Karl Pauker, thirty-six, was the children’s favourite, and important to Stalin himself. A symbol of the cosmopolitan culture of the Cheka of that time, this Jewish-Hungarian had been hairdresser at the Budapest Opera before being conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, captured by the Russians in 1916 and converted to Bolshevism. He was an accomplished actor, performing accents, especially Jewish ones, for Stalin. Rotund, with his belly held in by a (much-mocked) corset, bald, perfumed, with a scarlet sensuous mouth, this showman loved elaborate OGPU uniforms and pranced around on 1½-inch-heeled boots. He sometimes returned to hairdressing, shaving Stalin like a valet, using talcum powder to fill the pock-marks. The font of delicacies, cars and new products for the Politburo, he kept the secrets of the magnates’ private lives. Said to provide mistresses for Kalinin and Voroshilov, he procured girls for Stalin himself.
Pauker used to show off his Cadillac, a gift from Stalin, to the children. Long before Stalin officially agreed to bring back the Christmas tree in 1936, Pauker played Father Christmas, delivering presents round the Kremlin and running Christmas parties for the children. The secret policeman as Father Christmas is a symbol of this strange world.22
The other figure who was never far away was Stalin’s chef de cabinet, Alexander Poskrebyshev, thirty-nine, who scuttled round the garden at Zubalovo delivering the latest paperwork. Small, bald, reddish-haired, this bootmaker’s son from the Urals had trained as a medical nurse, conducting Bolshevik meetings in his surgery. When Stalin found him working in the CC, he told him, “You’ve a fearsome look. You’ll terrify people.” This “narrow-shouldered dwarf ” was “dreadfully ugly,” resembling “a monkey,” but possessed “an excellent memory and was meticulous in his work.” His Special Sector was the heart of Stalin’s power machine. Poskrebyshev prepared and attended Politburos.
When Stalin exerted his patronage, helping a protégé get an apartment, it was Poskrebyshev who actually did the work: “I ask you to HELP THEM IMMEDIATELY,” Stalin typically wrote to him. “Inform me by letter about quick and exact carrying out of this request.” Lost in the archives until now is Stalin’s correspondence with Poskrebyshev: here we find Stalin teasing his secretary: “I’m receiving English newspapers but not German… why? How could it be that you make a mistake? Is it bureaucratism? Greetings. J. Stalin.” Sometimes he was in the doghouse: in 1936, one finds on one of Stalin’s list of things to do: “1. To forgive Poskrebyshev and his friends.”
The sad, twitchy face of this Quasimodo was a weather vane of the leader’s favour. If he was friendly, you were in favour. If not, he sometimes whispered, “You’re in for it today.” The cognoscenti knew that the best way to get Stalin to read their letter was to address it to Alexander Nikolaievich. At work, Stalin called him Comrade but at home, he was “Sasha” or “the Chief.”
Poskrebyshev was part buffoon, part monster, but he later suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. According to his daughter Natalya, he asked if he could study medicine but Stalin made him study economics instead. But in the end, this half-trained nurse provided the only medical care Stalin received.23
Stalin rose late, at about eleven, took breakfast and worked during the day on his piles of papers, which he carried around wrapped in the newspaper—he did not like briefcases. When he was sleeping, anxious parents begged children to be quiet.
The big daytime meal was an expansive “brunch” at 3–4 p.m. with all the family and, of course, half the Politburo and their wives. When there were visitors, Stalin played the Georgian host. “He was elaborately hospitable in that Asiatic way,” remembers Leonid Redens, his nephew. “He was very kind to the children.” Whenever Stalin’s brood needed someone to play with, there were their Alliluyev cousins, Pavel’s children, Kira, Sasha and Sergei, and the younger boys of Anna Redens. Then there was the Bolshevik family: Mikoyan’s popular sons, whom Stalin nicknamed the “Mikoyanchiks,” only had to scamper over from next door.
The children ran around together but Svetlana found there were too many boys and not enough girls to play with. Her brother Vasily bullied her and showed off by telling her sexual stories that she later admitted disturbed and upset her. “Stalin was very loving to Svetlana but he did not really like the boys,” recalls Kira. He invented an imaginary girl named Lelka who was Svetlana’s perfect alter ego. Weak Vasily was already a problem. Nadya understood this and gave him more attention. But Bolshevik parents did not raise their children: they were brought up by nannies and tutors: “It was like an aristocratic family in Victorian times,” says Svetlana. “So were the others, the Kaganoviches, Molotovs, Voroshilovs… But the ladies of that top circle were all working so my mother did not dress or feed me. I don’t remember any physical affection from her but she was very fond of my brother. She certainly loved me, I could tell, but she was a disciplinarian.” Once when she cut up a tablecloth, her mother spanked her hard.
Stalin kissed and squeezed Svetlana with “overflowing Georgian affection” but she claimed later that she did not like his “smell of tobacco and bristly moustache.” Her mother, whose love was so hard to earn, became the untouchable saint in her eyes.
The Bolsheviks, who believed it was possible to create a Leninist “New Man,” placed stern emphasis on education.[30] The magnates were semi-educated autodidacts who never stopped studying, so their children were expected to work hard and grew up much more cultured than their parents, speaking three languages which they had learned from special tutors. (The Stalin and Molotov children shared the same English tutor.)
The Party did not merely come before family, it was an über-family: when Lenin died, Trotsky said he was “orphaned” and Kaganovich was already calling Stalin “our father.” Stalin lectured Bukharin that “the personal element is… not worth a brass farthing. We’re not a family circle or a coterie of close friends—we’re the political party of the working class.” They cultivated their coldness.[31] “A Bolshevik should love his work more than his wife,” said Kirov. The Mikoyans were a close Armenian family but Anastas was a “stern, exacting, even severe” father who never forgot he was a Politburo member and a Bolshevik: when he spanked his son, he said in time with the smacks: “It’s not YOU who’s Mikoyan, it’s ME!” Stepan Mikoyan’s mother Ashken “sometimes ‘forgot herself ’ and gave us a hug.” Once at a dinner in the Kremlin, Stalin told Yenukidze, “A true Bolshevik shouldn’t and couldn’t have a family because he should give himself wholly to the Party.” As one veteran put it: “If you have to choose between Party and individual, you choose the Party because the Party has the general aim, the good of many people but one person is just one person.”
Yet Stalin could be very indulgent to children, giving them rides around the estate in his limousine: “I think ‘Uncle Stalin’ really loved me,” muses Artyom. “I respected him but I didn’t fear him. He managed to make one’s conversation interesting. He always made you formulate your thoughts like an adult.”
“Let’s play the game of egg breaking—who can break theirs first?” Stalin asked his nephew Leonid when boiled eggs arrived. He entertained the children by throwing orange peel, wine corks into the ice cream or biscuits into their tea. “We children thought this was hilarious,” recalls Vladimir Redens.
30
Stalin’s ex-secretary, now Editorial Director of
31
Kirov, for example, had not seen his sisters for twenty years when he was assassinated and indeed he had not even bothered to tell them who or where he was. They only discovered when they read it in the papers that the famous Kirov was their brother Kostrikov.