Simon Montefiore - Stalin

At the Kremlin apartment, Valechka often served Svetlana and her friend Martha who recalls her “in her white apron, like a kind woman from the villages, with her fair hair and shapeless figure, not fat though. Always smiling. Svetlana loved her too.” Artyom was one of the few who heard how Stalin spoke to her: “he’d say about her birthday or something, ‘Of course I must give you a present.’”

“I don’t need anything, Comrade Stalin,” she replied.

“Well, if I forget, remind me.” At the end of the thirties, Valechka became Stalin’s trusted companion and effectively his secret wife, in a culture when most Bolshevik couples were not formally married. “Valya looked after Father’s creature comforts,” Svetlana said. The court understood that she was his companion and no more was said about it. “Whether or not Istomina was Stalin’s wife is nobody’s business,” said the ageing Molotov. “Engels lived with his housekeeper.” Budyonny and Kalinin “married” their housekeepers.

“My father said she was very close to him,” asserts Nadezhda Vlasika. Kaganovich’s daughter-in-law heard from “Iron Lazar”: “I only know that Stalin had one common-law wife. Valechka, his waitress. She loved him.” [144] Stalin’s bodyguards, whose inconsistent but revealing memoirs were collected long after his death, were not sure about the Valechka relationship. When she became older, she married and, during Stalin’s later years, she complained of her husband’s jealous reproaches. After Stalin’s death, Valechka never spoke of their relationship but when she was asked if the opera singer Davydova ever visited Kuntsevo, her answer perhaps displayed a proprietorial sting: “I never saw her at the dacha… She’d have been thrown out!” Valechka was not a Party member.

Valechka appeared like a jolly, quiet and buxom hospital sister, always wearing a white apron at Stalin’s dinners. No one noticed when she attended Yalta and Potsdam: this was as Stalin wished it. Henceforth Stalin’s private life was frozen in about 1939: the dramas of Nadya and Zhenya that had caused him pain and anger were over. “These matters,” recalled the Polish Communist Jakob Berman, who was often at Kuntsevo during the forties, “were arranged with extreme discretion and never filtered out beyond his closest circle. Stalin was always very careful there shouldn’t be any gossip about him… Stalin understood the danger of gossip.” If other men could be betrayed by their wives, there at least he was safe. He sometimes asked Valechka’s political opinions as an ordinary person. Nonetheless, for this political man, she was no companion. He remained lonely. 9

Between 24 February and 16 March 1939, Beria presided over the executions of 413 important prisoners, including Marshal Yegorov and ex-Politburo members Kosior, Postyshev and Chubar: he was already living in the dacha of the last of these. Now he suggested to Stalin that they call a halt, or there would be no one left to arrest. Poskrebyshev marked up the old Central Committee with VN—Enemy of the People—and the date of execution. The next day, Stalin reflected to Malenkov: “I think we’re well and truly rid of the opposition millstone. We need new forces, new people…” The message was sent down the vertikal of power: when Mekhlis demanded more arrests in the army for “lack of revolutionary loyalty,” Stalin replied: “I propose to limit ourselves to an official reprimand… (I don’t see any ill will in their actions—these aren’t mistakes but misunderstandings).” [145] Vyshinsky reported that the arrest of hundreds of teenagers in Novosibirsk had been faked by the NKVD: “the children were innocent and have been released but three senior officials including the head of the NKVD and the town Procurator were guilty of ‘betraying revolutionary loyalty’ and expelled from the Party.” What should be done with them? On 2 January 1939, Stalin scribbled: “It’s necessary to have a public trial of the guilty.”

Blaming all excesses on Yezhov, Stalin protected his other grotesques. The “denunciatrix” of Kiev, Nikolaenko, was discredited. But she once again appealed to Stalin and Khrushchev: “I ask you to check everything, where I was mistaken, where I was lied to and where I was provoked, I’m ready to be punished,” she wrote to Khrushchev. But then, still playing high politics, she warned Stalin: “I’m sure there are too many remnants of Enemies in Kiev… Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I’ve no words to tell you how to understand me but you understand us, your people, without words. I write to you with bitter tears.” Stalin protected her: “Comrade Khrushchev, I ask you to take measures to let Nikolaenko find calm and fruitful work, J.St.”

The victims of his creatures could now appeal to Stalin. Khrulev, who was to be the outstanding Red Army quartermaster during the Second World War, complained to Stalin about the peripatetic, pompous Mekhlis. “The lion is the king of the jungle,” Stalin laughed.

“Yes but Mekhlis’s a dangerous animal,” said Khrulev, “who told me he’d do all he could… [to destroy me].”

Stalin smiled genially. “Well if me and you… fight Mekhlis together, do you think we’ll manage?” retorted the “lion king.”

Stalin had not forgotten his greatest enemy: Beria and one of the talented dirty tricks specialists in quiet and quick death, Pavel Sudoplatov, were received in the Little Corner where, pacing silently in soft Georgian boots, Stalin laconically ordered: “Trotsky should be eliminated within a year.” 10

On 10 March 1939, the 1,900 delegates of the Eighteenth Congress gathered [146] In the ugly wooden chamber that had been created by vandalizing the sumptuous Alexandrovsky Hall in the Great Kremlin Palace. to declare the end of a slaughter that had been a success, if slightly marred by Yezhov’s manic excesses. The survivors, from Molotov to Zhdanov, remained at the top but were challenged by the younger generation: Khrushchev joined the Politburo while Beria was elected candidate and “Melanie” Malenkov became a CC Secretary. This leadership ruled the country for the next decade without a single casualty: contrary to his myth, Stalin, a master of divide and rule, could be surprisingly loyal to his protégés. But not to the Blackberry.

Yezhov was on ice yet he still attended the Politburo, sat next to Stalin at the Bolshoi and turned up for work at Water Transport, where he sat through meetings throwing paper darts. He caroused by day but appeared at Congress evening sessions, trying to get permission to speak. “I strongly ask you to talk with me for only one minute,” he wrote to Stalin. “Give me the opportunity.” Still a CC member, he attended the meeting of Party elders where the names for the new body were selected.

No one objected to his name until Stalin called Yezhov forward: “Well what do you think of yourself ? Are you capable of being a member of the Central Committee?” Yezhov protested his devotion to the Party and Stalin—he could not imagine what he had done wrong. Since all the other murderers were being promoted, the dwarf’s bafflement is understandable.

“Is that so?” Stalin started mentioning Enemies close to Yezhov.

“Joseph Vissarionovich!” Yezhov cried out. “You know it was I—I myself—who disclosed their conspiracy! I came to you and reported it…”

“Yes yes yes. When you felt you were about to be caught, then you came in a hurry. But what about before that? Were you organizing a conspiracy? Did you want to kill Stalin? Top officials of the NKVD are plotting but you are supposedly not involved. You think I don’t see anything? Do you remember who you sent on a certain date for duty with Stalin? Who? With revolvers? Why revolvers near Stalin? Why? To kill Stalin? Well? Go on, get out of here! I don’t know, comrades, is it possible to keep him as a member of the Central Committee? I doubt it. Of course think about it… As you wish… But I doubt it.”