Pravda (November 10, 1932) announced the death of Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva in what was the first mention in the Soviet press of Stalin’s marriage.337 No cause was given.338 She had been diagnosed with acute appendicitis but had put off the operation until after her exams, and this became the unofficial cause of death, spread by the secret police.339 Rumors that Stalin shot her over political disagreements were instantaneous. Some people claimed they heard from a Kremlin doctor or a servant that Nadya’s screams for him to stop had been heard by neighbors (through impossibly thick walls).340 Others whispered that he had driven her to suicide.341 Still other rumors had Stalin marrying Kaganovich’s sister Rosa (no such person existed).342 Kirov and Orjonikidze, Stalin’s two closest comrades, were said to have stayed in the Kremlin apartment with him the night of her death. Bukharin, who used to visit Nadya in the apartment, would offer to exchange Kremlin apartments with Stalin. Stalin accepted. Soon, however, he and the children instead moved into the Imperial Senate, to an apartment one floor below his Kremlin office. It comprised seven rooms on a long corridor, with rooms for servants and bodyguards at each end and windows looking out onto the Arsenal.343
The casket was placed on a white catafalque for an unhurried procession to the Novodevichy Cemetery on November 12. The newspaper had announced the schedule, and Moscow’s streets were lined with people (many of them plainclothes police). Stalin exited the Kremlin on foot, behind the horse-drawn hearse. Whether he marched the full four miles, through many narrow and winding streets, is uncertain.344 TASS announced that grave-site eulogies were delivered by Bukharin (for the Krasnaya Presnya ward party committee, Nadya’s primary party organization) and Kaganovich (Moscow party boss). “We are burying one of the best, most loyal members of our party,” Kaganovich stated. “Raised in the family of an old Bolshevik proletarian, going forward after the revolution for many years in a state of the greatest loyalty to the cause of the working class, Nadezhda Sergeyevna was organically linked with the worker movement, with our party. . . . We, close friends and comrades, understand the severity of the loss of comrade Stalin, and we know what duties this imposes on us with respect to comrade Stalin.”345
After Nadya was lowered into the grave, “Stalin threw a handful of dirt on it,” Artyom recalled. “He told Vasily and me to do likewise. Returning home, we had lunch. Stalin sat silently, contemplatively. Soon he left for a meeting of the government.”346 Pravda published a grace note from the dictator (November 18) offering “heartfelt gratitude to all organizations, comrades, and individuals who had expressed their condolences on the occasion of the death of my close friend and comrade Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva-Stalina.” He exhibited remorse and self-pity, fury and his sense of victimhood.347 Svetlana’s subsequent account, unreliable in most respects, rightly surmised that her father “was too intelligent not to know that people always commit suicide to punish someone.”348
ENEMY WITH A PARTY CARD
Secret reports were now mentioning a threat of starvation even for Moscow and Leningrad.349 Military intelligence estimated that Japan had a standing army of 1,880,000, Poland 1,772,000, Romania 1,180,000, Finland 163,000, Estonia 75,000, and Latvia 114,000.350 Absorbing his personal loss, his subjects starving, his eastern and western borders facing formidable enemies, Stalin could have been moved to carve out a breathing space. But the spring 1932 concessions had failed to produce a harvest miracle, and now he ratcheted up the repression again to squeeze blood from a stone.351 He had formed a commission to purge the party in the North Caucasus, sending Kaganovich there to bang heads, and returned Yevdokimov to its capital, Rostov, ordering that villages that failed to fulfill grain quotas be deported in their entirety. (Their houses and fields were to be taken by “conscientious Red Army collective farmers who have too little land or bad land in other regions.”)352 Molotov was dispatched to Ukraine, whence he complained to Stalin (November 21) that in the “opportunist, bourgeois, kulak situation,” local functionaries were urging that farmers’ consumption needs be met before more grain went to the state.353 That same day, Stalin accused the party boss in the Kazakh republic, Filipp Goloshchokin, of having surrendered despite “a maximal reduction” in procurement quotas, and ordered him to “strike those Communists in counties and below who are in the hands of petit bourgeois anarchy and have slid onto the rails of kulak sabotage.”354
The Soviet agricultural press in November 1932 carried headlines of peasants dying from starvation in Poland (“It is not a crisis; it is a catastrophe”), Czechoslovakia (“dying villages”), China (“hunger despite a good harvest”), and the United States (“poverty and ruin”).355 Not a word about the famine in the Soviet Union.
Once again, the party “opposition” played into Stalin’s hands: he received a denunciation (on or before November 19) against two officials, Nikolai Eismont, commissar of food for the RSFSR, and Vladimir Tolmachev, head of road transport for the RSFSR, who, in connection with the Revolution Day holiday, had been drinking in Eismont’s apartment. They gathered again the next day with Alexander Smirnov, a former agriculture commissar who had been demoted to a position in forestry, and criticized anew Stalin’s destructive policies. Smirnov had become a Central Committee member back in 1912, the same year as Stalin. Eismont had been on the recent commission to the North Caucasus led by Kaganovich and had seen the swarms of starving refugees at railroad stations. Under the influence, the trio had discussed possible replacements for the general secretary: Voroshilov, Kalinin, even Smirnov.
There it was, yet again. Remove Stalin.
The Central Control Commission, now overseen by the Stalin minion Jānis Rudzutaks, deemed the lubricated conversations a “counterrevolutionary grouping.”356 Stalin added the disgraced rightist Mikhail Tomsky (head of the state publishing house) to the “conspiracy,” and summoned a joint session of the politburo and the Control Commission presidium on November 27. “These people,” the attack dog Yemelyan Yaroslavsky fulminated, “are like the Ryutin group, only in a different form.” By now, though, the crisis under Stalin’s rule was pervasive and even some arch-loyalists shrank from full-throated condemnation of their loose-tongued comrades. Kuibyshev referred to Smirnov by his nickname (“Foma”) and recalled their long association, dating back to Narym exile. (Stalin had been there, too, and Smirnov had fed him.) Mikoyan, who used to be Eismont’s boss, awkwardly said almost nothing (until the very end).357
Rumors again circulated that Stalin had verbally offered to resign, and that after an awkward silence Molotov had spoken up to reassure him he had the party’s confidence.358 Be that as it may, Stalin found himself defending his policies.359 He grumbled that the conspirators “represent matters as if Stalin were guilty of everything” and warned that the choice was between becoming a victim of the imperialists—the fate of China—or a socialist industrial power that could defend itself. “What matters is not Stalin, but the party,” he concluded. “You can remove Stalin, but things will continue just as they are.”360