Stalin had a passion for books, which he marked up and filled with placeholders to find passages. (His personal library would ultimately grow to more than 20,000 volumes.) He annotated works by Marx and Lenin, but also Plato and the German strategist Clausewitz in translation, as well as Alexander Svechin, a former tsarist officer whom Stalin never trusted but who demonstrated that the only constant in war was an absence of constants.6 “Stalin read a great deal,” noted Artyom. “And always, when we saw him, he would ask what I was reading and what I thought about it. At the entrance to his study, I recall, there was a mountain of books on the floor.” Stalin recommended the classics—Gogol, Tolstoy—telling Artyom and Vasily that “during wartime there would be a lot of situations you had never encountered before in life. You will need to make decisions. But if you read a lot, then in your memory you will already have the answers how to conduct yourself and what to do. Literature will tell you.”7 Among Russian authors, Stalin’s favorite was probably Chekhov, who, he felt, portrayed villains, not just heroes, in the round. Still, judging by the references scattered among his writings and speeches, he spent more time reading Soviet-era belles lettres.8 His jottings in whatever he read were often irreverent: “Rubbish,” “Fool,” “Scumbag,” “Piss off,” “Ha-ha!”
His manners were coarse. When, on April 5, 1930, a top official in the economy drew a black-ink caricature of finance commissar Nikolai Bryukhanov hanging by his scrotum, Stalin wrote on it, “To members of the politburo: For all his current and future sins Bryukhanov is to be hung by the balls; if his balls hold, he is to be considered acquitted by the court; if his balls do not hold, he is to be drowned in the river.”9 But Stalin cultivated a statesmanlike appearance, editing out his jokes and foul language even from the transcripts of official gatherings that were meant to be circulated only internally.10 He occasionally jabbed the air with his index finger for emphasis during speeches, but he usually avoided histrionics. “All Stalin’s gestures were measured,” Artyom recalled. “He never gesticulated severely.” Artyom also found his adoptive father reserved in his compliments. “Stalin never used expressions of the highest degree: marvelous [chudesno], elegant [shikarno]. He said ‘fine’ [khorosho]. He never went higher than ‘fine.’ He could also say ‘suitable’ [goditsia]. ‘Fine’ was the highest compliment from his mouth.”11
Stalin invoked God casually (“God forbid,” “Lord forgive us”) and referred to the Pharisees and other biblical subjects.12 In his hometown of Gori, he had lived across from the cathedral, attended the parish school, sung beatifically in the choir, and set his sights on becoming a priest or a monk, earning entrance to the Tiflis seminary, where he prayed nine to ten times per day and completed the full course of study except for sitting his last year’s final exams. By then he had become immersed in banned literature, beginning with Victor Hugo, evolving toward Karl Marx, and had come to detest organized religion and abandoned his piety.13 Rumors that Stalin attended church services in the 1930s have never been substantiated.14 In Stalin’s marginalia in works by Dostoevsky and Anatole France, he continued to be drawn to issues of God, the church, religion, and immortality, but the depth and nature of that interest remain difficult to fathom.15 Be that as it may, he had long ago ceased to adhere to Christian notions of good and evil.16 His moral universe was that of Marxism-Leninism.
He appears to have had few mistresses, and definitely no harem. His family life was neither particularly happy nor unhappy. His father, Beso, had died relatively young, not uncommon in the early twentieth century; his mother, Keke, lived alone in Tiflis. His first wife, Ketevan “Kato” Svanidze, a Georgian to whom he was married in 1906, had died in agony the next year of a common disease in Baku. He married again, to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a Russian better known as Nadya, who had been born in Tiflis in 1901 and lived in Baku, too. Stalin had known her since she was a toddler. They had married in 1918, when he was officially thirty-nine (actually forty). She worked as his secretary, then as one of Lenin’s secretaries, but she had higher ambitions. The couple had two healthy children, Vasily (b. 1921) and Svetlana (b. 1926). He also had a son from his first marriage, Yakov (b. 1907), whom he had abandoned to relatives in Georgia for the first fourteen years of the boy’s life. Stalin avoided contact with his many blood relatives from his father’s and mother’s families. He did live among in-laws—Kato’s and Nadya’s many brothers and sisters and their spouses—but his interest in them would wane. Personal life was subsumed in politics.
• • •
STALIN WAS A COMMUNIST and a revolutionary. He was no Danton, the French firebrand who could mount a rostrum and ignite a crowd (until he was guillotined in 1794). Stalin spoke softly, sometimes inaudibly, because of a defect in his vocal cords. Nor was he the dashing type, like his contemporary the Italian aviator Italo Balbo (b. 1896), a Blackshirt squadrista who, a jaunty cigarette dangling from his lips, lived the fascist ideal of the “new man,” leading armadas of planes in formation across the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic, attaining international renown (until he died in a crash caused by his own country’s antiaircraft guns).17 Stalin turned white during air travel and avoided it. He relished being called Koba, after the Georgian folk-hero avenger and the real-life benefactor who underwrote his education, but one childhood chum had called him Geza, a Gori-dialect term for the awkward gait Stalin had developed after an accident. He had to swing his hip all the way around to walk.18 This and other physical defects apparently weighed on him. Once, near his beloved medicinal baths at Matsesta, in the Caucasus, according to a bodyguard, Stalin encountered a boy of about six, “reached out his hand and asked, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Valka,’ the boy answered firmly. ‘Well, my name is Smallpox-Pockmarks,’ Stalin said to him. ‘Now we are introduced.’”19
Like the twisted spine of Shakespeare’s Richard III, it is tempting to find in such deformities the wellsprings of bloody tyranny: torment, self-loathing, inner rage, bluster, a mania for adulation. The boy at Matsesta was around the age Stalin had been when he had contracted the disease whose lifelong scars he bore on his nose, lower lip, chin, and cheeks. His pockmarks were airbrushed from public photographs, and his awkward stride kept from public view. (Film of him walking was prohibited.) People who met him saw the facial disfigurement and odd movement, as well as signs that he might be insecure. He loved jokes and caricatures, but never about himself. (Of course, the supposedly ultraconfident Lenin had refused to allow even friendly caricatures of himself to be printed.)20 Stalin’s sense of humor was perverse. Those who encountered him further discovered that he had a limp handshake and was not as tall as he appeared in photographs. (He stood five feet seven inches, or about 1.7 meters, roughly the same as Napoleon and one inch shorter than Hitler, who was 1.73 meters.)21 And yet, despite their initial shock—could this be Stalin?—most first-time onlookers usually found that they could not take their gaze off him, especially his expressive eyes.22 More than that, they witnessed him shouldering an immense load, under colossal pressure. Stalin possessed the skills and steeliness to rule a great country, unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III. He radiated charisma, the charisma of dictatorial power.