There were also some homosexual overtones to Stalin’s all-male drinking parties after the war. Polish government official Jakub Berman attended one of these parties in 1948 and recalled dancing with Molotov.
“Don’t you mean Mrs Molotov?” he was asked.
“No, she wasn’t there,” he said. “She’d been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov — it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple, because I haven’t a clue about how to dance and I just moved my feet to the rhythm.”
“As the woman?”
“Yes, Molotov led,” said Berman. “I wouldn’t know how. He wasn’t a bad dancer, actually.”
Stalin wound the gramophone and watched. Berman said that Stalin really had fun.
This is not an isolated incident. Stalin often forced men to dance with each other at his parties. Indeed, there were fewer and fewer women around the Kremlin. Like Mrs Molotov, Stalin was arresting them all.
Stalin only joined in on one occasion. After drinking Bruderschaft with Tito, he grabbed the Yugoslav dictator and span him around the floor to a Russian folk melody. Stalin danced so exuberantly that he lifted the bemused Yugoslav up in his arms several times.
William Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, reported a far more overt incident: “Stalin was very affectionate toward me. At one time when he had had a little too much to drink, he kissed me full on the mouth — what a horrible experience that was!”
Stalin’s heir apparent was Lavrenty Beria. He was head of Stalin’s secret police and notorious for his sexual attacks on young women and girls. When Stalin died he was waiting in the wings.
Like most would-be dictators, on the surface, his sex life seemed normal enough. He met his wife in 1920 in Georgia. At that time Stalin’s home state was not yet Communist and Beria was in jail. The wife of one of his Bolshevik colleagues came to visit him and brought her niece, fifteen-year-old Nino Gegechkori. Beria was immediately struck by her beauty.
The following year, when the Communists had taken over and Beria was released, he met her in the street in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. She was on her way to school and he asked her if he could meet her later for a talk. She agreed.
“We sat on a bench,” Nino said. “Lavrenty was wearing a black topcoat and a student’s service cap. He told me that for a long time he had been very taken with me. What’s more, he said that he loved me and wanted to marry me. I was sixteen years old at the time.”
Beria explained that the Soviet government wanted to send him to Belgium to learn about oil processing, but he could only go if he had a wife. She thought about his proposal and agreed to marry him.
They married quickly, fearing objections from her family. But the Belgian trip never materialized. As a loyal Communist, Beria was to head the Cheka (a forerunner of the KGB). They had one son, Sergo.
Well, that’s the official version of the story at least, but in a book called Commissar by Thaddeus Whittlin, himself a former inmate of the gulag at Vorkuta, another, more harrowing, version is told. Whittlin maintains that Beria met Nino when he was already head of the secret police in Georgia. He had a luxurious train at his disposal, which he used as his travelling headquarters. One day at the station, he was approached by a young girl, who asked him to intercede for her brother who had been arrested. It was Nino. She was extremely beautiful — medium height with black eyes and a creamy white complexion.
Beria was taken with her and asked her to board the train so he could take more details of the case. He took her to his bedroom compartment and ordered her to undress. When she tried to leave, he locked the door and slapped her face. Then he grabbed her arms, twisted them behind her back, pushed her down onto the bed and raped her.
When it was all over, he went to call the guard to have her taken to jail. But he looked at her tear-streaked face and decided that she was, indeed, very attractive. In half an-hour or so, he might want her again. So he locked her in his compartment and went down to the restaurant car for dinner and some vodka.
He kept the girl all night, raping her repeatedly. In the morning, he ordered breakfast for two. When he left the train to perform official duties, he left her locked in the compartment.
Despite the show of brutality, Beria was completely spellbound. Nino was the type of woman that appealed to him. She had small breasts, big eyes and a full ripe mouth. Although she was young and innocent, her body was full and mature.
He kept her on board the train with him for several days, while he travelled around supervising the progress of a Five-Year Plan in the Sukhumi region of Abkhazia. During that time, Beria started thinking how stupid it would be to throw away such a find. All his comrades and his superiors were married, while he spent his time seducing young girls.
Despite its ideological commitment to free love, the party, he knew, had a puritanical streak in it. If he was to get on, it would be best if he got married. So he did. Nino, his captive, had no say in the matter.
Whittlin’s story seems to be more in keeping with Beria’s character. An ugly child, girls had teased him at school. As an adolescent, they snubbed him and he hated them. He did not have enough money to pay good-looking prostitutes and had to make do with the older, uglier ones.
But, with the Revolution, everything changed. As head of the Cheka, he was charged with seeking out antiBolshevik elements. He did this largely in schools, where he would interrogate pupils personally, slapping their faces or beating their hands with a reed cane until they gave him the names of reactionary elements. He particularly liked interrogating girls — the pretty ones, the sort who had teased him when he was younger and turned him down. The more helpless and innocent the girl the better. It was the violation of innocence that he liked and he would not stop even at murder to get it.
In 1935, the People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade, Arkaday Rosengoltz, made the mistake of taking his beautiful young daughter, Yelena, on a trip to Sukhumi in Georgia. They were the guests of Nestor Lakoba, the Secretary of the Executive Committee of Abkhazia, and Lakoba arranged for his two cousins Basil and Michael to show Yelena around.
When Beria saw Yelena he was smitten. A few days later, Lakoba invited Beria to his country house, intimating it was for a stag party. When Beria arrived, Lakoba was nowhere to be seen, but Basil and Michael were there, along with Yelena. They played some records and Yelena danced with each of them in turn. Turkish delight, tea and wine were served.
When Yelena excused herself to go to the lavatory, one of the boys poured pure alcohol into her wine glass. When she returned, Beria proposed a toast “to the Queen of Beauty” and urged her to down her wine in one gulp.
Soon after, she felt dizzy and hot, and went outside to get some air. The three men followed. Out on the lawn, she collapsed. When she came: to, they were fiddling with her clothes. To start with, she thought they were loosening her clothing, so that she could breathe more easily. The three of them raped her in turn.
Afterwards they began to panic. What if she told her father? He was a highly respected Bolshevik with a lot of influence in Moscow. So one of them put his hands round her throat and strangled her.
Beria telephoned the investigating magistrate. When he arrived, Beria explained that he was the Chief of the Secret Police in Georgia and informed the magistrate that the girl had had a few glasses of wine. A little drunk, she had become hysterical and run out into the garden where she had committed suicide. No autopsy was necessary. A statement signed by the First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Committee of the Communist Party, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, corroborated by the Secretary of the Executive Committee of Abkhazia, Nestor Lakoba, would do. All the magistrate had to do was inform the dead girl’s father about the unfortunate accident.