At home, Stalin alternated between absentee bully and hectored husband. Nadya had in the past snitched on dissenters at the Academy: in these last months, it is hard to tell if she was denouncing Enemies or riling Stalin who ordered their arrest. There is the story of this “peppery woman” shouting at him: “You’re a tormentor, that’s what you are! You torment your own son, your wife, the whole Russian people.” When Stalin discussed the importance of the Party above family, Yenukidze replied: “What about your children?” Stalin shouted, “They’re HERS!” pointing at Nadya, who ran out crying.
Nadya was becoming ever more hysterical, or as Molotov put it, “unbalanced.” Sergo’s daughter Eteri, who had every reason to hate Stalin, explains, “Stalin didn’t treat her well but she, like all the Alliluyevs, was very unstable.” She seemed to become estranged from the children and everything else. Stalin confided in Khrushchev that he sometimes locked himself in the bathroom, while she beat on the door, shouting: “You’re an impossible man. It’s impossible to live with you!”
This image of Stalin as the powerless henpecked husband besieged, cowering in his own bathroom by the wild-eyed Nadya, must rank as the most incongruous vision of the Man of Steel in his entire career. Himself frantic, with his mission in jeopardy, Stalin was baffled by Nadya’s mania. She told a friend that “everything bored her—she was sick of everything.”
“What about the children?” asked the friend.
“Everything, even the children.” This gives some idea of the difficulties Stalin faced. Nadya’s state of mind sounds more like a psychological illness than despair caused by political protest or even her oafish husband. “She had attacks of melancholy,” Zhenya told Stalin; she was “sick.” The doctors prescribed “caffeine” to pep her up. Stalin later blamed the caffeine and he was right: caffeine would have disastrously exacerbated her despair.5
Stalin became hysterical himself, feeling the vast Ukrainian steppes slipping out of his controclass="underline" “It seems that in some regions of Ukraine, Soviet power has ceased to exist,” Stalin scribbled to Kosior, Politburo member and Ukrainian boss. “Is this true? Is the situation so bad in Ukrainian villages? What’s the GPU doing? Maybe you’ll check this problem and take measures.”6 The magnates again roamed the heartland to raise grain, more ferocious semi-military expeditions with OGPU troops and Party officials wearing pistols—Molotov headed to the Urals, the Lower Volga and Siberia. While he was there, the wheels of his car became stuck in a muddy rut and the car rolled over into a ditch. No one was hurt but Molotov claimed, “An attempt was made on my life.”7
Stalin sensed the doubts of the local bosses, making him more aware than ever that he needed a new, tougher breed of lieutenant like Beria whom he promoted to rule the Caucasus. Summoning the Georgian bosses to Moscow, Stalin turned viciously against the Old Bolshevik “chieftains”: “I’ve got the impression that there’s no Party organization in Transcaucasia at all. There’s just the rule of chieftains—voting for whomsoever they drink wine with… It’s a total joke… We need to promote men who work honestly… Whenever we send anyone down there, they become chieftains too!” He was playing to the gallery. Everyone laughed, but then he turned serious: “We’ll smash all their bones if this rule of chieftains isn’t liquidated…”
Sergo was away.
“Where is he?” whispered one of the officials to Mikoyan who answered: “Why should Sergo participate in Beria’s coronation? He knows him well enough.”
There was open opposition to the promotion of Beria: the local chiefs had almost managed to have him removed to a provincial backwater but Stalin had saved him. Then Stalin defined the essence of Beria’s career: “He solves problems while the Buro just pushes paper!”[43]
“It’s not going to work, Comrade Stalin. We can’t work together,” replied one Georgian.
“I can’t work with that charlatan!” said another.
“We’ll settle this question the routine way,” Stalin angrily ended the meeting, appointing Beria Georgian First Secretary and Second Secretary of Transcaucasia over their heads. Beria had arrived. 8
In Ukraine, Fred Beal wandered through villages where no one was left alive and found heartbreaking messages scrawled beside the bodies: “God bless those who enter here, may they never suffer as we have,” wrote one. Another read: “My son. We couldn’t wait. God be with you.”
