It was the Caucasian tradition to let babies suck wine off the adults’ fingers and when they were older to give them little glasses of wine. Stalin often gave Vasily, and later Svetlana, sips of wine, which seems harmless (though Vasily died of alcoholism) but this infuriated the stern Nadya. They constantly argued about it. When Nadya or her sister told him off, Stalin just chuckled: “Don’t you know it’s medicinal?”
Once Artyom did something that could have become serious because Stalin was already highly suspicious. “When the leaders were working in the dining room,” young Artyom noticed the soup which, as always, was on the sideboard. The boy crept behind the backs of Stalin, Molotov and Voroshilov and naughtily sprinkled Stalin’s tobacco into the broth. He then waited to see if they would eat it. “Molotov and Voroshilov tried it and found the tobacco. Stalin asked who did it. I said it was me.”
“Have you tried it?” asked Stalin.
Artyom shook his head.
“Well, it’s delicious,” replied Stalin. “You try it and if you like it, you can go and tell Carolina Vasilevna [Til, the housekeeper] to always put tobacco in the soup. If not, you better not do it again.”
The children were aware that it was a political household. “We looked at everything with humour and irony,” says Leonid Redens. “When Stalin dismissed a commissar, we regarded it with amusement.” This was a joke that would not remain funny for long.24
This country set knew about the unspeakable depredations in the countryside. Stanislas Redens, Stalin and Nadya’s brother-in-law, was the GPU boss of the Ukraine, at the centre of the famine, a job that entailed intimate knowledge and participation: there is no doubt that his wife talked to Nadya about the Ukraine’s tragedy. Soon it had poisoned not only Stalin’s marriage but the Bolshevik family itself.
5. HOLIDAYS AND HELL
The Politburo at the Seaside
In late 1931, Stalin, Nadya and most of the magnates were already on holiday as the hunger turned to famine. They took their holidays very seriously. Indeed, at least ten percent of the letters between Stalin’s circle, even during the worst years of famine, concerned their holidays. (Another twenty percent concerned their health.) Networking on holiday was the best way to get to know Stalin: more careers were made, more intrigues clinched, on those sunny verandas than on the snowy battlements of the Kremlin.[32]
There was a fixed ritual for taking these holidays: the question was formally put to the Politburo “to propose to Comrade Stalin one week’s holiday” but by the late twenties, the holidays had expanded from “twenty days” to one or two months “on the suggestion of doctors.” Once the dates were arranged, Stalin’s secretary sent a memorandum to Yagoda, giving him the schedule “so bodyguards can be arranged appropriately.”1
The potentates set off in private trains, guarded by OGPU troops, southwards to the Soviet Riviera—the Politburo’s southern dachas and sanatoria were spread from the Crimea in the west to the Georgian spa of Borzhomi in the east. Molotov preferred the Crimea but Stalin favoured the steamy Black Sea coastline that ran from Sochi down into the semi-tropical towns of Sukhumi and Gagra in Abkhazia. All were state-owned but it was understood that whoever supervised their building had preferential rights to use them.
The magnates moved about to visit one another, asking permission so as not to wreck anyone else’s holiday, but naturally they tended to cluster around Stalin. “Stalin would like to come to Mukhalatka [in the Crimea][33] but does not want to disturb anyone else. Ask Yagoda to organize bodyguards…”2
There was a dark side to their holidays. The OGPU carefully planned Stalin’s train journey which, during the Hunger, was accompanied by a train of provisions. If, on arrival, the staff thought there was still a shortage of food for Stalin and his guests, his assistants rapidly sent “a telegram to Orel and Kursk” to despatch more. They eagerly reported that during the journey they had successfully cooked Stalin hot meals. “As for the GPU,” wrote one of his assistants, “there’s lots of work, massive arrests have taken place” and they were still working on hunting down “those who remain… Two bands of bandits have been arrested.” 3
Stalin’s tastes in holiday houses changed but in the thirties, Dacha No. 9 in Sochi was his favourite. Krasnaya Polyana, Red Meadow, was “a wooden house with a veranda around the whole outside,” says Artyom, who usually holidayed with “Uncle Stalin.”[34] Stalin’s house stood high on the hill while Molotov and Voroshilov’s houses stood symbolically in the valley below. When Nadya was on holiday with her husband, they usually invited a wider family, including Yenukidze and the obese proletarian poet, Demian Bedny. It was the job of Stalin’s staff, along with the secret police and the local bosses, to prepare the house before his arrivaclass="underline" “The villa… has been renovated 100%,” wrote one of his staff, “as if ready for a great party” with every imaginable fruit.4
