Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Yet all the leaders also knew that they themselves were constantly being tested: both Molotov’s secretaries were arrested.

“I sensed danger gathering around me,” he said as they collected testimony against him. “My first assistant threw himself down the liftshaft at the NKVD.” 11No one was safe: they had their families to consider. Stalin had made it amply clear that the Enemies had to be destroyed “without looking at their faces.” If they had hoped that their rank would protect them, the arrests of Politburo members like Rudzutak had corrected that impression. Testimonies were prepared against all, including Molotov, Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Their chauffeurs were arrested so frequently that Khrushchev grumbled to Stalin, who said: “They’re gathering evidence against me too.” All of them must have thought like Khrushchev who asked: “Do you think I’m confident… that tomorrow won’t transfer me from this office to a prison cell?”

The case of Marshal Budyonny surely concentrated their minds: on 20 June 1937 soon after the execution of Tukhachevsky, Stalin told the cavalryman: “Yezhov says your wife’s conducting herself dishonourably and bear in mind we won’t let anyone, even a wife, compromise you in the Party and the State. Talk to Yezhov about it and decide what to do if it’s necessary. You missed an Enemy near you. Why do you feel sorry for her?”

“A bad wife is family, not political business, Comrade Stalin,” replied Budyonny. “I’ll look into it myself.”

“You must be brave,” said Stalin. “Do you think I don’t feel sorry when my closest circle turn out to be Enemies of the People?” Budyonny’s wife, Olga, was a Bolshoi singer, who was best friends with the actress wife of Marshal Yegorov. It seems Olga was cuckolding Budyonny with a Bolshoi tenor and flirting with Polish diplomats. Budyonny went to Yezhov who told him that his wife “along with Yegorova, visits foreign embassies…” When he was inspecting the troops, his wife was arrested in the street, interrogated and sentenced to eight years and then another three. Budyonny sobbed, “the tears pouring down his cheeks.” Olga went mad in solitary confinement. There used to be a legend that Stalin was more merciful to women: certainly female CC members were more likely to survive. [117] Alexandra Kollontai, at that time sixty-five and Ambassador to Sweden, was a beautiful Bolshevik noblewoman who wrote the manifesto of feminism and free love, her novel Love of Worker Bees . Her scandalous sex life shocked and amused Stalin and Molotov. Several of her famous Bolshevik lovers were shot in the Great Terror. Yet she herself survived. Perhaps her letters to Stalin, always addressed to “highly respected Joseph Vissarionovich” with “friendly greetings from an open heart” with the flirtatious romanticism of a once beautiful woman, appealed to his chivalry. Similarly, Stalin muttered to Dmitrov about the veteran Bolshevik Yelena Stasova that “we shall probably arrest Stasova. Turned out she’s scum.” Yet she was allowed to survive and continued to write Stalin warm letters of gratitude into honourable old age. In the Stalin family too, the women usually survived (though they were arrested) but the men were decimated. But Galina Yegorova, forty, was shot even before her Marshal husband. No chivalry there. Her flirtation with Stalin on the night of Nadya’s suicide cannot have helped her case but he was always more pitiless if there was a hint of sexual debauchery. 12

The Terror was, among many more important things, the triumph of prissy Bolshevik morality over the sexual freedom of the twenties. The destruction of Yenukidze, Tukhachevsky and Rudzutak involved what Molotov called that “weak spot… women!” The scent of actresses, the whirl of diplomatic balls and the glow of foreign decadence were sometimes enough to convince the lonely Stalin and the priggish Molotov, both reeking of Puritanical envy, that treason and duplicity lurked. But debauchery was never the real reason their victims were destroyed. That was always political. The accusations of sexual deviance were deployed to dehumanize them among their former colleagues. Yenukidze and Rudzutak were both said to seduce what Kaganovich called “little girls.” Since it is unlikely that the Central Committee contained a cell of paedophiles, as well as a web of terrorists and spies, it seems more likely these hedonistic grandees just “protected” ballerinas like millionaires past and present. Nonetheless Stalin had tolerated (and probably enjoyed) Yenukidze’s parties for years. Womanizers, such as Bulganin and Beria, continued to prosper, providing they were loyal and competent politically, but no one could say this was mere tittle-tattle at Stalin’s court. [118] In their generation, the proud exception to this narrow-minded hypocrisy were those rare Bolsheviks who combined Party discipline with European Bohemianism, the Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov and his English wife Ivy. She sneered openly at humbugs like Molotov and flaunted her promiscuity with a parade of Germanic lovers: “I don’t care a pin what anyone says… for I feel head and shoulders taller than anyone who can gloat on such outworn topics of scandal as who sleeps with whom.” Meanwhile Commissar Litvinov, the plump, rumpled and tough Jewish intellectual who had known Stalin a long time but was never close to him, started an affair with a “very pretty, decidedly vulgar and very sexy indeed” girl who lodged with them. She even accompanied him to diplomatic receptions and arrived at the office in tight riding breeches. People died of gossip.

Stalin was an awkward man of the nineteenth century: flirtatious with, and appreciative of, the well-dressed women of his circle, strictly prudish about his own daughter, shocked at the feminism and free love of the early twenties, yet crudely macho among his male friends. His prudishness was thoroughly “Victorian”: the appearance of Svetlana’s knees, even her bold stare in a photograph, provoked absurd crises. Stalin disapproved of the “first kiss” in Alexandrov’s Volga, Volga , which was too passionate, with the result that not only was the kiss cut, but all kissing was almost banned from all Soviet films by over-zealous officials. In Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part Two , Stalin, who identified so closely with the Tsar, was embarrassed by Ivan’s kiss which he said went on much too long and had to be cut. When Tatiana appeared in the opera Onegin wearing a sheer gown, Stalin exclaimed: “How can a woman appear before a man dressed like that?” The director immediately restored “Bolshevik modesty” to Pushkin’s worldliness. In old age, seeing a Georgian cigarette packet illustrated with a racy girl, Stalin furiously ordered the entire brand to be redesigned: “Where would she learn to sit like that? Paris?”

He encouraged bourgeois morality among his magnates: Zhdanov’s wife wanted to leave him for his alcoholism but just as Hitler insisted Goebbels return to his wife, so Stalin ordered, “You must stay together.” It was the same with Pavel Alliluyev. When Stalin heard that Kuibyshev mistreated his wife, he exclaimed: “If I’d known about it, I’d have put an end to such beastliness.”

However, if an old friend needed help in an embarrassing situation, Stalin was amused to oblige, as a fascinating letter from his archives shows. Alexander Troyanovsky, probably the diplomat, asked for his help with a mistress (one F. M. Gratsanova) who worked for the NKVD and had been given a job by Yagoda. Now if they both left their jobs simultaneously, “there’ll be gossip. So can I leave earlier than her… Please solve this for me as an old comrade,” he wrote to Stalin who helped with a snigger, writing: “Comrade Yagoda, arrange this business of Troyanovsky. He’s entangled, the devil, and we are responsible [for helping him out]. Oh to God, or to the Devil, with him! Arrange this business and make him a calm bloke [ muzhik ]. Stalin.” In 1938, Troyanovsky again wrote to ask Stalin to get Yezhov to let the lady keep her apartment. Stalin helped again. 13