Pravda followed up (October 27) with additional details from Keke: “‘Our Lavrenti came and announced that Soso had arrived and that he was already here and coming in. . . . The door opened, and there he stood on the threshold: it’s him, my own. . . . I look and I can’t believe my eyes.’” She notices that he has gray hair. “‘What’s that, son, have you gone gray?’” Stalin answers: “‘It’s nothing, Mother, a little gray. It’s not important. I feel terrific, and you should not doubt it.’”197 (The account omitted the part where she said, “What a shame that you didn’t become a priest,” which Stalin, according to Svetlana, liked to repeat.) Keke was quoted as revealing that Stalin’s father had removed him from school to apprentice him to a shoemaker, against her strenuous objections. On October 29, Stalin exploded. “I ask that you prohibit the vulgar rubbish that infiltrated our central and local press, publishing an ‘interview’ with my mother and sundry other promotional nonsense right up to portraits,” he wrote from Sochi to Molotov, Kaganovich, Andreyev, Zhdanov, and Boris Tal (head of publishing in the apparatus). “I ask that you spare me from the promotional hoopla of these scum.”198
LIFE BECOMES MORE JOYOUS
Stalin’s first order of business back in Moscow, on November 2, 1935, was to receive Kandelaki, just returned from a meeting in Berlin with Schacht, who had revisited the proposal for a large new credit, now half a billion marks, while Kandelaki had again raised the need for political rapprochement and reemphasized Soviet interest in state-of-the-art military technology (automatic piloting of aircraft, remote control of vessels). France’s Laval, who had concurrently become prime minister, was also working all channels to secure rapprochement with Germany while delaying formal ratification of the Soviet alliance. Hitler perceived weakness.199 Schulenburg, Germany’s ambassador, reported that at the dinner for the diplomatic corps on Revolution Day, Litvinov had raised his glass and loudly proclaimed, “I drink to the rebirth of our friendship!” Schulenburg added, “The British ambassador, who was sitting opposite, said: ‘Well, that’s a fine toast.’”200
The capital was having its usual chilly, white winter, but at the November 7, 1935, parade, for the first time, Voroshilov, Tukhachevsky, and others appeared with gold shoulder boards. Not long thereafter, Stalin allowed the reintroduction of the snapped-hand salute and formal ranks.201 The dictator named five “marshals”: Voroshilov, Yegorov, Tukhachevsky, Blyukher, and Budyonny.202 In the process of awarding ranks for thousands of others, some officers were effectively demoted because it was remembered that they happened to be the sons of priests or gentry or had once run afoul of a bigwig.203 The NKVD also got ranks. Zakovsky, conductor of the post-Kirov meat grinder in Leningrad, became commissar of state security first rank, equivalent to general in the army; Stalin had raised this from the proposal in the draft. Yagoda became general commissar of state security, the sole person in that rank.204 Grasping for rank, uniforms, and medals, as well as grand apartments, dachas, and cash bonuses, the new elite was becoming ever more conspicuous.205
On November 8, the extended family of the Alliluyevs and Svanidzes gathered for the third consecutive year in memory of Nadya. The night before Stalin had spent with the cronies until 3:00 a.m. Now, concerned about the dictator’s mood on the occasion, Molotov called to suggest watching a film together, but Stalin begged off.206 His elder son, Yakov, had found a new woman, Judith Meltzer (b. 1911), a ballerina from Odessa who went by Yulia. Yakov had been cohabiting with and gotten engaged to Olga Golysheva (b. 1909), a fellow student at the Moscow Aviation School from Stalingrad province, but they broke up and she went home.207 Meltzer had evidently come to Yakov’s attention at a Moscow restaurant, where he had an altercation with her second husband, Nikolai Bessarab, an NKVD officer who served as an aide to Redens, Stalin’s brother-in-law and now head of the Moscow province NKVD. “She is a fine woman, 30–32 years old, coquettish, speaks stupidities with aplomb, reads novels, gave herself the goal of leaving her husband and making a ‘career,’ and succeeded,” Maria Svanidze acidly wrote of Meltzer at the holiday dinner. “She already lives with Yasha, but her belongings are with her husband.”208
Between November 14 and 17, 1935, the regime held the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Pressure for labor intensification had been high even before Stalin’s approval of capital investment increases—but an apparent solution fell into the regime’s lap. At the Central-Irmino mine in Kadievka (Donbass), Alexei Stakhanov (b. 1906), a jackhammer operator, hewed 102 tons of coal in a single overnight shift, more than fourteen times his quota of seven. At 6:00 a.m., the mine’s party cell voted to award Stakhanov bonus pay of 220 rubles (a month’s salary) and give him permanent passes to the workers’ club. Pravda carried a report of Stakhanov’s feat (September 2); the next day he had a new apartment. Stakhanov’s innovation was to ask that hewers like himself be freed from periodically setting down their jackhammers in order to prop the coal face. Additionally, a local party organizer had hauled in extra equipment and workers, whose names went unmentioned in the shower of publicity he arranged. Orjonikidze, in Kislovodsk, read the Pravda account and telephoned aides in Moscow and the coal trust in Kadievka. Pravda (September 11) launched a “movement” across industrial sectors and into the Gulag.209
Record chasing often left follow-on shifts bereft of supplies and labor to meet, let alone exceed, norms, provoked breakdowns and injuries, and exacerbated tensions among workers. But managers who tried to contain Stakhanovism’s deleterious consequences risked accusations of sabotaging worker initiative.210 (The mine director at Central-Irmino would be arrested for “wrecking”; his place would be taken by the party organizer.)211 Stakhanovism became a truncheon against both managers and workers, forcing norms upward. At the Stakhanovite conference, Orjonikidze, as always, stressed the need to raise quality, not just quantity.212 On the closing day, as Voroshilov regaled the Stakhanovites with the paratrooper exploits at the recent army maneuvers, Stalin walked in, inciting delirium.
The dictator soon took the podium, attributing the “profoundly revolutionary” movement to initiative from below, in the country’s new conditions. “Life has become better, comrades,” he observed. “Life has become more joyous. And whenever life is joyful, work goes better.” (Earlier in the proceedings, the 3,000 attendees had spontaneously broken out into the catchy march from Jolly Fellows.) “If there had been a crisis in our country, if there had been unemployment—that scourge of the working class—if people in our country lived badly, drably, joylessly, there would have been nothing like the Stakhanovite movement. (Applause.) . . . If there is a shortage of bread, a shortage of butter and fats, a shortage of textiles, and if housing conditions are bad, freedom will not carry you very far. It is very difficult, comrades, to live on freedom alone. (Shouts of approval. Applause.)”213
Stalin closed by asking for approval to reward the country’s best workers with the highest state honor, again inciting delirium. Stakhanov would be awarded the Order of Lenin, admitted to the party, promoted into mine management, and made the author of texts extolling Stalin for originating his movement.214 He would take to drinking, lose his Order of Lenin and party card in a drunken brawl, smash the mirrored walls at the Metropole Hotel restaurant, and wed a fourteen-year-old. Stalin would lose interest in Stakhanovism, but he now paid still more attention to the cultivation of public heroes.