Young Stalin (63 page)

He grew up in the clannish Caucasus; he had spent his entire maturity
in the conspiratorial underground, that peculiar milieu where violence, fanaticism and loyalty were the main coinage; he flourished in the jungle of constant struggle, drama and stress; he came to power as that rare thing—both man of violence and of ideas, an expert in gangsterism, as well as a devout Marxist; but, above all, he believed in himself and in his own ruthless leadership as the only way to govern a country in crisis and to promote a mere ideal to a real utopia.

In a limitless government run as a giant conspiracy of bloodletting and clan patronage, who was the most qualified to prosper?

The dance of power between Trotsky and Stalin started at the very beginning, at the first meeting of the new government, a historic occasion at which the personal peccadilloes and political wheeler-dealering clashed with the sanctity of dialectical materialism.

The first Cabinet—the Sovnarkom in Bolshevik acronym—was held in Lenin’s office in the Smolny, which was still so makeshift and amateurish that the only link with his new empire was a “cubby-hole for his telephone girl and typist” behind an unpainted wooden partition. It was surely no coincidence that Lenin’s two outstanding magnates, “Stalin and I,” writes Trotsky, “were the first to arrive.”

Then, from behind the wooden partition, the two of them overheard seductive and affectionate sighs: “a conversation of a rather tender nature” in the “thick basso of [People’s Commissar of the Navy] Dybenko, a blackbearded sailor, twenty-nine years old, a jolly and self-confident giant” who had recently “become intimate with Alexandra Kollontai, a woman of aristocratic antecedents approaching her forty-sixth year.” At this epoch-making moment, Stalin and Trotsky found themselves eavesdropping on Kollontai’s latest scandalous affair, about which “there’d been much gossip in Party circles.”

Trotsky and Stalin, two arrogant self-annointed Marxist messiahs, two magnificent administrators, deep thinkers, murderous enforcers, rank outsiders, a Jew and a Georgian, looked at each other. Stalin was amused, but Trotsky was shocked. “Stalin came up to me with a kind of unexpected jauntiness and pointing his shoulder towards the partition said, smirking: ‘That’s him with Kollontai, with Kollontai!’”
^*
Trotsky was not amused:

“His gesture and laughter seemed to me out of place and unendurably vulgar especially on that occasion and in that place.”

“That’s their affair!” snapped Trotsky, at which “Stalin sensed he’d made a mistake.”

The amazing and unthinkable had happened: Stalin, the Georgian cobbler’s son, was close to the peak of a Russian oligarchical government, and almost instantly Trotsky was his natural rival.

Stalin, says Trotsky, “never again tried to engage me in conversation of a personal nature. Stalin’s face changed. His yellow eyes flashed with the glint of malice.”
³

*
Surprisingly, Lenin chose Kamenev to be the effective first Bolshevik head of state as Chairman of the Soviet Executive Committee, though he lasted only a few days. Sverdlov succeeded him.

*
Pestkovsky’s first memoirs, when published in 1922, contained Stalin’s grunts and moodiness. Naturally, when these were republished in 1930 the grunts were gone.

*
It is still widely believed that Stalinism was a distortion of Leninism. But this is contradicted by the fact that in the months after October they were inseparable. Indeed for the next five years Lenin promoted Stalin wherever possible. Lenin single-handedly pushed the Bolsheviks to frenzied bloodletting on orders that have recently been revealed in the archives and published in Richard Pipes’s
Unknown Lenin
. He knew what he was doing with Stalin, even though he realized that “that chef will cook up some spicy dishes.” Stalinism was not a distortion but a development of Leninism.

