Young Stalin (65 page)

Stalin kept in contact with old friends from Gori and Tiflis. Sometimes he wrote them a note or just sent them money out of the blue. If they appealed to him, he liked to help. In 1933, he wrote to Kapanadze:

Hi Peta, as you see . . . I’m sending you 2,000 roubles. I haven’t got more now. This money is a publishing royalty and we don’t accept many royalties, but your needs are a special occasion for me . . . Apart from this money, you’ll be given a3,000-rouble loan. I’ve told Beria about this . . .

Live long and be happy

Beso

During the war, Kapanadze and Glurjidze, both ex-priests, and Tseradze, his wrestling friend, got even luckier. On 9 May 1944, Stalin noticed the cash piling up in his safe (from his salaries as Party Secretary-General, Premier, Supreme Commander-in-Chief, People’s Commissar of Defence and Supreme Soviet deputy). He could not spend the money so he scrawled this note:

1. To my friend Peter Kapanadze—40,000 roubles;
   

2. 30,000 roubles to Grisha Glurjidze;
   

3. 30,000 roubles to Mikhail Tseradze.
   

The note to Glurjidze read: “Grisha! Accept this small gift from me. Your Soso.” He was indulgent to those who never dabbled in politics but it is unlikely he would have spared Iremashvili and Davrichewy. They opposed him politically.
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When Stalin seized Georgia in 1921, Iremashvili attended the funerals of those who fell in battle and found himself standing next to Keke Djugashvili. “Keke, it’s your son who is to blame for this,” said Iremashvili, who knew her well from Gori. “Write to him in Moscow: he’s no longer my friend!” When Stalin visited Tiflis later that year, Iremashvili was arrested, but his sister appealed to Stalin, “who showed benevolent kindness to her: ‘What a pity! It hurts me greatly for him. Hopefully [Iremashvili] will find his way back to me!’” Stalin ordered him to be freed and then invited him over. Iremashvili refused. He was arrested again and found himself under the control of Tsintsadze, Stalin’s gangster, now a senior secret policeman. Stalin had him expelled to Germany, where he flirted with Fascism and wrote his hostile memoirs.

The colourful Davrichewy, Gori police officer’s son and fellow bank robber, escaped to Paris. Under the name “Jean Violan,” he became a famous First World War pilot and served as a French spy. Some accounts
claim that he had an affair with the notorious courtesan Mata Hari, executed as a traitor in 1917, but the real story of his sexual espionage is no less dramatic. The French secret service suspected a beautiful young adventuress and aviatrix, Marthe Richard, of being a German spy. They enrolled the flying ace Davrichewy to watch her. She fell in love with “Zozo” Davrichewy and they started an affair so passionate that he threatened to kill himself if she was arrested. He managed to prove her innocence; she joined French intelligence and was despatched to Madrid, where she seduced the septuagenarian German intelligence chief.

In 1936, Stalin contacted Davrichewy and invited him to return. Wisely, Davrichewy stayed in Paris. Just after Stalin’s death, Davrichewy declared in an interview: “I am Stalin’s half brother.” He himself died in 1975 after a life described in an obituary as “astonishing—revolutionary, aviator, spy, author.” His remarkable memoirs were obscurely published in French in 1979.
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Kamo remained a Bolshevik hero, despite his macabre behaviour with Fyodor Alliluyev. But this dangerous simpleton was unsuited to peacetime work. He became a Chekist but his cruelty was too deranged even for them. By 1922, he was back in Tiflis employed in the customs service. When Lenin considered a Caucasian holiday, Kamo insisted on accompanying him: Lenin never came. According to Tiflis legend, Kamo drank too much, chattering about Stalin’s role in the Tiflis bank robbery, a sensitive subject.
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He was bicycling home after starting his memoirs when he was run over by a truck. It was said Stalin had him killed: after all, went the joke, it seemed a bit of a coincidence that the only bicycle in Tiflis should be hit by the only truck.

Kamo was buried in the Pushkin Gardens outside the Tilipuchuri Tavern in Yerevan Square, scene of his notorious exploit. His statue replaced that of Pushkin. Later Stalin ordered the removal of his monument. Kamo was reburied elsewhere.
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Egnatashvili, Soso’s protector and possibly father, educated his two surviving sons, Sasha and Vaso, at a private school in Moscow. The family were restaurant entrepreneurs and soon expanded outside Gori.
Egnatashvili and his sons established restaurants in Baku, while Vaso qualified from Kharkov University, becoming a history teacher.

