“Hail Mistress Svetlana!” replied Kaganovich. “We await her impatiently.” When she was back in Moscow, she visited Kaganovich who reported to her father: “Today our Mistress Svetlana inspected our work…” Indeed, Stalin encouraged her interest in politics: “Your little Secretaries received your letter and we discussed its contents to our great satisfaction. Your letter enabled us to find our way in complicated international and domestic political questions. Write to us often.” Soon she was commanding Stalin in her “Daily Order No. 3. I order you to show me what happens in the Central Committee! Strictly confidential. Stalina, the Mistress of the house.”12
Then Stalin heard from Beria that his mother Keke was getting frailer. On 17 October, he headed across to Tiflis to visit her for only the third time since the Revolution.
Beria had taken over the responsibility for caring for the old lady like a courtier looking after a dowager empress. She had lived for years in comfortable rooms in the servant’s quarters of the palace of the nineteenth-century Tsarist governor, Prince Michael Vorontsov, where she was accompanied by two old ladies. All of them wore the traditional black headdress and long dress of Georgian widows. Beria and his wife Nina called on Keke frequently, recalling her spicy taste for sexual gossip:
“Why don’t you take a lover?” she asked Nina. Stalin was a negligent son but still wrote his dutiful notes: “Dear Mother, please live for 10,000 years. Kisses, Soso.” He apologized, “I know you’re disappointed in me but what can I do? I’m busy and can’t write often.”
Mother sent sweets; Soso, money; but, as the son who had replaced her husband as the man of the family, he always played the hero, revealing his dreams of destiny and courage: “Hello my mama, the children thank you for the sweets. I’m healthy, don’t worry about me… I’ll stand up for my destiny! You need more money? I sent you 500 roubles and photos of me and the children. PS the children bow to you. After Nadya’s death, my private life is very hard but a strong man must always be valiant.” 13
Stalin took special trouble to protect the Egnatashvili brothers, the children of the innkeeper who was the benefactor of his mother. Alexander Egnatashvili, a Chekist officer in Moscow (supposedly Stalin’s food taster, nicknamed “the Rabbit”), kept this old link alive: “My dear spiritual mother,” Egnatashvili wrote in April 1934, “yesterday I visited Soso and we talked a long time… he’s put on weight… In the last four years, I had not seen him so healthy… He was joking a lot. Who says he’s older? No one thinks he’s more than 47!” But she was ailing.
“I know you’re ill,” Stalin wrote to her. “Be strong. I’m sending you my children…” Vasily and Svetlana stayed at Beria’s residences and then visited the old lady in her “tiny room,” filled with portraits of her son. Svetlana remembered how Nina Beria chatted to her in Georgian but the old lady could not speak Russian.
Now Stalin recruited his old brother-in-law Alyosha Svanidze and Lakoba to visit his mother with him while Beria briskly made the arrangements. He did not stay long. If he had looked around the rooms, he would have noticed that not only did she have photographs of Stalin but she also had a portrait of Beria in her bedroom. Beria had his own cult of personality in Georgia but more than that, he must have become like a son to her.
Stalin’s real feelings for his mother were complicated by her taste for beating him and alleged affairs with her employers. There is a clue to this possible saint-whore complex in his library where he underlined a passage in Tolstoy’s Resurrection about how a mother is both kind and wicked. But she also had the tendency of making tactless, if drily witty, comments. She wondered why Stalin fell out with Trotsky: they should have ruled together. Now when Stalin sat smiling beside her, he revealingly asked her: “Why did you beat me so hard?”
“That’s why you turned out so well,” she replied, before asking: “Joseph, what exactly are you now?”
“Well, remember the Tsar? I’m something like a Tsar.”
“You’d have done better to become a priest,” she said, a comment that delighted Stalin.
The newspapers reported the visit with the queasy sentimentality of a Bolshevik version of Hello! magazine: “Seventy-five-year-old Keke is kind and lively,” gushed Pravda. “She seems to light up when she talks about the unforgettable moments of their meeting. ‘The whole world rejoices when it looks upon my son and our country. What would you expect me, his mother, to feel?’”
Stalin was irritated by this outbreak of Stalinist Hello!-ism. When Poskrebyshev sent him the article, Stalin wrote back: “It’s nothing to do with me.” But then he penned another Blimpish note to Molotov and Kaganovich: “I demand we ban petit bourgeois tidbits that have infiltrated our press… to insert the interview with my mother and all this other balderdash. I ask to be freed of the incessant publicity din of these bastards!” But he was glad his mother was healthy, telling her, “Our clan is evidently very strong” and sending some presents: a headdress, a jacket and some medicine.14
Back in Moscow,[88] Stalin decided to reopen and expand the Kirov Case that had subsided with the shooting of Nikolaev and sentencing of Zinoviev and Kamenev in early 1935. Now the two Old Bolsheviks were reinterrogated and the net of arrests was spread wider. Then a former associate of Trotsky’s named Valentin Olberg was arrested by the NKVD in Gorky. His interrogation “established” that Trotsky was also involved in the murder of Kirov. More arrests followed.15
16. TAKE YOUR PARTNERS; MOUNT YOUR PRISONERS
The Show Trial
Oblivious of these lengthening shadows, Stalin’s birthday party, attended by the magnates, Beria and the family, was “noisy and cheerful.” Voroshilov was resplendent in his new white Marshal’s uniform while his dowdy wife stared jealously at Maria Svanidze’s dress from Berlin. After dinner, there were songs and dancing like old times: with Zhdanov on harmonies, they sang Abkhazian, Ukrainian, student and comic songs. Stalin decided to order a piano so Zhdanov could play. Amid general hilarity, Postyshev, one of the Ukrainian bosses, slow-danced with Molotov—and “this couple very much amused Joseph and all the guests.” Here was the first example of the notorious stag slow dancing that was to become more forced after the war.
Stalin took over the gramophone and even did some Russian dancing. Mikoyan performed his leaping lezginka. The Svanidzes did the foxtrot and asked Stalin to join them but he said he had given up dancing since Nadya’s death. They danced until four.1
In the spring of 1936, the arrests of old Trotskyites spread further and those already in camps were resentenced. Those convicted of “terror” offences were to be shot. But the real work was the creation of a new sort of political show: the first of Stalin’s great trials. Yezhov was the supervisor of this case—this hopeful theoretician was even writing a book about the Zinovievites, corrected personally by Stalin.2 Yagoda, Commissar-General of State Security, who was sceptical about this “nonsense,” remained in charge but Yezhov constantly undermined him. This process exhausted frail Yezhov. Soon he was once again so debilitated that Kaganovich suggested, and Stalin approved, that he be sent on another special holiday for two months with a further 3,000 roubles.3
The chief defendants were to be Zinoviev and Kamenev. Their old friends were arrested to help persuade them to perform. Stalin followed every detail of the interrogations. The NKVD interrogators were to devote themselves body and soul to achieving the confessions. Stalin’s instructions to the NKVD were suggestive of this terrible process: “Mount your prisoner and do not dismount until they have confessed.”
88
In case we have forgotten that this was a state based on repression, Zhdanov and Mikoyan were inspecting the NKVD’s slave labour projects in the Arctic such as the Belomor Canaclass="underline" “the Chekists here have done a great job,” Zhdanov wrote enthusiastically to Stalin. “They allow ex-kulaks and criminal elements to work for socialism and they may become real people…”