*
Trotsky later claimed that Stalin amassed power as a bureaucratic mediocrity, but it was actually Yakov Sverdlov, assisted by Elena Stasova, who ran the Party machine. Stalin was not a born bureaucrat at all. He was a hard worker utterly dedicated to politics; indeed everything with Stalin was political, but he worked in an eccentric, structureless, unbureaucratic, almost bohemian, style that would not have succeeded in any other government, then or now. Lenin’s trust was won in the bank robberies and intrigues of the early years and, later, on the battlefields of the Civil War: Stalin was hardly in his office before 1920.

*
Alexandra Kollontai always treated Stalin with old-world courtesy: she served as his Swedish Ambassador and died naturally. Dybenko was shot in the Great Terror.

Epilogue

Old Ninika

Our Ninika has grown old
His hero’s shoulders have failed him . . .
How did this desolate grey hair
Break an iron strength?

Oh mother! Many a time
With his “hyena” sickle swinging,
Bare-chested, at the end of the cornfield
He must have suddenly burst out with a roar.

He must have piled up mountains
Of sheaves side by side,
And on his face governed by dripping sweat
Fire and smoke must have poured out.

But now he can longer move his knees,
Scythed down by old age.
He lies down or he dreams or he tells
His children’s children of the past.

From time to time he catches the sound
Of singing in the nearby cornfields
And his heart that was once so tough
Begins to beat with pleasure.

He drags himself out, trembling.
He takes a few steps on his shepherd’s crook
And, when he catches sight of the lads,
He smiles with relief.

—SOSELO
(Josef Stalin)

An Old Tyrant—in Remembrance
of Things Past

O
n the lush hills above Gagra on the Black Sea coast, an old Georgian man, small, squat, paunchy, with thinning grey hair and a moustache, wearing a grey tunic and baggy trousers, sat on the verandah of a clifftop mansion, a fortified eyrie, with panoramic views, and talked to his elderly guests about how they grew up together . . .

The
mtsvadi
kebabs and spicy vegetable dishes of a Georgian
supra
were spread around the table with bottles of local red wine as the men talked in Georgian about their boyhoods in Gori and Tiflis, their seminary studies and their youthful radicalism. It did not matter that they had parted and followed their different paths, because the host “had never forgotten his schoolmates and fellow seminarists.”

In the years before his death, Generalissimo Stalin, Premier of the Soviet government and General Secretary of the Communist Party, conqueror of Berlin and supreme pontiff of world Marxism, the old Soso, exhausted by more than fifty years of conspiracy, thirty years of government, four years of total war, would retire for many months to his favourite seaside villa on the semi-tropical Black Sea of his homeland, to spend the days gardening, conspiring and reading—and the warm evenings talking in remembrance of things past.

Sometimes he talked to his magnates Molotov or Voroshilov, sometimes to his younger Georgian viceroys and protégés, but often “Stalin invited Georgian houseguests whom he’d known in his youth. When he had time,” recalls Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, whose name reminded Stalin of his patron, Father Kote Charkviani of Gori, “he kept in touch with his schoolmates. Stalin used to tell stories of his childhood and then remember his friends and decide he wanted to see them. So it was arranged to invite them to the house in Gagra.” Stalin enjoyed planning this dinner-party: “Let’s invite Peter Kapanadze and Vaso Egnatashvili . . . I wonder how Tseradze is? He was a famous wrestler . . . It would be good to get him along and . . .”

Whereupon Kapanadze, Egnatashvili and the other old men were gathered and driven from Tiflis to the Black Sea up into the hills, along the precipitous drive, through the steel gates and the drive-through guardhouse, to Stalin’s secret and heavily guarded mansion, Coldstream.

There, the guards brought them to Stalin, who was often clipping roses or weeding around his lemon-trees, reading on the verandah, writing in the wooden summerhouse that was balanced on the edge of the cliff or playing billiards. Dinner would be laid by almost invisible ladies in aprons who then disappeared. Stalin opened the Georgian wine. Everyone helped themselves to food, set out as a buffet.

