“Dear Comrade Nestor,” Beria wrote to Lakoba, “I want very much to see Comrade Koba before his departure… if you would remind him of it.”
So now Lakoba brought Beria to the Vozhd. Stalin had become infuriated by the insubordinate clans of Georgian bosses, who promoted their old friends, gossiped with their patrons in Moscow, and knew too much about his inglorious early antics. Lakoba proposed to replace these Old Bolshevik fat cats with Beria, one of the new generation devoted to Stalin. Nadya hated Beria on sight.
“How can you have that man in the house?”
“He’s a good worker,” replied Stalin. “Give me facts.”
“What facts do you need?” Nadya shrieked back. “He’s a scoundrel. I won’t have him in the house.” Stalin later remembered that he sent her to the Deviclass="underline" “He’s my friend, a good Chekist… I trust him…” Kirov and Sergo warned Stalin against Beria but he ignored their advice, something he later regretted. Now he welcomed his new protégé. Nonetheless, “when he came into the house,” recalls Artyom, “he brought darkness with him.” Stalin, according to Lakoba’s notes, agreed to promote the Chekist but asked: “Will Beria be okay?”
“Beria’ll be fine,” replied Lakoba who would soon have reason to regret his reassurance.15
After Sochi, Stalin and Nadya took the waters at Tsaltubo. Stalin wrote to Sergo from Tsaltubo to tell him about his new plan for their joint protégé. He joked that he had seen the regional bosses, calling one “a very comical figure” and another “now too fat.” He concluded, “They agreed to bring Beria into the Kraikom [regional committee] of Georgia.” Sergo and the Georgian bosses were appalled at a policeman lording it over old revolutionaries. Yet Stalin happily signed off to Sergo, “Greetings from Nadya! How’s Zina?”16
Taking the waters was an annual pilgrimage. In 1923, Mikoyan found Stalin suffering from rheumatism with his arm bandaged and suggested that he take the waters in the Matsesta Baths near Sochi. Mikoyan even chose the merchant’s house with three bedrooms and a salon in which Stalin stayed. It was a mark of the close relationship between the two men. 17 Stalin often took Artyom with him “in an old open Rolls-Royce made in 1911.” Only his personal bodyguard Vlasik accompanied them.[36]
Stalin seems to have been shy physically, either because of his arm or his psoriasis: among the leaders, only Kirov went to the baths with him. But he did not mind Artyom. As they soaked in the steam, Stalin told Artyom “stories about his childhood and adventures in the Caucasus, and discussed our health.”
Stalin was obsessed with his own health and that of his comrades. They were “responsible workers” for the people, so the preservation of their health was a matter of State. This was already a Soviet tradition: Lenin supervised his leaders’ health. By the early thirties, Stalin’s Politburo worked so hard and under such pressure that it was not surprising that their health, already undermined by Tsarist exile and Civil War, was seriously compromised. Their letters read like the minutes of a hypochondriacs’ convention.[37]
“Now I’m getting healthy,” Stalin confided in Molotov. “The waters here near Sochi are very good and work against sclerosis, neurosis, sciatica, gout and rheumatism. Shouldn’t you send your wife here?” 18 Stalin suffered the tolls of the poor diet and icy winters of his exiles: his tonsillitis flared up when he was stressed. He so liked the Matsesta specialist, Professor Valedinsky, that he often invited him to drink cognac on the veranda with his children, the novelist Maxim Gorky, and the Politburo. Later he moved Valedinsky to Moscow and the professor remained his personal physician until the war.
His dental problems might themselves have caused his aches. After his dentist Shapiro had worked heroically, at Nadya’s insistence, on eight of his rotten and yellowed teeth, Stalin was gratefuclass="underline" “Do you wish to ask me anything?” The dentist asked a favour. “The dentist Shapiro who works a lot on our responsible workers asks me (now he’s working on me) to place his daughter in the medical department of Moscow University,” Stalin wrote to Poskrebyshev. “I think we must render such help to this man for the service he does daily for our comrades. So could you do this and fix it… very quickly… because we risk running out of time… I’m awaiting your answer.” If he could not get the daughter into Moscow, then Poskrebyshev must try Leningrad.19
Stalin liked to share his health with his friends: “At Sochi, I arrived with pleurisy (dry),” he told Sergo. “Now I feel well. I have taken a course of ten therapeutic baths. I’ve had no more complications with rheumatism.”20 They told theirs too.21
“How’s your nephritic stone?” Stalin asked Sergo, who was holidaying with Kaganovich. The letters formed a hypochondriacal triangle.
“Kaganovich and I couldn’t come, we’re sitting on a big steamboat,” replied Sergo, telling “Soso,” “Kaganovich’s a bit ill. The cause isn’t clear yet. Maybe his heart is so-so… Doctors say the water and special baths will help him but he needs a month here… I feel good but not yet rested…”
Kaganovich sent a note too, from the Borzhomi Baths: “Dear Comrade Stalin, I send you a steamy hello… It’s a pity the storm means you can’t visit us.”22 Sergo also told Stalin about Kaganovich’s health: “Kaganovich has swollen legs. The cause isn’t yet established but it’s possible his heart is beating too faintly. His holiday ends on 30th August but it’ll be necessary to prolong it…”23 Even those in Moscow sent medical reports to Stalin on holiday: “Rudzutak’s ill and Sergo has microbes of TB and we’re sending him to Germany,” Molotov reported to his leader. “If we got more sleep, we’d make less mistakes.” 24
Term was starting so Nadya headed back to Moscow. Stalin returned to Sochi whence he sent her affectionate notes: “We played bowling and skittles. Molotov has already visited us twice but as for his wife, she’s gone off somewhere.” Sergo and Kalinin arrived but “there’s nothing new. Let Vasya and Svetlana write to me.”
Unlike the year before, Stalin and Nadya had got on well during the holidays, to judge by their letters. Despite Beria, her tone was confident and cheerful. Nadya wanted to report to her husband on the situation in Moscow. Far from being anti-Party, she remained as eager as ever to pass her exams and become a qualified manager: she worked hard on her textile designs with Dora Khazan.
“Moscow’s better,” she wrote, “but like a woman powdering to cover her blemishes, especially when it runs and runs in streaks.” Kaganovich’s remodelling of Moscow was already shaking the city, such was his explosive energy. The destruction of the Christ the Saviour, the ugly nineteenth-century cathedral, to make way for a much more hideous Palace of the Soviets, was progressing slowly. Nadya began to report “details” that she thought Stalin needed to know but she saw them from a very feminine aesthetic: “The Kremlin’s clean but its garage-yard’s very ugly… Prices in the shops are very high and stocks very high. Don’t be angry that I’m so detailed but I’d like the people to be relieved of all these problems and it would be good for all workers…” Then she turned back to Stalin himself: “Please rest well…” Yet the tensions in government could not be concealed from Nadya: indeed she was living at the heart of them, in the tiny world of the Kremlin where the other leaders visited her every day: “Sergo called me—he was disappointed by your blaming letter. He looked very tired.”25
36
The driver down south was named Nikolai Ivanovich Soloviev who was supposed to have been Nicholas II’s driver. In fact Soloviev had been General Brusilov’s chauffeur but had once, during the First World War, driven the Tsar.
37
Beria was not the only future monster with whom Stalin concerned himself on this holiday. He also showed a special interest in Nikolai Yezhov, a young official who would be the secret police chief during the coming Terror: “They say that if Yezhov extends his holidays for a month or two, it’s not so bad. Let’s prolong his holiday… I’m voting ‘for.’” Yezhov was clearly a man to watch.