For years, the three of them travelled and plotted and politicked together. They travelled back to Russia in March 1917 in the famous sealed train. Also on board was Angelica Balabanoff.
It was Lenin, Nadya and Inessa that planned the October Revolution. They formed the inner circle which took over the government, created the Soviet Union, ran the world’s first Communist state and lived together in the Kremlin until Inessa’s death from typhus in October 1920.
Two weeks before she died, Inessa wrote in her diary: “For romantics, love occupies the first place in their lives, it comes before everything else.” She was a romantic.
Even as the illness took its toll, she remained devoted to Lenin. In a last scribbled note, she wrote: “Now I’m indifferent to everyone. The main thing is I’m bored with almost everyone. I only have warm feelings left for the children and V.I. In all other respects, it’s as if my heart has died. As if, having given up all my strength, all my passion to V.I. and work, all the springs of love have dried up in me.”
Inessa was laid in state in the House of the Soviets and buried in the Kremlin wall. The message on one wreath read simply: “To Comrade Inessa from V.I. Lenin.”
Lenin himself was shattered. Angelica Balabanoff, now a Comintern official, wrote: “Not only his face but his whole body expressed so much sorrow that I dared not greet him, not even with the slightest gesture. It was clear that he wanted to be alone with his grief. He seemed to have shrunk: his cap almost covered his face, his eyes seemed drowned in tears held back with effort. As our circle moved, following the movement of the people, he too moved, without offering resistance, as if he were grateful for being brought nearer to his dead comrade.”
After her death, Lenin and Nadya looked after Inessa’s five children. But Lenin never really got over his grief. Without his great love, his health and his political star went into decline. He died of a stroke in January 1924. Nadya survived for another fifteen years, living in their apartment in the Kremlin until her death at the age of seventy in 1939.
3. MORE REVOLTING RED RAVERS
Communist dictators are not supposed to be concerned with sex. They are supposed to think only of the good of the people. The personal gratification involved in making love is irredeemably bourgeois. Take, for example, Soviet Secretariat member Boris Bazhanov’s description of the greatest dictator of them all, Comrade Stalin: “This passionate politician has no other vices. He loves neither money nor pleasure, neither sport nor women. Women, apart from his own wife, do not exist for him.” This simply was not true.
Stalin’s first wife was a Georgian woman named Ekaterina Svanidze. Her brother Aleksandr was at the same theological seminary that Stalin attended before he gave up the priesthood for the Revolution. They married in 1903. Although Stalin was already an atheist, to please Ekaterina’s mother the ceremony took place in an Orthodox Church. Ekaterina was also very religious and, while he was away at his revolutionary meetings, she would be on her knees praying that he would turn away from ideas that were displeasing to God and live a life of quietness and contentment. They had one son, Yakov.
Although he saw little of her, Stalin must have loved his wife. He was devastated when she died in 1910. At the gates of the cemetery, he said: “This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for human beings.” Then he placed his right hand over his heart and said: “It is all so desolate here inside, so unspeakably desolate.” Millions died as a consequence.
Although the loss of his first wife hardened his heart, his sexual feelings did not die with her. During the Civil War in 1919, he met Nadya Alliluyeva, the daughter of a railwayman. She was very beautiful, with a distinctly oriental appearance. He was on the run and they met when her parents-who had known him for twenty years -harboured him. She was just sixteen when he took her virginity. He was thirty-nine. Although he was more than twice her age, she found his fanatical revolutionary ideas wildly romantic. Nadya too became a revolutionary and, despite her mother’s opposition, married Stalin as a revolutionary act.
Stalin fulfilled her girlish fantasies by taking her to Moscow in an armoured car. They honeymooned in Tsaritsyn, where Stalin organized the defences against the White Russian Army. He re-organized the police force, uncovered counter-revolutionary plots and had the plotters executed. The city was renamed Stalingrad. It was there that Nadya lost her political virginity. Stalin’s ruthless suppression of anyone who opposed him was her first exposure to the naked use of power.
Nadya became one of Lenin’s secretaries and she lived with Stalin in an apartment in the Kremlin, which she hated. Their first child, a son, Vasily, was born in 1920; their daughter, Svetlana, in 1926.
When Stalin took over the reins of power after Lenin’s death, Nadya became disturbed by the power and privileges that went with his position. It offended her Communist principles. She decided to go to college. There, from other students, she began to learn about what was happening in the Ukraine, where her husband’s policy of forked collectivization had caused a famine which cost five million lives.
Raising such issues at home was not a recipe for domestic bliss. Stalin would respond with the crudest of insults. He also swore at Lenin’s wife, greatly upsetting her. Even his own mother was called an “old whore” to her face.
Stalin would complain to others that Nadya had never been much to his taste, she was “a woman with ideas …a herring with ideas — skin and bones”. Much more to his taste was the former waitress — “a young one with a snub nose and a gay, ringing laugh” — who he employed as a housekeeper at his dacha. Svetlana summed up her virtues in her father’s eyes: “Plump, neat, served softly at table and never joined in the conversation.”
By the time the waitress joined the household, Svetlana believed that her parents” sexual relationship had come to an end. Nadya had her own bedroom, while Stalin slept in his office or in a small room with a telephone in it, next to the dining-room. It was rumoured that he was having an affair with a ballerina.
There was also a rumour that it was Stalin who had made the sixteen-year-old daughter of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich pregnant. Trotsky believed that Stalin had another daughter besides Svetlana, whose mother was not Nadya.
Matters came to a head between Stalin and Nadya on the night of 8 November, 1932. There was a party in the Kremlin celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution. Stalin insisted that she drink, though he knew she was teetotal. There was a row and Stalin threw a lighted cigarette at her. Nadya ran from the room, humiliated. She walked around the grounds of the Kremlin for a long time, trying l compose herself. When she returned to their apartment, she found Stalin in bed with the wile of a party official. Nadya went to her room and shot herself.
Stalin was unconcerned about her death. At her open coffin, he was heard to say: “She left me as an enemy.”
He did not attend her funeral or her memorial service and took his anger out on her family. Nadya’s sister Anna was sentenced to ten years” solitary confinement. Her brother Pavel died of a heart attack in 1938 during the purges. Pavel’s wife, Eugenia, was imprisoned on the trumped-up charge of having poisoned him. Anna’s husband, Stanislav Redens, was arrested and shot the same year. Many said that Nadya was lucky she committed suicide when she did, otherwise she would have fallen victim to the purges too.
Only his daughter Svetlana enjoyed the love of her father, but she became a prisoner of the Kremlin. He would call her his “housekeeper” and she would have to sit on his right during working dinners. He had affectionate nicknames for her — “little sparrow” and “little fly” — and his letters to her always ended “I kiss you”. He was always kissing her.