“The guests had a good time,” says Charkviani. Stalin was friendly and nostalgic—but there were also flashes of dictatorial fury. “During the dinner, there was an unpleasant moment when Stalin noticed a pack of Georgian cigarettes with an illustration of a saucily posed girl.” Abruptly, he lost his temper: “When have you ever seen a decent woman in such a pose? This is unacceptable!”

Charkviani and the other apparatchiks promised to redesign the cigarettes. Stalin calmed down. Mostly, Soso and the old friends “talked about theatre, art, literature and partially about politics.” He poignantly remembered his two wives, Kato and Nadya; he talked about the problems of his children—and Peter Kapanadze walked solemnly round the table to whisper his condolences for the death of Stalin’s son Yakov. Stalin nodded sadly: “Many families lost sons.” Then he recounted his father’s drinking, the Gori wrestling bouts, his adventures in 1905, the antics of Kamo, Tsintsadze and his bank robbers, and his increasingly Herculean exploits in exile. But always the fearsome shadow of the Terror, the shameful human cost of the Revolution and the wicked price of Stalin’s lust for power hung over them all.

“Stalin recalled the lives of other Old Bolsheviks and told anecdotes about them.” He mentioned names that made the guests shiver slightly, for they were people whom Stalin himself had wantonly murdered. Sometimes he mused that they had been wrongly executed—on his orders. “I was surprised,” says Charkviani, “that when he mentioned people who were unjustly liquidated, he talked with the calm detachment of a historian, showing neither sorrow nor rage—but speaking without rancour, with just a tone of light humour . . .” The only time Stalin explained this sentiment was, much earlier, in a letter to his mother: “You know the saying: ‘While I live, I’ll enjoy my violets, when I die the graveyard worms can rejoice.’”

Looking back into his secret past, the old dictator reflected: “Historians are the sort of people who’ll discover not only facts that are buried underground but even those at the very bottom of the ocean—and reveal them to the world.” He asked, almost to himself: “Can you keep a secret?”

Stalin casually looked through a glass darkly as he remembered the lives of his family, friends and acquaintances whose mixed destinies form a microcosm of the colossal tragedy of his reign.
¹

Stalin “was a bad and neglectful son, as he was father and husband,” writes his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalin. “He devoted his whole being to something else, to politics and struggle. And so people who weren’t personally close were always more important to him than those who were.” But, worse, he permitted, indeed encouraged, his politics to destroy and consume his loved ones.

By 1918, most of the Alliluyev children were working for Soso. When Stalin was sent down to Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) in 1918 during the Civil War, he took his girlfriend Nadya Alliluyeva and her brother Fyodor on his armoured train as his assistants. When they returned, Nadya was effectively his wife, moving into his apartment in the Kremlin and blessing him with two children, a son, Vasily,
^*
and a daughter, Svetlana. After the Civil War, Nadya worked for a while as one of Lenin’s secretaries.

Anna Alliluyeva also got married during the Civil War. She accompanied Stalin and Dzerzhinsky on their mission to investigate the fall of Perm, where she fell in love with Dzerzhinsky’s Polish assistant, Stanislas Redens, who became a senior secret policeman and a member of Stalin’s court. Their brother Pavel served as a diplomat and military commissar
in the Defence Commissariat. All flourished in Stalin’s entourage. Yet Stalin’s effect on the family was nothing short of apocalyptic.

The first tragedy was that of the clever but fragile Fyodor. During the Civil War, he was recruited into special forces being trained by Kamo. The psychotic former bank robber was obsessed with tests of loyalty under fire. To this end, he devised a plan to simulate his unit’s capture by enemy Whites. “At night he would seize the comrades and lead them out to be shot. If any began to beg for mercy and turn traitor, he would shoot them . . . ‘That way,’ said Kamo, ‘you could be absolutely sure they wouldn’t let you down.’” One revealed himself—and was shot on the spot. Then came the ultimate test: he cut open the chest and tore out the heart. “Here,” he told Fyodor, “is the heart of your officer!”