“I’ve only got two ways out,” he told Artyom. “The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?”
He callously abandoned his wife, Galina, taking their son Sasha to live with him at the House on the Embankment. She so longed to see Sasha that the nanny secretly met her so she could play with him. But Galina was too frightened to demand a flat or housekeeping from him. Vasily then married Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter Ekaterina, “a pretty Ukrainian.” His apartment was not grand enough for the scions of the Generalissimo and the Marshal so he demanded General Vlasik’s elegant villa on Gogolevsky. He flew back from Germany with a plane filled with “loot”: “golden ornaments, diamonds, emeralds, dozens of carpets, lots of ladies’ lingerie, a huge number of men’s suits, overcoats, fur coats, fur wraps, astrakhan” until Vasily’s house was “bursting with gold, German carpets and cut glass.” There was so much that his wife Timoshenka gradually sold it and pocketed the money. When his marriage to Timoshenka collapsed, he married a swimming star, the statuesque Kapitolina Vasileva, with whom he was happiest. Svetlana thought he was looking for his mother in his wives because he called her “mama” and she even wore her hair in a bun like Nadya.
Vasily commanded the air force in the Moscow Military District, a job beyond his capabilities. He demanded that his strutting entourage call him Khozyain like his father. “Vasily drank heavily almost every day,” testified his adjutant later, “didn’t turn up for work for weeks on end and couldn’t leave the women alone.”
Once, Crown Princes proudly drilled their own regiments. Now, like a Western millionaire’s son, Vasily was determined to make his own VVS (air force) football team top of the league. He immediately sacked the football manager, having decided to rescue Starostin, Russia’s pre-eminent soccer manager exiled by Beria, for plotting to assassinate Stalin, from the Gulag. Starostin was called into his camp commandant’s office and handed the vertushka: “Hello, Nikolai, this is Vasily Stalin.” General Stalin’s plane arrived to fly Starostin back to Moscow. Vasily hid him there while he tried to get the sportsman’s sentence reversed.
Abakumov, now boss of the Dynamo team, was furious. The MGB kidnapped Starostin. Vasily, using air-force intelligence officers, grabbed him back. Abakumov kidnapped him again. When Vasily phoned the Minister, he denied any knowledge of the footballer but Starostin managed to get a message to Vasily who despatched the head of air-force security to bring him back yet again. That day, Vasily attended the Dynamo game in the government box, with Starostin beside him. The MGB brass were foiled. Vasily called Abakumov’s deputy and shouted: “Two hours ago you told me you didn’t know where Starostin was… He’s sitting here right beside me. Your boys abducted him. Remember, in our family, we never forgive an insult. That’s told to you by General Stalin!”[269]
When he visited Tiflis, he got drunk, took a fighter-plane up over the city and caused havoc by swooping over the streets. If he did not get his way, he denounced officers to Abakumov or Bulganin. The only escape was to denounce him to Stalin himself: “Dear Joseph Vissarionovich, I ask you to tell Vasily Josephovich not to touch me,” wrote the air-force officer N. Sbytov, who had spotted the first German tanks approaching Moscow. “I could help him.”
Sbytov revealed that Vasily was constantly name-dropping: “When my father approved this job, he wanted me to have an independent command,” he whined.
Vasily certainly behaved like a boy brought up by Chekists: when some “Enemies” were found in his command, he set up an impromptu torture chamber in his own apartment and started “beating the soles of the man’s feet with a thin rod” until this ersatz-Lubianka broke up into a party.4
Days after Zhukov’s exile, President Kalinin, who was ill with stomach cancer, started to deteriorate. Stalin was fond of Papa Kalinin, personally arranging to send him down to recuperate in Abkhazia, calling the local boss to demand “maximum care,” and later ordering his bodyguards to look after him tenderly. Yet he also tormented the half-blind Kalinin, remembering Papa’s dissent in the twenties for which he had excluded him from active government for two decades. When Tito offered Kalinin some cigarettes at a banquet, Stalin quipped: “Don’t take any of those Western cigarettes!” Kalinin “confusedly dropped them from his trembling fingers.”
The 71-year-old Kalinin lived with his housekeeper and two adopted children while his adored wife festered in the camps. Emboldened by his imminent death, Kalinin appealed to Stalin: “I look calmly on the future of our country… and I wish only one thing—to preserve your power and strength, the best guarantee of the success of the Soviet State,” he started his letter. “Personally I turn to you with two requests—pardon Ekaterina Ivanovna Kalinina and appoint my sister to bring up the two orphans living with me. With all my soul, a last goodbye. M. Kalinin.”
Stalin, Malenkov and Zhdanov voted to pardon Kalinin’s wife after she had admitted her guilt, the usual condition for forgiveness: “I did bad things and was severely punished… but I was never an enemy to the Communist Party—pardon me!”
“It’s necessary to pardon and free at once, and bring the pardoned to Moscow. J Stalin.”
Before he died, on 24 June, Kalinin wrote an extraordinary but pathetic letter to Stalin, inspired by his bitter need of Bolshevik redemption: “Waiting for death… I must say that during all the time of the oppositions, no one from the opposition ever proposed hostility to the Party line. This might surprise you because I was friendly with some of them… Yet I was criticized and discredited… because Yagoda worked hard to imply my closeness to the oppositions.”
Now he revealed a secret he had kept for twenty-two years: “In the year after Lenin’s death, after the row with Trotsky, Bukharin invited me to his flat to admire his hunting trophies and asked—would I consider ‘ruling without Stalin?’; I replied I couldn’t contemplate such a thing. Any combination without Stalin was incomprehensible… After the death of Lenin, I believed in Stalin’s policy… I thought Zinoviev most dangerous.” Then he again requested that Stalin care for his sister and the orphans, and “commit this letter to the archive.”
At the funeral, when photographers hassled Stalin, he pointed at the coffin, growling: “Photograph Kalinin!”5
On 8 September, Stalin headed off on his holiday while Molotov shuttled around the world to attend meetings with the Allies to negotiate the new Europe. In Paris, he defended Soviet interests in Germany while still trying to win a protectorate over Libya, against the ever-hardening opposition of the Western Allies. It seems that Stalin still hoped to consolidate his position by negotiations with his former allies.
Stalin, writing in code as “Druzhkov” or Instantsiya , praised Molotov’s indomitable defiance. Molotov was very pleased with himself too. When he found himself relegated to the second row at a French parade, he stormed off the podium but then wrote to Stalin for approvaclass="underline" “I’m not sure I did the right thing.”
“You behaved absolutely correctly,” replied Stalin. “The dignity of the Soviet Union must be defended not only in great matters but in minutiae.”
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When Starostin was finally returned to his camp (where he ran the soccer team), Vasily hired the famous coach of Dynamo Tiflis and managed to make it to fourth place in 1950 and the semi-finals of the USSR Cup. He favoured Stalinist punishments and plutocratic incentives: when his team lost 0–2, he ordered their plane to dump them in the middle of nowhere, far from Moscow, as a punishment; when the team won, a helicopter landed on the field filled with gifts. When he bothered to turn up to his air-force command, he ruled there too with wild generosity and grim terror. Thanks to Zurab Karumidze for these anecdotes of his father-in-law, Vasily’s football manager.