Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Her daughter Natalya was told she had died naturally. Poskrebyshev brought up the girls himself with loving devotion. He kept photographs of Bronka around the house. When Natalya pointed at one of the photos and said “Mama,” Poskrebyshev burst into tears and ran out of the room. It was typical of the tragedies of the time that Natalya only discovered her mother had been shot when she was told at school by the daughter of Kozlovsky the singer. She sobbed in the lavatories. Poskrebyshev remarried.

Bronka’s destruction did not affect Poskrebyshev’s relationship with Stalin or Beria: the Party was just. Stalin took a solicitous interest in Bronka’s daughter: “How’s Natasha?” he often asked his chef de cabinet . “Is she plump and sweet?” Years later when she could not do her homework, she called her father to ask his help. Someone else answered.

“Can I speak to my father?” she asked.

“He’s not here,” replied Stalin. “What’s the problem?”—and he solved her mathematical questions. The only awkwardness in Poskrebyshev’s apparent friendship with Beria was when the latter hugged little Natalya and sighed: “You’re going to be as beautiful as your mother.”

Poskrebyshev “turned green,” struggled to control his emotions, and rasped: “Natalya, go and play.” 2

Before he turned to wantonly kill another of his friend’s wives, Stalin capriciously saved two old friends from death. Sergo Kavtaradze was an Old Bolshevik Leftist who had known Stalin since the turn of the century. He was an intelligent cosmopolitan Georgian married to Princess Sofia Vachnadze, whose godmother had been Empress Maria Fyodorovna, Nicholas II’s mother. They were an unusual couple. Kavtaradze consistently joined the oppositions yet Stalin always forgave him. Arrested in the late twenties, Stalin brought him back and ordered Kaganovich to help him. He was arrested again in late 1936, appearing on Yezhov’s death lists. His wife was also arrested. His daughter Maya, then eleven, thought both parents were already dead but she courageously wrote to Stalin to beg for their lives, signing her letters: “Pioneer Maya Kavtaradze.” Both Kavtaradzes were tortured but because Stalin had put a dash next to his old friend’s name on the death list, their lives were spared. Now, in late 1939, “Pioneer Kavtaradze” ’s letters reminded Stalin to ask Beria if his old friend was still alive.

In the Lubianka, Kavtaradze was suddenly shaved by a barber, given a comfortable room, and a menu from which he could order any food he liked. Delivered to the Hotel Lux, he found his wife was there, a frail shadow of her former self—but alive. Their daughter arrived from Tiflis. Soon afterwards, Kavtaradze was called: “Comrade Stalin is waiting for you. If you’re ready, a car will pick you up in half an hour.” He was taken to Kuntsevo where Koba greeted him in the study: “Hello Sergo,” he said as if Kavtaradze had not been found guilty of involvement in a plot to kill him. “Where’ve you been?”

“Sitting [in prison].”

“Oh you found time to sit?” The Russian slang for being in prison is sidet —to sit—hence Stalin’s joke, a line he used frequently. After dinner, Stalin turned to him anxiously: “Nevertheless, you all wanted to kill me?”

“Do you really think so?” Kavtaradze replied. Stalin just grinned. Afterwards, when he got home, Kavtaradze whispered to his wife: “Stalin’s sick.” A few weeks later, the family received a bizarre and revealing visitation. [161] This is often mentioned in Stalin biographies but never with the testimony of any of the five people present. The following is based on the author’s interview with Maya Kavtaradze, the last of those five still alive whose story has never before been published. Now seventy-six and living in her father’s huge, antique-filled apartment in Tbilisi, she has generously allowed the author to use her father’s unpublished memoirs which are an invaluable source. In 1940, Kavtaradze was appointed to the State Publishing House and then as Deputy Foreign Commissar in charge of the Near East for the whole war. Since the Foreign Commissariat was just next door to the Lubianka, Kavtaradze used to joke: “I crossed the road.” Kavtaradze was Soviet Ambassador to Romania after the war and died in 1971.

The Kavtaradzes had some friends to dinner when the telephone rang at 11 p.m. Kavtaradze said he had to rush out and left without an explanation. His wife and their daughter Maya, fourteen, went to bed. At 6 a.m. Kavtaradze staggered into their three-room apartment on Gorky Street, still dizzy from drinking. “Where’ve you been?” his wife scolded him.

“We’ve guests,” he announced.

“You’re drunk!” Then she heard footsteps: Stalin and Beria tipsily walked in and sat down at the kitchen table. Vlasik stood guard at the front door. While Kavtaradze poured out drinks, his wife rushed into Maya’s room.

“Wake up!” she whispered.

“What’s wrong?” asked the schoolgirl. “They’ve come to arrest us at night?”

“No, Stalin’s come.”

“I won’t meet him,” retorted Maya who understandably hated him.

“You must,” replied her mother. “He’s a historical personage.” So Maya got dressed and came into the kitchen. As soon as she appeared, Stalin beamed.

“Ah, it’s you—‘Pioneer Kavtaradze.’” He recalled her letters appealing for her parents. “Sit on my lap.” She sat on Stalin’s knee. “Do you spoil her?”

Maya was charmed: “He was so kind, so gentle—he kissed me on the cheek and I looked into his honey-coloured, hazel, gleaming eyes,” she recalls, “but I was so anxious.”

“We’ve no food!” the little girl exclaimed.

“Don’t worry,” said Beria. Ten minutes later, Georgian food was delivered from the famous Aragvi restaurant. Stalin looked closely at Kavtaradze’s wife, the princess born at the imperial court. Her hair was white.

“We tortured you too much,” Stalin said.

“Whoever mentions the past, let him lose his eyes,” she answered shrewdly, using the proverb Stalin had used to Bukharin. He asked Beria about Kavtaradze’s brother, also arrested, but they were too late: he had already died, like so many others, en route to Magadan.

Kavtaradze started singing a Georgian song but he was out of tune.

“Don’t, Tojo,” said Stalin, who nicknamed Kavtaradze, with his Oriental eyes, after the Japanese General Tojo. He started to sing himself “in a sweet tenor.” Maya was “shocked—there he was short and pock-marked. Now he was singing!” Then he announced: “I want to see the apartment,” and inspected it carefully. The feast continued until 10 a.m. and Maya missed school that day.

Stalin appointed Kavtaradze to a publishing job that involved another prisoner, Shalva Nutsibidze, a celebrated Georgian philosopher. As a young man, Nutsibidze had once met Stalin. While in jail, Nutsibidze started translating the Georgian epic poem by Rustaveli, The Knight in the Panther Skin , into Russian. Every day, his work was taken from him and returned marked with the pen of an anonymous editor. Kobulov tortured him, tearing off his fingernails.

Then he suddenly became friendly, telling the prisoner that during a recent meeting, Stalin had asked Beria if he knew what kind of bird the thrush was: “Ever heard of a thrush singing in his cage?” Beria shook his head. “It’s the same with poets,” Stalin explained. “A poet can’t sing in a cell. If we wish to have Rustaveli perfectly translated, free the thrush.” Nutsibidze was released and, on 20 October 1940, Kavtaradze picked him up in a limousine and the two “lucky stiffs” drove to the Little Corner to report to Poskrebyshev on the Rustaveli translation.