10. SPOILED VICTORY
Kirov, the Plot and the Seventeenth Congress
Vlasik threw himself onto Stalin on the deck of the Red Star, requesting permission to return fire. Firing shots landwards, the boat turned to the open sea. Stalin initially thought it had just been Georgians firing a greeting but he changed his mind. He received a letter from the border guards admitting they had fired, mistaking it for a foreign vessel. Beria investigated personally, displaying his ruthlessness to get results which impressed Stalin. Yet he aroused suspicions that he had contrived the attack to undermine Lakoba, who was responsible for security inside Abkhazia. The guards were despatched to Siberia. Vlasik and Beria became closer to Stalin.1
Back on dry land, the entourage progressed into Gagra, where the GPU had found a new dacha in the hills which Lakoba had started to rebuild. This became a favourite residence, Kholodnaya Rechka, Coldstream, a Stalinist eyrie built on a cliff with views of dazzling natural beauty.[63] Returning to Sochi, Svetlana stayed with Stalin but when she went back to school, he found himself “like a lonely owl” and craved Yenukidze’s company.2 “What keeps you in Moscow?” he wrote to Abel. “Come to Sochi, swim in the sea and let your heart rest. Tell Kalinin from me that he commits a crime if he doesn’t send you on holiday immediately… You could live with me at the dacha… I’ve visited the new dacha at Gagra today… Voroshilov and his wife are enchanted with it… Your Koba.”3
After this long holiday, the “lonely owl” returned to Moscow, on 4 November 1933, to plan the coming Congress of Victors which was to crown him for the triumphs of the last four years. Moscow felt as if it was waking up and stretching after a long nightmare. The famine was over. The harvest had improved. The starving millions were buried and forgotten in villages that had disappeared forever off the map.
There was much to celebrate as the delegates started to arrive for the Seventeenth Congress in late January. It must have been an exciting and proud time for the 1,966 voting delegates to be visiting Moscow from every corner of the sprawling workers’ paradise. The Congress was the highest Party organ, which theoretically elected the Central Committee to govern in its place until it met again, usually four years later. But by 1934, this was a pantomime of triumphalism, supervised by Stalin and Kaganovich, minutely choreographed by Poskrebyshev.
Nonetheless, a Congress was not all business: the Great Kremlin Palace was suddenly filled with outlandish costumes as bearded Cossacks, silk-clad Kazakhs and Georgians paraded into the great hall. Here the viceroys of Siberia, the Ukraine, or Transcaucasia renewed their contacts with allies in the centre while the younger delegates found patrons.[64] Lenin’s generation, who regarded Stalin as their leader but not their God, still dominated but the Vozhd took special care of his younger protégés.
He invited Beria, his blond wife Nina and their son to the Kremlin to watch a movie with the Politburo. Sergo Beria,[65] aged ten, and Svetlana Stalin, who would become friends, watched the cartoon Three Little Pigs with Stalin before they set off for Zubalovo where the Berias joined the magnates in feasting and singing Georgian songs. When Sergo Beria was cold, Stalin hugged him and let him snuggle into his coat lined with wolf fur before tucking him into bed. It must have been thrilling for Beria, the ambitious provincial entering the inner portals of power.
“STALIN!” gasped Pravda when he attended the Bolshoi. “The appearance of the ardently loved Vozhd, whose name is linked inseparably with all the victories scored by the proletariat, by the Soviet Union, was greeted with tumultuous ovations” and “no end of cries of ‘Hurrah!’ and ‘Long Live our Stalin!’”
However, some regional bosses had been shaken by Stalin’s brutal mismanagement. A cabal seems to have met secretly in friends’ apartments to discuss his removal. Each had their own reasons: in the Caucasus, Orakhelashvili was insulted by the promotion of the upstart Beria. Kosior’s cries for help in feeding the Ukraine had been scorned. Some of these meetings supposedly took place in Sergo’s flat in the Horse Guards where Orakhelashvili was staying. But who was to replace Stalin? Kirov, popular, vigorous and Russian, was their candidate. In the Bolshevik culture with its obsession with ideological purity, the former Kadet and bourgeois journalist with no ideological credentials, who owed his career to Stalin, was an unlikely candidate. Molotov, as loyal to Stalin as ever, sneered that Kirov was never a serious candidate.
