Stalin trusted his devoted bodyguard, a brawny, hard-living but uncouth peasant, Nikolai Vlasik, thirty-seven, who had joined the Cheka in 1919 and guarded the Politburo, and then exclusively the Vozhd, since 1927. He became a powerful vizier at Stalin’s side but remained the closest thing to Vasily’s father figure: Vasily introduced his girlfriends to Vlasik for his approval.
When his behaviour at school became impossible, it was Pauker who wrote to Vlasik that his “removal to another school is absolutely necessary.” Vasily craved Stalin’s approvaclass="underline" “Hello father!” he wrote in a typical letter in which he talks in a childish version of Bolshevik jargon. “I’m studying at the new school, it’s very good and I think I’m going to become a good Red Vaska! Father, write to me how you are and how is your holiday. Svetlana is well and studies at school too. Greetings from our working collective. Red Vaska.”
But he also wrote letters to the secret policemen: “Hello Comrade Pauker. I’m fine. I don’t fight with Tom [Artyom]. I catch a lot [of fish] and very well. If you’re not busy, come and see us. Comrade Pauker, I ask you to send me a bottle of ink for my pen.” So Pauker, who was so close to Stalin that he shaved him, sent the ink to the child. When it arrived, Vasily thanked “Comrade Pauker,” claimed he had not reduced another boy to tears, and denounced Vlasik for accusing him of it. Already his life among schoolboys and secret policemen was leading the spoilt child to denounce others, a habit that could prove deadly for his victims in later life. The princely tone is unmistakable: “Comrade Efimov has informed you that I asked you to send me a shotgun but I have not received it. Maybe you forgot so please send it. Vasya.”
Stalin was baffled by Vasily’s insubordination and suggested greater discipline. On 12 September 1933, Carolina Til went on holiday, so Stalin, who was in the south, wrote the following instructions to Efimov at Zubalovo: “Nanny will stay at the Moscow home. Make sure that Vasya doesn’t behave outrageously. Don’t give him free playtime and be strict. If Vasya won’t obey Nanny and is offensive, keep him ‘in blinders,’” wrote Stalin, adding: “Take Vasya away from Anna Sergeevna [Redens, Nadya’s sister]—she spoils him by harmful and dangerous concessions.” While the father was on holiday, he sent his son a letter and some peaches. “Red Vaska” thanked him. Yet all was not well with Vasily. The pistol that had killed Nadya remained around Stalin’s house. Vasily showed it to Artyom and gave him the leather holster as a keepsake.6
It was only years later that Stalin understood how damaged the children had been by his absence and the care of bodyguards—what he called “the deepest secret in his heart”: “Children growing up without their mother can be raised perfectly by nannies but they can’t replace the mother…” 7
In January 1933, Stalin delivered a swaggering Bolshevik rodomontade to the Plenum: the Five-Year Plan had been a remarkable success. The Party had delivered a tractor industry, electric power, coal, steel and oil production. Cities had been built where none stood before. The Dnieper River dam and power station and the Turk-Sib railway had all been completed (built by Yagoda’s growing slave labour force). Any difficulties were the fault of the enemy opposition. Yet this was Hungry Thirty-Three when millions more starved, hundreds of thousands were deported.