Old Egnatashvili died in 1929, “very close to Stalin until his last day.” Sasha Egnatashvili ran five restaurants in Tiflis until about 1929. In the early 1930s, both brothers were arrested. Sasha contacted Yenukidze, who had him released and brought to Moscow, where he was received by Stalin. Vaso was also released immediately. Stalin enrolled Sasha in the NKVD, and appointed him to run a Politburo dacha in the Crimea before promoting him to his own Guards Department. Sasha, the former capitalist restaurateur, was made chief of Stalin’s catering department, known as the Base, a trusted position for a paranoid dictator who used poison on others and feared it himself. Egnatashvili became the dictator’s food-taster, hence his nickname in the NKVD: “the Rabbit.” Within the NKVD, he was quietly known as “Stalin’s relative” or “brother,” even by General Vlasik, who knew the dictator better than anyone. (One of Sasha’s underlings was a cook who had contrived, in an astonishing culinary career hidden in the catering shadows of the NKVD universe, to serve not only Rasputin in his early days but also Lenin and Stalin: this world-historical chef was the grandfather of President Vladimir Putin.)

Vaso, who had been a Socialist-Federalist, not even a Menshevik, was promoted to editor of a Tiflis newspaper, then to Secretary of the Georgian Supreme Soviet, Stalin’s eyes and ears in Georgia.

Sasha the Rabbit lived near Stalin’s Kuntsevo mansion, his main residence, and often attended his dinners. When Vaso visited Moscow, he always stayed with Stalin. They remained close to Keke. Sasha Egnatashvili’s letter to Stalin’s mother on her birthday in 1934 reveals their special relationship: “My dear spiritual mother, Yesterday I visited Soso and we talked a long time . . . He’s put on weight . . . Over the last four years, I’ve never seen him so healthy. More handsome than you can imagine. He was joking a lot. Who says he’s older? He’s younger than four years ago—no one thinks he’s more than forty-seven!”

In 1940, Stalin remembered his father’s old cobbling apprentice Dato Gasitashvili, who had been very kind to him as a boy. “Is Dato still alive?” he suddenly asked Sasha. “I haven’t seen him for ages.” Egnatashvili summoned Dato, still a Gori cobbler, to Moscow.

One day Stalin, his chief of personal security, Vlasik, and Beria arrived at the Egnatashvilis’ for a Georgian feast: Stalin was reunited with Dato. When Stalin teased him, the old cobbler fearlessly replied: “Do you
think you’re Stalin to me as you are to others? To me you are the same little boy I held in my arms. And if you carry on, I’ll pull down your trousers and spank your bottom until it’s redder than your flag!” Stalin laughed. But, ominously, he noticed Sasha’s wife: the Rabbit had happily but dangerously married an ethnic German ex-wife of a Jewish-Armenian businessman: their daughter lived in America.

“Your wife’s in a bad mood,” Stalin said. “Is she offended with me?”

Sasha explained that, being German, she was afraid for herself and for her daughter in America.

“We’ve an agreement with Germany but it doesn’t mean anything,” Stalin reassured her, according to Sasha’s grandson, Guram Ratishvili. “War is inevitable. America and Britain will be our allies.”

When the Germans invaded in 1941, Egnatashvili’s wife was arrested and shot. “She just disappeared and never returned,” says Sasha’s grandson, “but Sasha never mentioned this to Stalin.” Egnatashvili knew the rules of Stalin’s court.

During the war, Egnatashvili, now a general, accompanied Stalin to Teheran and Yalta. “A Georgian chef in charge of supplying wine and shashlik was made lieutenant-general!” carps Khrushchev in his memoirs. “Whenever I came back from the front, I noticed he’d been awarded one or two more medals! And I remember Stalin once even gave me a dressing-down in front of this Lieutenant-General for provisions: he even got drunk with Stalin and the rest of us.” Stalin the Russian warlord was sensitive to such attitudes—and he also learned from Beria about the corruption
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in his households, transferring Egnatashvili to be director of the
State Dachas in the Crimea to prepare the Big Three Yalta Conference. But afterwards he left Egnatashvili behind.

