At 4 p.m. on 12 November, the day after the funeral, Stalin arrived at his office to meet Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Molotov and Sergo. Alongside them was Stalin’s closest friend, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, First Secretary of Leningrad and Politburo member. “After Nadya’s tragic death,” Maria Svanidze noticed that “Kirov was the closest person who managed to approach Joseph intimately and simply, to give him that missing warmth and cosiness.” Stalin turned to Kirov who, he said, “cared for me like a child.”7
Always singing operatic arias loudly, brimming with good cheer and boyish enthusiasm, Kirov was one of those uncomplicated men who win friends easily. Small, handsome with deep-set brown, slightly Tartar eyes, pock-marked, brown-haired and high-cheekboned, women and men seemed to like him equally. Married without children, he was said to be a womanizer with a special eye on the ballerinas of the Mariinsky Ballet which he controlled in Leningrad.[54] Certainly he followed ballet and opera closely, listening to it in his own apartment by a special link. A workaholic like his comrades, Kirov liked the outdoors, camping and hunting, with his boon companion Sergo. Like Andreyev, Kirov was an avid mountaineer, an appropriate hobby for a Bolshevik. He was at ease in his own skin. It was perhaps this that made him so attractive to Stalin whose friendships resembled crushes—and, like crushes, they could turn swiftly into bitter envy. Now he wanted to be with Kirov all the time: Kirov was in and out of his office five times during the days after Nadya’s funeral.
Born Sergei Kostrikov in 1886, the son of a feckless clerk who left him an orphan, in Urzhum, five hundred miles north-east of Moscow, Kirov was sent by charity to the Kazan Industrial School where he excelled. But the 1905 Revolution interfered with his plans for university, and he joined the Social Democrat Party, becoming a professional revolutionary. In between exiles, he married the daughter of a Jewish watchmaker but like all good Bolsheviks, his personal life “was subordinated to the revolutionary cause,” according to his wife. During the doldrums before the war, Kirov had worked as a journalist in the bourgeois press, which was strictly banned by the Party, and this was a black mark on his Bolshevik pedigree. Nineteen seventeen found him setting up power in the Terek in the North Caucasus. During the Civil War, Kirov was one of the swashbuckling commissars in the North Caucasus beside Sergo and Mikoyan. In Astrakhan he enforced Bolshevik power in March 1919 with liberal blood-letting: over four thousand were killed. When a bourgeois was caught hiding his own furniture, Kirov ordered him shot. He and Sergo, whose lives and deaths were parallel, engineered the seizure of Georgia in 1921, remaining in Baku afterwards, both brutal Bolsheviks of the Civil War generation.
He had probably met Stalin in 1917 but got to know his patron on holiday in 1925: “Dear Koba, I’m in Kislovodsk… I’m getting better. In a week, I’ll come to you… Greetings to everyone. Say hello to Nadya,” he wrote. Kirov was a family favourite. Stalin inscribed a copy of his book On Lenin and Leninism: “To SM Kirov, my friend and beloved brother.” In 1926, Stalin removed Zinoviev from his Leningrad power base and promoted Kirov to take over Peter the Great’s capital, now the second largest Party in the State. He joined the Politburo in 1930.8
When Kirov asked if he could fly south to join him for the 1931 holidays, Stalin replied: “I have no right and would not advise anyone to authorize flights. I most humbly request you to come by train.” Artyom, often on these holidays, recalls, “Stalin was so fond of Kirov, he’d personally meet Kirov’s train in Sochi.” Stalin always had “a lovely time with Kirov,” even swimming and visiting the banya. Sometimes when Kirov swam, “Stalin went to the beach and sat waiting for Kirov,” says Artyom.
After Nadya’s death, Stalin’s friendship with “my Kirich” became more insistent. Stalin often called him in Leningrad at any time of the night: the vertushka phone can still be seen by Kirov’s bed in his apartment. When he came to Moscow, Kirov preferred to stay with Sergo, who was so fond of his boon companion that his widow remembered how he once faked a car crash to ensure that Kirov missed his train.[55] Yet Stalin and Kirov were “like a pair of equal brothers, teasing one another, telling dirty stories, laughing,” says Artyom. “Big friends, brothers and they needed one another.”9
This did not mean that Stalin completely trusted Kirov. In the autumn of 1929, Stalin orchestrated Pravda’s criticism of Kirov.10 However fond he was of Kirov, Stalin could also be cross with him. In June 1928, one of his articles seemed to have been edited when it appeared in Leningradskaya Pravda, provoking a letter that revealed Stalin’s thin-skinned paranoia on even small matters: “I understand… the technical reasons… Yet I’ve heard no other such examples of articles by Politburo members… It seems strange that the 40–50 words cut are the brightest about how the peasantry are a capitalist class… I await your explanation.” 11
Kirov did not regard Stalin as a saint: during the 1929 birthday celebrations that raised Stalin to Vozhd, the Leningraders dared to mention Lenin’s views on Stalin’s rudeness.12 Kirov knew Stalin’s unusual mentality welclass="underline" when a student sent him some questions on ideology, he forwarded them to Kirov with this note: “Kirov! You must read the letter of student Fedotov… an absolutely politically illiterate young man. Maybe you will telephone him and talk to him, probably he is a corrupted drunken “Party member.” We must not introduce the GPU I think. By the way, the student is a very good trickster with an anti-Soviet face which he conceals artistically beneath a simple face that says ‘Help me understand. Maybe you understand all—I don’t.’ Greetings! Stalin.” 13 No doubt Kirov’s intimacy with Sergo, Kuibyshev and Mikoyan worried Stalin. The challenges of 1932—the Riutin Platform, Kirov’s possible resistance to Riutin’s execution, the famine, the suicide of Nadezhda—had shown Stalin needed firmer loyalty.
After Nadya’s death, Kirov was almost part of the family: Stalin insisted he stay with him, not Sergo. Kirov stayed at Stalin’s apartment so often he knew where the sheets and pillows were and he would bed down on the sofa. The children loved Kirov and sometimes when he was there, Svetlana would put on a doll show for him. Her favourite game was her own mock government. Her father was “First Secretary.” This Stalinette wrote orders like: “To my First Secretary, I order you to allow me to go with you to the theatre.” She signed it “The Mistress [or Boss—khozyaika] Setanka.” She hung the notes in the dining room above the telephone table. Stalin replied: “I obey.” Kaganovich, Molotov and Sergo were Setanka’s Second Secretaries, but “she has a special friendship with Kirov,” noticed Maria Svanidze, “because Joseph is so good and close with him.”14
Stalin returned to the ascetic Bedouin life of the underground Bolshevik, with the tension and variety of the revolutionary on the run, except that now his restless progress more resembled the train of a Mongol Khan. Though a creature of routine, he needed perpetual movement: there were beds in his houses but there were also big, hard divans in every room. “I never sleep on a bed,” he told a visitor. “Always a divan,” and on whichever one he happened to be reading. “Which historical person had the same Spartan habit?” he asked, answering with that autodidactic omniscience: “Nicholas I.” Nadya’s death naturally changed the way Stalin and his children lived.15