In July 1933, Kirov joined Stalin, Voroshilov, OGPU Deputy Chairman Yagoda and Berman, boss of Gulag, the labour camp system, on the ship Anokhin to celebrate the opening of a gargantuan project of socialist labour: the Baltic–White Sea Canal or, in Bolshevik acronym, the Belomor,[59] a 227-kilometre canal begun in December 1931 and completed by the Pharaonic slavery of 170,000 prisoners, of whom around 25,000 died in a year and a half. Voroshilov later praised Kirov and Yagoda for their contributions to this crime.8
By the summer, the magnates were exhausted after five years of Herculean labour in driving the triumphant Five-Year Plan, defeating the opposition and most of all, crushing the peasantry. After bearing such strain, they needed to relax if they were not going to crack—but even if the crisis of Hungry Thirty-Three had been weathered due to the massive repression, this was no time to rest. Sergo, who as People’s Commissar for Heavy Industry directed the Five-Year Plan, suffered heart and circulatory complaints—Stalin himself supervised his treatments.9 Kirov was also breaking under the pressure, suffering from “irregular heartbeat… severe irritability and very poor sleep.” The doctors ordered him to rest.10 Kirov’s friend Kuibyshev, Gosplan boss, who had the impossible task of making the planning figures work, was drinking and chasing women: Stalin complained to Molotov, later muttering that he had become “a debauchee.” 11
On 17 August, Stalin and Voroshilov set off in their special train.[60] We know from an unpublished note that the Vozhd was already paranoid about his movements, fed up with his sister-in-law Anna Redens and keen for Klim to be more discreet: “Yesterday, around my sister-in-law (a chatter-box) and near the doctors (they gossip), I did not want to say my exact departure. Now I’m informing you that I’ve decided to go tomorrow… It’s not good to talk widely. We’re both tasty tidbits and we should not inform everyone by our openness. So if you agree, we go tomorrow at two. So I’ll order Yusis [Stalin’s Lithuanian bodyguard who shared duties with Vlasik] to immediately inform the chief of the railway station and order him to add one wagon, without information as to who it is for. Until tomorrow at two…” It was to be a most eventful holiday: there was even an assassination attempt.12
At Krasnaya Polyana, Sochi, Stalin found Lakoba, the Abkhazian chief, waiting on the veranda along with President Kalinin and Poskrebyshev. When Stalin and Lakoba strolled in the gardens, Beria, now effective viceroy of the Caucasus, joined them. Lakoba and Beria, already enemies, had come separately. After breakfast on the veranda, the Vozhd, followed by this swelling entourage, which was soon joined by Yan Rudzutak, a Latvian Old Bolshevik who headed the Control Commission but was increasingly distrusted by Stalin, toured his gardens.
“Stop being idle,” said the green-fingered Stalin. “The wild bushes here need to be weeded.” The grandees and the guards set to work, collecting wood and cutting brambles while Stalin, in his white tunic with baggy white trousers tucked into boots, supervised, puffing on his pipe. Taking a fork, he even did some weeding himself. Beria worked with a rake while one of the leaders from Moscow hacked with an axe. Beria seized the axe and, chopping away to impress Stalin, joked, with rather obvious double entendre: “I’m just demonstrating to the master of the garden, Joseph Vissarionovich, that I can chop down any tree.” No grandee was too big for Beria to fell. He would soon get the chance to wield his little axe.
Stalin sat down on his wicker chair and Beria perched behind him like a medieval courtier with the axe in his belt. Svetlana, who now called Beria “Uncle Lara,” was brought down to join them. When Stalin did some work on his papers, Lakoba listened to music on headphones while Beria called over to Svetlana, sat her on his knee and was photographed in a famous picture with his pince-nez glistening in the sun and his hands on the child, while the Master worked patiently in the background.
Voroshilov and Budyonny, who had also turned up, took Stalin, in the front seat of an open Packard, to inspect their horses bred by the army stud. They went on a cruise and then they went hunting, Stalin cheerfully carrying his rifle over his shoulder, with his hat on the back of his head, as his Chekist guard wiped the sweat off his forehead. After a day’s hunting, they pitched tents for an al fresco picnic and barbecue. Later, Stalin went fishing. The informality of the whole trip is obvious: it was one of the last times he lived like this.13
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Belomor cigarettes now became one of the most popular brands, smoked by Stalin himself when his favourite Herzogovina Flor were not to hand. The Belomor Canal was one of the triumphs that were celebrated by writers and film-makers; Gorky, the novelist who had become a shameful apologist for the worst excesses of Bolshevism, edited a book, The Canal Named for Stalin, that amazingly praised the humanitarian aspects of Belomor.
60
We are especially well informed on this holiday because not only do we have Stalin’s correspondence with Kaganovich, in charge in Moscow, but the GPU took photographs which they mounted in a special album for Stalin, and Lakoba, the host in Abkhazia, also kept notes: therefore we have both sound and vision.