The vain, abrasive, emotional magnates often argued viciously in Stalin’s absence: after a row with his friend Sergo, Kaganovich admitted to Stalin, “This upset me very much.” Stalin often enjoyed such conflicts: “Well, dear friends… more squabbling…” Nonetheless, sometimes even Stalin was exasperated: “I can’t and shouldn’t give decisions on every possible and imaginable question raised at Politburo. You should be able to study and produce a response… yourselves!” 13
There was time for fun too: Stalin took a great interest in the gardens at the house, planting lemon bowers and orange groves, proudly weeding and setting his entourage to toil in the sun. Stalin so appreciated the gardener in Sochi, one Alferov, that he wrote to Poskrebyshev: “it would be good to put [Alferov] in the Academy of Agriculture—he’s the gardener in Sochi, a very good and honest worker…”
His life in the south bore no resemblance to the cold solitude that one associates with Stalin. “Joseph Vissarionovich liked expeditions into nature,” wrote Voroshilova in her diary. “He drove by car and we settled near some small river, lit a fire and made a barbecue, singing songs and playing jokes.” The whole entourage went on these expeditions.
“We often all of us get together,” wrote one excited secretary to another. “We fire air rifles at targets, we often go on walks and expeditions in the cars, we climb into the forest, and have barbecues where we grill kebabs, booze away and then grub’s up!” Stalin and Yenukidze entertained the guests with stories of their adventures as pre-revolutionary conspirators while Demian Bedny told “obscene stories of which he had an inexhaustible reserve.” Stalin shot partridges and went boating.
“I remember the dacha in Sochi when Klim and I were invited over by Comrade Stalin,” wrote Voroshilova. “I watched him playing games such as skittles and Nadezhda Sergeevna was playing tennis.” Stalin and the cavalryman Budyonny played skittles with Vasily and Artyom. Budyonny was so strong that when he threw the skittle, he broke the entire set and the shield behind. Everyone laughed about his strength (and stupidity): “If you’re strong you don’t need a brain.” They teased him for hurting himself by doing a parachute jump. “He thought he was jumping off a horse!”
“Only two men were known as the first cavalrymen of the world—Napoleon’s Marshal Lannes and Semyon Budyonny,” Stalin defended him, “so we should listen to everything he says about cavalry!” Years later, Voroshilova could only write: “What a lovely time it was!” 14
That September 1931, Stalin and Nadya were visited by two Georgian potentates, one she loved, one she hated. The popular one was Nestor Lakoba, the Old Bolshevik leader of Abkhazia which he ruled like an independent fiefdom with unusual gentleness. He protected some of the local princes and resisted collectivization, claiming there were no Abkhazian kulaks. When the Georgian Party appealed to Moscow, Stalin and Sergo supported Lakoba. Slim and dapper, with twinkling eyes, black hair brushed back, and a hearing aid because he was partially deaf, this player strolled the streets and cafés of his little realm, like a troubadour. As the maitre d’ of the élite holiday resorts, he knew everyone and was always building Stalin new homes and arranging banquets for him—just as he is portrayed in Fasil Iskander’s Abkhazian novel, Sandro of Chegem. Stalin regarded him as a true ally: “Me Koba,” he joked, “you Lakoba!” Lakoba was another of the Bolshevik family, spending afternoons sitting out on the veranda with Stalin. When Lakoba visited the dacha, bringing his feasts and Abkhazian sing-songs, Stalin shouted: “Vivat Abkhazia!” Artyom says Lakoba’s arrival “was like light pouring into the house.”
Stalin allowed Lakoba to advise him on the Georgian Party, which was particularly clannish and resistant to orders from the centre. This was the reason for the other guest: Lavrenti (the Georgian version of Laurence) Pavlovich Beria, Transcaucasus GPU chief. Beria was balding, short and agile with a broad fleshy face, swollen sensual lips and flickering “snake eyes” behind a glistening pince-nez. This gifted, intelligent, ruthless and tirelessly competent adventurer, whom Stalin would one day describe as “our Himmler,” brandished the exotic flattery, sexual appetites and elaborate cruelty of a Byzantine courtier in his rise to dominate first the Caucasus, then Stalin’s circle, and finally the USSR itself.
Born near Sukhumi of Mingrelian parentage, probably the illegitimate son of an Abkhazian landowner and his pious Georgian mother, Beria had almost certainly served as a double agent for the anti-Communist Mussavist regime that ruled Baku during the Civil War. It was said that Stalin’s ally, Sergei Kirov, had saved him from the death penalty, a fate he had only escaped because there was no time to arrange the execution. Training as an architect at the Baku Polytechnic, he was attracted by the power of the Cheka, which he then joined and wherein he prospered, promoted by Sergo. Even by the standards of that ghastly organization, he stood out for his sadism. “Beria is a man for whom it costs nothing to kill his best friend if that best friend uttered something bad about Beria,” said one of his henchmen. His other career as a sexual adventurer had started, he later told his daughter-in-law, on an architectural study trip to Romania when he had been seduced by an older woman—but while in prison during the Civil War, he fell in love with his cellmate’s blonde, golden-eyed teenage niece, Nina Gegechkori, a member of a gentry family: one uncle became a minister in Georgia’s Menshevik government, another in the Bolshevik one. When he was twenty-two, already a senior Chekist, and she was seventeen, she petitioned Beria for her uncle’s release. Beria courted her and they finally eloped on his official train, hence the myth that he raped her in his carriage. On the contrary, she remained in love with her “charmer” throughout her long life.
Beria was now thirty-two, the personification of the 1918 generation of leaders, much better educated than his elders in the first generation, such as Stalin and Kalinin, both over fifty, or the second, Mikoyan and Kaganovich, in their late thirties. Like the latter, Beria was competitive at everything and an avid sportsman—playing left-back for Georgia’s football team, and practising ju-jitsu. Coldly competent, fawningly sycophantic yet gleaming with mischief, he had a genius for cultivating patrons. Sergo, then Caucasus boss, eased his rise in the GPU and, in 1926, introduced him to Stalin for the first time. Beria took over his holiday security.
“Without you,” Beria wrote to Sergo, “I’d have no one. You’re more than a brother or father to me.” Sergo steered Beria through meetings that declared him innocent of working for the enemy. In 1926, when Sergo was promoted to Moscow, Beria fell out with him and began to cultivate the most influential man in the region, Lakoba, importuning him to let him see Stalin again.
Stalin had been irritated by Beria’s oleaginous blandishments on holiday. When Beria arrived at the dacha, Stalin grumbled, “What, he came again?” and sent him away, adding, “Tell him, here Lakoba’s the master!” When Beria fell out with the Georgian bosses, who regarded him as an amoral mountebank, Lakoba backed him. Yet Beria aimed higher.