Kaganovich, patrolling the Ukraine, was unmoved. He was more outraged by the sissy leaders there: “Hello dear Valerian,” he wrote warmly to Kuibyshev, “We’re working a lot on the question of grain preparation… We had to criticize the regions a lot, especially Ukraine. Their mood, particularly that of Chubar, is very bad… I reprimanded the regions.” But in the midst of this wasteland of death, Kaganovich was not going to spoil anyone’s holidays: “How are you feeling? Where are you planning to go for vacation? Don’t think I’m going to call you back before finishing your holidays…”9
After a final meeting with Kaganovich and Sergo in his office on 29 May 1932, Stalin and Nadya left for Sochi. Lakoba and Beria visited them but the latter now had his access to Stalin. He ditched his patron, Lakoba, who muttered in Beria’s hearing, “What a vile person.” 10
We do not know how Stalin and Nadya got on during this holiday but, day by day, the pressure ratcheted up. Stalin governed a country on the edge of rebellion by correspondence, receiving the bad news in heaps of GPU reports—and the doubts of his friends.[44] While Kaganovich suppressed the rebellious textile workers of Ivanovo, Voroshilov was unhappy and sent Stalin a remarkable letter: “Across the Stavropol region, I saw all the fields uncultivated. We were expecting a good harvest but didn’t get it… Across the Ukraine from my train window, the truth is it looks even less cultivated than the North Caucasus…” Voroshilov finished his note: “Sorry to tell you such things during your holiday but I can’t be silent.”11
Stalin later told Churchill this was the most difficult time of his life, harder even than Hitler’s invasion: “it was a terrible struggle” in which he had to destroy “ten million [kulaks]. It was fearful. Four years it lasted. It was absolutely necessary… It was no use arguing with them. A certain number of them had been resettled in the northern parts of the country… Others had been slaughtered by the peasants themselves—such had been the hatred for them.”12
The peasants understandably attacked Communist officials. Sitting on the terrace of the Sochi dacha in the baking heat, an angry, defensive Stalin seethed about the breakdown of discipline and betrayal in the Party. At times like this, he seemed to retreat into a closed melodramatic fortress surrounded by enemies. On 14 July, he put pen to paper ordering Molotov and Kaganovich in Moscow to create a draconian law to shoot hungry peasants who stole even husks of grain. They drew up the notorious decree against “misappropriation of socialist property” with grievous punishments “based on the text of your letter.”[45] On 7 August, this became law. Stalin was now in a state of nervous panic, writing to Kaganovich: “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine.” Stalin blamed the weakness and naïvety of his brother-in-law, Redens, Ukrainian GPU chief, and the local boss Kosior. The place “was riddled with Polish agents,” who “are many times stronger than Redens or Kosior think.” He had Redens replaced with someone tougher.
43
Margaret Thatcher used a similar expression about her favourite minister, Lord Young: “He brings me solutions: others bring me problems.” Every leader prizes such lieutenants.
44
Stalin felt the “circle of friends,” tempered by the fight with the oppositions, was falling apart under the pressure of crisis and rows between Sergo and Molotov, as he confided in Kaganovich: Comrade Kuibyshev, already an alcoholic, “creates a bad impression. It seems he flees from work… Still worse is the conduct of Comrade Ordzhonikidze. The latter evidently does not take into account that his conduct (with sharpness against Comrades Molotov and Kuibyshev) leads to the undermining of our leading group.” Furthermore, Stalin was dissatisfied with Kosior and Rudzutak among others in the Politburo.
45
Just as the grain fuelled the industrial engine, so did the peasants themselves. The same week, Stalin and Sergo, on holiday in Sochi, ordered Kaganovich and Molotov to transfer another 20,000 slave labourers, probably kulaks, to work on their new industrial city, Magnitogorsk. The repression was perhaps used deliberately to provide slave labour.