It is only natural that all defend their fathers’ parts in the Terror. The Khrushchevs and Mikoyans have the courage and decency to admit the truth, reflecting their fathers’ attempts to correct the worst of Stalin’s (and their own) atrocities. Nonetheless, many of the magnates’ children still enthusiastically defend the Terror and many prefer to blame Beria for Stalin’s own crimes.
Martha Peshkova, who was brought up with Gorky in Sorrento, who still believes her grandfather and father were murdered, who as a child played with Stalin, reflects that “Stalin was as clever as he was cruel. Politics in Stalin’s time was like a closed jar with intriguers fighting one another to the death. What a frightening time! But if Beria had had his way after Stalin, he’d have improved the lifestyle of the country and we’d probably have avoided the destruction and poverty of today!”
Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens), whose father was shot on Stalin’s orders and whose mother lost her mind in his prisons, insists he was a “great man with good and bad sides.” Natasha Poskrebysheva, whose mother was shot by Stalin, admires him enormously and claims to be his daughter. Natasha Andreyeva, who lives in straitened circumstances in an apartment filled with her father’s art deco Kremlin furniture, remains the most aggressively Stalinist. “I have inherited my mother’s intuition,” she warned this author during his interview for this book. “I can see an Enemy by their eyes. Are you an Enemy? Are you afraid of the Red Flag?” She still supports the Terror: “We had to destroy spies before the war.” Despite the bulging file chronicling her father’s murderous spree in 1937, she asserts his innocence and claims, “Khrushchev’s dirty hands killed far more in Ukraine!” The “system,” not Stalin, were to blame for any “mistakes,” Andreyeva concludes. “But you Western capitalists have killed many more in Russia with your AIDS than Stalin ever did!”
Those who lived the extraordinary, terrible and privileged life as a child of Stalin’s grandees remain linked together and it is no surprise that their attitudes defy time—and the fate of their own families. The passionately optimistic ideals of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism and the imperial triumphs of the Generalissimo’s armies remain as potent and persuasive as the presence of Stalin himself, of whom they are never free. Old Molotov was asked if he dreamed about Stalin: “Not often but sometimes. The circumstances are very unusual. I’m in some sort of destroyed city and I can’t find a way out. Afterwards, I meet HIM…”1
Source Notes
A NOTE ON SOURCES AND SPELLING
This book is based on my research in the RGASPI and GARF archives with their enlightening array of new letters and diaries, from notes between Stalin and his fellow leaders to the diary of Ekaterina Voroshilova, as well as new research in both RGVA and TsAMO RF. But I have also unapologetically used my own interviews, and the memoirs of both participants and their families. Clearly the latter materials are less reliable than the former but I believe they are still valuable: wherever possible I have checked these interviews against other witnesses. I have used them on matters on which they are likely to be well-informed. For example, Malenkov’s children are probably reliable about what stories their father read them at bedtime but worthless on his role in the Politburo. Sergo Beria’s memoirs certainly aim to redeem his father’s reputation but, to my surprise on checking his stories, I discovered they are fairly reliable about Stalin’s courtiers and table talk. Clearly the reminiscences of magnates such as Khrushchev, Molotov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan, Shepilov and those just published by Mgeladze are invaluable but often evasive or downright mendacious. I was fortunate to be able to use the mainly unpublished memoirs of Charkviani, Kavtaradze, Budyonny and the son of Dekanozov, but the same rules apply to them.
I have widely used conversation and dialogue which I hope gives a new immediacy to this chronicle, but I have applied rigourous standards to this materiaclass="underline" the great majority of it comes from the archives themselves, specifically the minutes of Central Committee Plenums or Stalin’s meetings: the RGASPI references are in the Source Notes. I have also made liberal use of the Plenum minutes and other documents published in Arch Getty’s Road to Terror and these are referenced to the page in “Getty.” Finally, some dialogue comes from reliable diaries and memoirs and my own interviews.
I have used materials from NKVD confessions such as testimonies aimed at Yezhov in 1939 and quoted in Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov’s new biography of him; those aimed at Vlasik in 1952; and at Beria in 1953. In all three cases, the aim of the “Organs” was to de-humanize the defendants by smearing them with accusations of sexual misconduct. They come with this health warning but I agree with Petrov that they can still be used carefully. In all three cases, interviews confirm the broader truth of some of these accusations.
Finally, I must stress here my debt to the great works of Stalin history that I have used as my essential texts in this book. These include Robert Tucker’s two volumes, Stalin as Revolutionary and Stalin in Power; the many classic works by Richard Pipes; Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror; Arch Getty’s The Road to Terror; Robert Service’s A History of 20th Century Russia; John Erickson’s The Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin; Richard Overy’s Russia’s War; Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov’s Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Gabriel Gorodetsky’s Grand Delusion; David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb; Amy Knight’s Beria and Who Killed Kirov?; Marc Jansen and Nikita Petrov’s Ezhov; Harold Shukman’s Stalin’s Generals; Gennadi Kostyrchenko’s Out of the Red Shadows and Jonathan Brent and Vladimir Naumov’s Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctors’ Plot; William Taubman, Sergei Khrushchev and Abbott Gleason’s Nikita Khrushchev; Oleg Khlevniuk’s collections of the correspondence of Stalin with Molotov and Kaganovich and his works on the thirties and Ordzhonikidze.
On spelling, I have used the most accessible and recognizable versions, e.g. “Joseph” instead of “Iosif,” even when this leads to inconsistencies: for example, I use “Koniev” yet “Alliluyev.” For similar reasons, I have sometimes used Party names if they are more widely used than surnames: e.g., Ordzhonikidze was almost universally known as “Comrade Sergo” and I have usually used that moniker. However, in the case of Polina Zhemchuzhina, I call her Polina Molotova. For the same reasons, I have persisted in using the traditional Chinese spellings of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.
JOURNALS CITED
ABBREVIATIONS OF NAMES OF ARCHIVES CITED
RGASPI Russian State Archive of Social and Political History
GARF State Archive of Russian Federation
RGVA Russian State War Archive
TsAMO Central Archives of Ministry of Defence of Russian Federation
FSB RF Central Archives of Security Service of Russian Federation
RGAE Russian State Economical Archives
RGALI Russian State Archives of History and Literature
APRF Archive of Administration of the President of the Russian Federation
Izvestiya TsK KPSS Izvestiya of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union