They enjoyed holidaying in groups, like an American university fraternity house, often without their wives who were with the children in Moscow. “Molotov and I ride horses, play tennis, skittles, boating, shooting—in a word, a perfect rest,” wrote Mikoyan to his wife, listing the others who were with them. “It’s a male Bolshevik monastery.” But at other times they took their wives and children too: when Kuibyshev went on holiday, the shock-haired economics boss and poet travelled round the Black Sea with a “large and jolly troupe” of pretty girls and bon vivants.5
They competed to holiday with Stalin but the most popular companion was the larger-than-life Sergo. Yenukidze often invited his fellow womanizer Kuibyshev to party with him in his Georgian village. Stalin was half jealous of these men and sounded delighted when Molotov failed to rendezvous with Sergo: “Are you running away from Sergo?” he asked.6 They always asked each other who was there: “Here in Nalchik,” wrote Stalin, “there’s me, Voroshilov and Sergo.”7
“I got your note,” Stalin told Andreyev. “Devil take me! I was in Sukhumi and we didn’t meet by chance. If I’d known about your intention to visit… I’d never have left Sochi… How did you spend your holidays? Did you hunt as much as you wanted?”8 Once they had arrived at their houses, the magnates advised which place was best: “Come to the Crimea in September,” Stalin wrote to Sergo from Sochi, adding that Borzhomi in Georgia was comfortable “because there are no mosquitoes… In August and half of September, I’ll be in Krasnaya Polyana [Sochi]. The GPU have found a very nice dacha in the mountains but my illness prevents me going yet… Klim [Voroshilov] is now in Sochi and we’re quite often together…”9
“In the south,” says Artyom, “the centre of planning went with him.” Stalin worked on the veranda in a wicker chair with a wicker table on which rested a huge pile of papers. Planes flew south daily bringing his letters. Poskrebyshev (often in a neighbouring cottage) scuttled in to deliver them. Stalin constantly demanded more journals to read. He used to read out letters and then tell the boys his reply. Once he got a letter from a worker complaining that there were no showers at his mine. Stalin wrote on the letter, “If there is no resolution soon and no water, the director of the mine should be tried as an Enemy of the People.” 10
Stalin was besieged with questions from Molotov or Kaganovich, left in charge in Moscow. “Shame we don’t have a connection with Sochi by telephone,”[35] wrote Voroshilov. “Telephone would help us. I’d like to visit you for 2–3 days and also have a sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep normally for a long time.” 11 But Stalin relished his dominance: “The number of Politburo inquiries doesn’t affect my health,” he told Molotov. “You can send as many inquiries as you like—I’ll be happy to answer them.” They all wrote Stalin long, handwritten letters knowing, as Bukharin put it, “Koba loves to receive letters.”12 Kaganovich, in charge in Moscow for the first time, took full advantage of this though the Politburo still took most of the decisions themselves, with Stalin intervening from afar if he disapproved.
32
These long holidays were formally proposed by his colleagues so the decrees in the archives often read: “At the proposal of Ordzhonikidze” or “To approve the proposition of Comrades Molotov, Kaganovich, Kalinin to grant Comrade Stalin twenty days holiday.”
33
Mukhalatka was the favourite resort of Molotov and Mikoyan, though both also holidayed in orbit around Stalin at Sochi. It remained a Soviet favourite: the resort is close to Foros where Gorbachev was arrested during the 1991 coup d’état. Naturally, being Bolsheviks, the leaders were always sacking the local officials at these resorts: “Belinsky was rude… not for the first time,” Stalin wrote to Yagoda and Molotov. “He should be removed at once from control of Mukhalatka. Appoint someone of the Yagoda type or approved by Yagoda.” If they did not find the holiday houses to their taste, they proposed new luxuries: “There’s no good hotel on the Black Sea for tourist and foreign specialists and working leaders,” wrote Kalinin to Voroshilov. “To hurry it up, we must give it to the GPU.”
34
In the mid-thirties, Miron Merzhanov, Stalin’s architect, rebuilt the house in stone. The big, dark green house is still there: there is now a museum with a dummy of Stalin at his desk, a Café Stalin, and a mini-Stalin theme park in the gardens.
35
But this has been a boon for historians: their main communication was by letter until 1935 when a safe telephone link was set up between Moscow and the south. Trotsky had paraphrased Herzen’s comment on Nicholas I, “Genghiz Khan with a telegraph,” to call Stalin “Genghiz Khan with a telephone.” Yet it is a sobering thought that for several months a year, he ruled with no telephone at all.