When he was approached in Sergo’s apartment, Kirov had to consider fast what to do: he informed them that he had no interest in replacing Stalin but that he would be able to see that their complaints were heard. Kirov was still ill, recovering from flu, and his reaction shows that he lacked the stomach for this poisoned chalice. His immediate instinct was to tell Stalin, which he did, probably in his new apartment where he denounced the plot, repeated the complaints, and denied any interest in becoming leader himself.
“Thank you,” Stalin is supposed to have replied, “I won’t forget what I owe you.” Stalin was surely disturbed that these Old Bolsheviks considered “my Kirich” his successor. Mikoyan, Kirov’s friend, stated that Stalin reacted with “hostility and vengefulness towards the whole Congress and of course towards Kirov himself.” Kirov felt threatened but showed nothing publicly. Stalin concealed his anxiety.
In the Congress hall, Kirov ostentatiously sat, joking, with his delegation, not up on the Presidium, the sort of demagoguery that outraged Stalin, who kept asking what they were laughing about. His victory had been spoiled. Yet this constant struggling against traitors also suited his character and his ideology. No political leader was so programmed for this perpetual fight against enemies as Stalin, who regarded himself as history’s lone knight riding out, with weary resignation, on another noble mission, the Bolshevik version of the mysterious cowboy arriving in a corrupt frontier town.[66]
There was no hint of any of this in the public triumph: “Our country has become a country of mighty industry, a country of collectivization, a country of victorious socialism,” declared Molotov, opening the Congress on 26 January. Stalin enjoyed the satisfaction of watching his enemies, from Zinoviev to Rykov, old and new, praise him extravagantly: “The glorious field marshal of the proletarian forces, the best of the best—Comrade Stalin,” declared Bukharin, now editor of Izvestiya. But when Postyshev, another Old Bolshevik hardman, newly promoted to run the Ukraine, called Kirov, Congress gave him a standing ovation. Kirov rose to the occasion, mentioning Stalin (“the great strategist of liberation of the working people of our country and the whole world”) twenty-nine times, ending excitedly: “Our successes are really tremendous. Damn it all… you just want to live and live—really, just look what’s going on. It’s a fact!” Stalin joined the “thunderous applause.”
The last duty of a Congress was to elect the Central Committee. Usually this was a formality. The delegates were given the ballot, a list of names prepared by the Secretariat (Stalin and Kaganovich) who were proposed from the floor: Kirov had to propose Beria. The voters crossed out names they opposed and voted for the names left unmarked. As the Congress ended on 8 February, the delegates received their ballots but when the vote-counting commission started work, they received a shock. These events are still mysterious, but it seems that Kirov received one or two negatives while Kaganovich and Molotov polled over 100 each. Stalin got between 123 and 292 negatives. They were automatically elected but here was another blow to Stalin’s self-esteem, confirming that he rode alone among “two-faced double-dealers.”
63
The Gagra house is one of the most beautiful of Stalin’s residences but also the least accessible. The children later got their own houses. A snake path of steps twists down to the sea. Yet it is invisible from the land. Like most of these houses, it is still under the control of the Abkhazian presidential security, hidden, eerie but perfectly preserved. Museri adjoins the same secret CC resort, Pitsunda, where Khrushchev had a house as First Secretary and where, in the eighties, Mikhail Gorbachev and Raisa his wife were criticized for building a multi-million-pound holiday house. All remain empty yet guarded in the steamy Abkhazian heat.
64
These provincials wanted to meet their heroes and a great amount of time was spent posing for the photographers in the hall where they gathered in eager groups, beaming, in their boots, tunics and caps, around Stalin, Kalinin, Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Budyonny. At the Fifteenth Congress in 1927, Stalin was just one of the leaders who posed with his fans. At the Seventeenth, Stalin is always at the centre. The album is mutilated by the huge number of figures either crossed out or cut out as they were arrested and executed during the following four years: out of 1,966 delegates, 1,108 would be arrested. Few survived.
65
Named, of course, after Beria’s former patron, Ordzhonikidze, a friendship that had disintegrated into mutual hatred.