Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Even if they did not grasp the randomness of death, they were aware that it was ever present and they accepted that the coming of war meant Enemies had to be killed. The children talked about it among themselves: Vasily Stalin gleefully told Artyom Sergeev and his Redens cousins about arrests. Protected by whispers and mysteries at home, it was at school that the children learned more. Most of the leaders’ children were at Schools No. 175 (or 110), driven there by their fathers’ chauffeurs in their Packards and Buicks which could be as embarrassing as a Rolls-Royce at the school gates in the West. The Mikoyans insisted on the car dropping them off so they could walk the last half kilometre. At this élite school, the teachers (who included the English-teaching wife of Nikolai Bulganin, a rising leader) pretended nothing was happening, while the danger was just dawning on the children, who saw their friends being repressed: Stepan Mikoyan’s best friend was Serezha Metalikov, son of the senior Kremlevka doctor and nephew of Poskrebyshev, who saw both of his parents arrested during 1937.

Svetlana was treated like a Tsarevna at school by the cringing teachers. A schoolgirl there recalled how Svetlana’s desk gleamed like a mirror, the only one to be polished. Whenever a parent was arrested, their children were removed mysteriously from Svetlana’s class so this Tsarevna did not have to rub shoulders with the kin of Enemies.

Sometimes friends were actually arrested at teenage parties in front of all the others. Vasily Stalin and Stepan Mikoyan were carousing at a party given by one of their friends at the Military Academy when the doorbell rang. A man in plain clothes asked to speak to Vasily Stalin who came to the door where he was told, as a sign of almost feudal respect, that the NKVD had arrived to arrest a boy at the party. Vasily returned and told his friend to go to the door while whispering to Stepan that the boy was being arrested. They watched from the window as the Chekists put the boy into a black car as a “member of a teenage anti-Soviet group.” He was never seen again.

Parents carefully vetted their children’s friends: “My stepfather was very cautious about my boyfriends,” remembered Zoya Zarubina. “He always wanted to know who their parents were…” and would check them out at the Lubianka. The Voroshilovs were stricter than the Mikoyans who were stricter than the Zhdanovs: when one of the Voroshilov children was phoned by a boy whose father had just been arrested, Ekaterina Voroshilova ordered him to break off relations. Zhdanov’s son Yury claims that his parents let him bring the children of Enemies home. “My parents made no objections.” But it was all a matter of timing: in the frenzy of 1937–38, this is hard to believe. After Stepan Mikoyan started going out with a girl called Katya, he found an NKVD report that mentioned her friendship with the son of an Enemy. “I was waiting for my father to say something to me… but he never did.” However when some families close to Mikoyan fell under suspicion, he cut off all contact with them. 7

During early 1937, the arrival of Poskrebyshev’s and Yezhov’s glamorous young wives meant that the entourage had never been more colourful and cosmopolitan. Out at Zubalovo, Stalin still took the family out for picnics, bringing chocolates for his daughter and Martha Peshkova. As the country shivered from the depredations of the NKVD, Stalin was solicitous to the children: once Leonid Redens, who was nine, got lost at Kuntsevo and finally galloped up to some adults who all laughed except Stalin. “Have you got lost?” he asked. “Come with me, I’ll show you the way.” 8However, the old familiarity with Stalin was gradually freezing into fear.

Once, when Stalin was resting at Zubalovo, Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev’s middle child Sergei kept crying and the parents worried that he would be disturbed. Pavel, who had a hysterical temper like his sister Nadya, slapped his daughter Kira for not keeping him quiet. Kira, now a teenager, was irrepressible and, having grown up around Stalin, could not understand the danger. When she refused to eat something Stalin offered her, Pavel kicked her under the table. Yet the children played around Stalin and his killers as obliviously as birds fluttering in and out of a crocodile’s open mouth.

Stalin still visited his comrades’ houses, often calling at Poskrebyshev’s for dinner where there was dancing and he played charades. Poskrebyshev had recently married a sparky girl who had joined Stalin’s circle. In 1934, this unlikely romantic hero went to a party at the house of the Kremlin doctor Mikhail Metalikov, whose wife Asya was indirectly related to Trotsky, her sister being married to his son, Sedov. Metalikov’s real name was Masenkis, a family of Jewish Lithuanian sugar barons, a dangerous combination.

Metalikov’s sister was Bronislava, dark and lithe, full of the energy and playfulness that was so often missing from Old Bolshevik women. The 24-year-old Bronka was married to a lawyer with whom she already had a daughter, while qualifying as an endocrinologist. Photographs show her slim, mischievous elegance in a polka-dot dress. That day at the party, she was playing some sort of game, running round the table from which Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s simian chef de cabinet of forty-three, watched her. When she started a food fight, she threw a cake that missed its target and landed right on Poskrebyshev’s Party tunic: he fell in love with Bronka and married her soon afterwards. Family photographs show the worshipful devotion of Poskrebyshev, who appears in history as a Quasimodo but is seen here as the loving husband resting his head on his wife’s lustrous shoulder, nuzzling her brown hair.

Beauty and the Beast caused much merriment in Stalin’s entourage: Kira Alliluyeva heard “Poskrebyshev’s beautiful Polish wife joke that he was so ugly that she only went to bed with him in the dark.” But Poskrebyshev was proud of his ugliness: Stalin chose him for his hideous countenance. He cheerfully played court jester: Stalin dared Poskrebyshev to drink a glass of vodka in one gulp without a sip of water or to see how long he could hold up his hands with burning paper under each nail.

“Look!” Stalin would laugh, “Sasha can drink a glass of vodka and not even wrinkle his nose!” Stalin liked Bronka, one of a new generation of lighthearted girls, secure in the heart of the élite, where she was accustomed to meet the magnates. She called Stalin the familiar ty and if she travelled abroad, she, like the Alliluyev women, always brought a present for Svetlana, calling Stalin to ask if she could give it. “Will it suit her?” he asked about a Western pullover.

“Oh yes!”

“Then give it to her!”

Bronka’s best friend was Yevgenia Yezhova, editor and irrepressible literary groupie. These two giggly and flighty glamour pusses of Jewish Polish or Lithuanian origins were so similar that Kira Alliluyeva thought they were sisters. They even shared the same patronymic Solomonova though they were no relation. Yezhov and Poskrebyshev were close friends too—they would go fishing together while their wives gossiped. 1

While Blackberry, now promoted to candidate Politburo member, massacred his victims, his wife was friends with all the artistic stars and slept with many of them. The enchanting Isaac Babel was Yezhova’s chief lion: “If you invited people ‘for Babel,’ they all came,” wrote Babel’s wife, Pirozhkova. Solomon Mikhoels, the Yiddish actor who performed King Lear for Stalin, jazz-band leader Leonid Utesov, film director Eisenstein, novelist Mikhail Sholokhov and journalist Mikhail Koltsov attended the salon of this fascinating flibbertigibbet. At the Kremlin parties, Yezhova fox-trotted the most, not missing a dance. Her best friend, Zinaida Glikina, had also created a literary salon. When her marriage broke up, Yezhov invited her to live with them and seduced her. She was far from being his only mistress, while Yevgenia enthusiastically pursued literary affairs with Babel, Koltsov and Sholokhov. Few refused an invitation from Yezhov’s wife: “Just think,” Babel said, “our girl from Odessa has become the first lady of the kingdom!” 2