The Rabbit died of diabetes in 1948. Vaso Egnatashvili remained close to Stalin, attending those dinners of old Gori friends. But on Stalin’s death Beria fired Vaso and jailed him. When Beria fell, Vaso was released, dying in 1956.
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The fate of Stalin’s Bolshevik comrades was tragic, never mind the fate of the Soviet people. Kamenev and Zinoviev were shot in 1936, Bukharin in 1938; Trotsky was murdered with an icepick in 1940—all on Stalin’s orders. During 1937–38, around one and a half million people were shot. Stalin personally signed deathlists for almost 39,000 people, many of them old acquaintances. Georgia, where Stalin’s rising magnate Beria was in charge, was hit especially severely: 10 percent of the Communist Party were purged; 425 out of the 644 delegates to the Tenth Georgian Party Congress were shot.

The star victim was Stalin’s old friend, Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani, who had several times saved his life in earlier days. But Mdivani had resisted Stalin in 1921 and the loquacious ex-actor irreverently joked that Beria should put an armed guard around Keke’s house—not for her protection, but so she never gave birth to another Stalin. Stalin was reconciled with Budu in the 1920s. When he was in Moscow, Budu usually stayed with him. Stalin often visited the Mdivanis in Georgia—even becoming godfather to their son. But Stalin had not forgotten Mdivani’s opposition. In 1937, he was arrested for plotting to kill Stalin and shot soon afterwards, along with most of his family.

The case of three of Soso’s closest Georgian acquaintances reveals how differently things could turn out in the universe of diabolical randomness. Sunny, genial, hedonistic and conciliatory, Abel Yenukidze, Nadya Stalin’s godfather, became Secretary of the Central Executive Committee, in charge of the Kremlin, the Party villas and the Bolshoi Ballet, which he used as his own private dating agency, becoming notorious for his taste for teenage ballerinas (and their mothers).

Uncle Abel was close friends with Stalin, but always preserved his own opinion. In his memoirs about the Baku printing-presses, he refused to praise Stalin for things he had not done. “Koba wants me to tell him he’s a genius but I won’t do it,” he complained. He was sceptical of the growing repression, priding himself on sheltering persecuted Georgian comrades. Yet he and Stalin often holidayed together, sending
each other affectionate notes. However, in 1936 Stalin selected Yenukidze as the first of his inner circle to be liquidated, even though he had never been a member of any formal opposition. He was arrested and shot in 1937.

Kavtaradze, on the other hand, had been a member of every opposition from the 1920s onwards. He not only threw a lantern at Stalin but later backed first Mdivani, then the Trotskyites. Yet each time Stalin saved, helped and promoted him.

In 1937, Kavtaradze was arrested (again) as a member of Mdivani’s “conspiracy” and sentenced to death for planning to murder Stalin. The others were all killed, but the dictator spared Kavtaradze by placing a dash next to his name on the deathlist. In 1940 Stalin, deciding that he missed him, freed him and invited him to dinner the same night. They got on well, even though Stalin teased him, “To think you wanted to kill me.” A few days later, he and Beria dined at Kavtaradze’s apartment: their host was made head of the State Publishing House, then Deputy Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Rumania. He survived Stalin, dying in 1961.

Sergo Ordzhonikidze was, by the 1930s, the last Old Bolshevik with the prestige to challenge Stalin. As Stalin’s enforcer he conquered the Caucasus in 1920–21, helped defeat the oppositions in the 1920s and ran heavy industry in the Five Year Plan into the 1930s. He and Stalin were inseparable, living in the same building, writing each other cosy notes, holidaying together. But in 1937 they clashed. Sergo committed suicide in the Kremlin.

Yet some of the earlier comrades survived.
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Kalinin served from 1919 until his death in 1946 as head of state (Chairman of the Supreme Soviet). Marshal Voroshilov served as Defence Commissar, a vicious henchman during the Terror, and an inept bungler in the Finnish and Great Patriotic Wars. Stalin tormented Voroshilov with being “an English agent.” Yet he outlived his master to become Soviet head of state until 1960.

Meyer Wallach became Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, later Soviet Ambassador in Washington. He was outspoken in his criticisms of Stalin, who planned a fatal car crash for him yet allowed him to survive, perhaps because he remembered Litvinov saving him from the dockers in London but more likely because of his international prestige. Stalin promoted his host in Vienna, Troyanovsky, making him the first Soviet Ambassador to the United States, and allowed him to live, even though he and Litvinov privately criticized him.

When he met Stalin again in 1918, Vyshinsky was clever enough neither to hide his unreliable political past nor to try to remind Stalin of the favours he had done him in Bailov Prison: he just formally, politely offered his services. As rebarbative, bloodthirsty and terrifying as he was cowardly and terrorized, he became the Soviet Procurator-General, the star inquisitor of the 1930s show-trials, and, in 1949, Stalin’s last Foreign Minister. He died in 1954.