After Vasily’s birth, Nadya was expelled from the party for inactivity, but since she’d worked in Lenin’s office, her membership was soon restored.31 Nadya hired servants to look after her children and strove for a political and professional life independent of Stalin. In 1929 she enrolled in the textile production faculty of the Industrial Academy in Moscow.
It is claimed that Nadya had some health issues, physical and mental. There is also much talk about her political differences with Stalin, notably over the violent ‘revolution from above’ he unleashed at the end of the 1920s, but there is no probative evidence to support such speculation. The conspiracy theory that Stalin had her murdered because of these supposed differences may be safely dismissed.
Hard evidence about the Stalin marriage is sparse and the memoir literature overdetermined by post hoc speculation about what led to Nadya’s suicide. Their surviving correspondence from the late 1920s and early 1930, conducted while Stalin was on holiday at his dacha in Sochi and Nadya was in Moscow studying, suggests theirs was a happy if not always smooth marriage.32
Their marriage breakdown appears to have been gradual rather than sudden, and gender inequality may have played a role. As radical socialists, the Bolsheviks were committed to female emancipation and sought to mobilise Soviet women in support of the communist project. But while there were many female activists and leaders throughout Soviet society, there were hardly any at the top levels of politics and power. One exception was Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina – a good friend of Nadya’s – who ran the fisheries industry in the 1930s and also looked after Soviet cosmetics.33 Another was Bolshevik feminist Alexandra Kollontai, who later became ambassador to Sweden – the only female Soviet diplomat of that rank. An early diary of hers was part of Stalin’s book collection. Among the very few other female authors that featured in his library were Lenin’s widow Krupskaya, the German communist Clara Zetkin, and the Polish Marxist Rosa Luxemburg, whose book on the General Strike as a revolutionary tactic was copiously marked by him. He was particularly interested in her treatment of the experience of strikes in Russia, especially in the Caucasus, where he himself had been active.34
The early years of the Stalin marriage coincided with the most liberationist and egalitarian phase of Bolshevik policy and practice on gender issues. However, from the early 1930s there developed a more conservative approach towards ‘the woman question’ and a reversion to more traditional gender relations.35
Soviet political culture from the outset was heavily male-dominated and Bolshevik leaders, including Stalin, affected a tough, coarse macho style. ‘Today I read the section of international affairs,’ Stalin wrote to Soviet premier Vyacheslav Molotov in January 1933, congratulating him on a speech. ‘It came out well. The confident, contemptuous tone with the respect to the “great” powers, the belief in our own strength, the delicate but plain spitting in the pot of the swaggering “great powers” – very good. Let them eat it.’36 For a young and ambitious female activist like Nadya, this was an inhospitable climate, even with the privileges that came from being Stalin’s wife. Matters came to a head at a private party in the Kremlin to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. After a drunken row with Stalin, Nadya left the room and shot herself with a revolver that her brother had brought back from Berlin as a souvenir.
Her suicide was obfuscated but not her death, which was announced in Pravda: ‘On the night of 9 of November, active and dedicated Party member Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva died’. The dedication that followed was signed by top Soviet leaders and their wives:
We have lost a dear, beloved comrade with a beautiful soul. A young Bolshevik filled with strength and boundlessly dedicated to the Party and the Revolution, is no more. . . . The memory of Nadezhda Sergeevna, dedicated Bolshevik, close friend and faithful helper to Comrade Stalin, will remain forever dear to us.37
Further tributes were paid when she was buried at the Novodevichy cemetery on 12 November and a few days later Stalin replied publicly to all the sympathy messages he had received: ‘With heartfelt gratitude to all organisations, comrades, and individuals who have expressed their condolences on the occasion of the death of my close friend and comrade Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva-Stalina.’38
As Sheila Fitzpatrick has written, ‘Stalin’s reactions [to Nadya’s suicide] are variously reported but grief, guilt and a sense of betrayal were all evidently present.’39 After his wife’s death, Stalin gradually withdrew from the family life that he had enjoyed in the 1920s. He moved into another apartment in the Kremlin, one that was located directly below his office. He stopped going to Zubalovo, although many of his books remained there.
STALIN’S MAPS
A grand, new Moscow dacha was constructed for Stalin in 1933–4.40 The Kuntsevo mansion was only ten or so minutes’ drive from the Kremlin using a fast highway reserved for government vehicles – hence the dacha’s colloquial name ‘Blizhnyaya’ (Nearby). Post-Nadya, Stalin’s daily life settled into a new pattern. Rarely staying overnight in his Kremlin apartment, he worked in his office until late and was then driven to Blizhnyaya. Not until the early hours of the morning did he go to bed.
The main house at Kuntsevo contained Stalin’s study and work spaces, a bedroom for Svetlana, a billiard room, a bath house, extensive servants’ quarters and a small dining room as well as a grand hall for large-scale banquets and events. The centrepiece of the dacha, however, was its library, a 30-square-metre room with four large bookcases whose shelves were deep enough to take two rows of books. But the bulk of Stalin’s collection, including those books transferred from his Kremlin apartment and office, were stored in a separate building nearby.
The dacha’s vestibule displayed three large multicoloured maps: a world map, a map of Europe and one of European Russia. As Molotov recalled: ‘Stalin loved maps . . . all maps.’41 The Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas reported that when he visited the dacha in June 1944, Stalin stopped before the world map and pointed at the Soviet Union, which was coloured red, exclaiming that the capitalists would ‘never accept the idea that so great a space should be red, never, never!’ Djilas misremembered that Stalin had encircled Stalingrad in blue on the world map. Actually, the city was marked by Stalin on the map of European Russia as part of a line drawing showing the German invasion’s deepest penetration into the USSR.42
In his attack on Stalin’s war record at the 20th party congress, Khrushchev accused him of planning military operations on a globe. Stalin did have a big globe in or near his Kremlin office, but Khrushchev’s calumny has been rejected by members of the Soviet high command who worked with him closely during the war. Moreover, Stalin’s lichnyi fond contains nearly 200 maps with his pometki, including many large-scale maps used for planning and plotting military operations. There are also maps of many different countries and parts of the world, as well as numerous political, economic, administrative, road and physical geography maps of the USSR and its regions.43
The dacha maps were conventional political maps (Mercator projection) that divided the world into differently coloured nations, states and empires. That political cartography was his chief preoccupation.
As a native Georgian, Stalin was, to use Alfred J. Rieber’s memorable phrase, a ‘man of the borderlands’.44 It was Stalin’s Georgian origins and background and his early experience of political activity in the multi-ethnic borderlands of the Russian Empire that shaped his approach to the creation and protection of the Soviet system. The Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 with a strong sense that the durability of their revolution depended on its spread to other countries. Stalin shared that outlook but felt the political and economic interdependence of Russia and its borderlands was just as important.