Most public men share the Caesarian habit of detaching themselves to admire their own figures on the world stage, but Stalin’s detachment was a degree greater. His adopted son Artyom Sergeev remembers Stalin shouting at his son Vasily for exploiting his father’s name. “But I’m a Stalin too,” said Vasily.
“No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin IS Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”
He was a self-creation. A man who invents his name, birthday, nationality, education and his entire past, in order to change history and play the role of leader, is likely to end up in a mental institution, unless he embraces, by will, luck and skill, the movement and the moment that can overturn the natural order of things. Stalin was such a man. The movement was the Bolshevik Party; his moment, the decay of the Russian monarchy. After Stalin’s death, it was fashionable to regard him as an aberration but this was to rewrite history as crudely as Stalin did himself. Stalin’s success was not an accident. No one alive was more suited to the conspiratorial intrigues, theoretical runes, murderous dogmatism and inhuman sternness of Lenin’s Party. It is hard to find a better synthesis between a man and a movement than the ideal marriage between Stalin and Bolshevism: he was a mirror of its virtues and faults.3
Nadya was excited because she was dressing up. Only the day before at the Revolution Day parade, her headaches had been agonizing but today she was cheerful. Just as the real Stalin was different from his historical persona, so was the real Nadezhda Alliluyeva. “She was very beautiful but you can’t see it in photographs,” recalls Artyom Sergeev. She was not conventionally pretty. When she smiled, her eyes radiated honesty and sincerity but she was also po-faced, aloof and troubled by mental and physical illnesses. Her coldness was periodically shattered by attacks of hysteria and depression. She was chronically jealous. Unlike Stalin, who had a hangman’s wit, no one recalls Nadya’s sense of humour. She was a Bolshevik, quite capable of acting as Stalin’s snitch, denouncing enemies to him. So was this the marriage of an ogre and a lamb, a metaphor for Stalin’s treatment of Russia itself ? Only insomuch as it was a Bolshevik marriage in every sense, typical of the peculiar culture that spawned it. Yet in another way, this is simply the commonplace tragedy of a callous workaholic who could not have been a worse partner for his self-centred and unbalanced wife.
Stalin’s life appeared to be a perfect fusion of Bolshevik politics and family. Despite the brutal war on the peasants and the increasing pressure on the leaders, this time was a happy idyll, a life of country weekends at peaceful dachas, cheerful dinners in the Kremlin, and languid warm holidays on the Black Sea that Stalin’s children would remember as the happiest of their lives.
Stalin’s letters reveal a difficult but loving marriage: “Hello, Tatka… I miss you so much Tatochka—I’m as lonely as a horned owl,” Stalin wrote to Nadya, using his affectionate nickname for her, on 21 June 1930. “I’m not going out of town on business. I’m just finishing up my work and then I’m going out of town to the children tomorrow… So goodbye, don’t be too long, come home sooner! My kisses! Your Joseph.” 4
Nadya was away taking treatment for her headaches in Carlsbad, Germany. Stalin missed her and was keeping an eye on the children, like any other husband. On another occasion, she finished her letter: “I ask you so much to look after yourself! I am kissing you passionately just as you kissed me when we were saying goodbye! Your Nadya.”5
It was never an easy relationship. They were both passionate and thin-skinned: their rows were always dramatic. In 1926, she took the children to Leningrad, saying she was leaving him. But he begged her to return and she did. One feels these sorts of rows were frequent but there were intervals of a kind of happiness, though cosiness was too much to hope for in such a Bolshevik household. Stalin was often aggressive and insulting but it was probably his detachment that made him hardest to live with. Nadya was proud and severe but always ailing. If his comrades like Molotov and Kaganovich thought her on the verge of “madness,” her own family admitted that she was “sometimes crazed and oversensitive, all the Alliluyevs had unstable Gypsy blood.” The couple were similarly impossible. Both were selfish, cold with fiery tempers, though she had none of his cruelty and duplicity. Perhaps they were too similar to be happy. All the witnesses agree that life with Stalin was “not easy—it was a hard life.” It was “not a perfect marriage,” Polina Molotova told the Stalins’ daughter Svetlana, “but then what marriage is?”6
After 1929, they were often apart since Stalin holidayed in the south during the autumn when Nadya was still studying. Yet the happy times were warm and loving: their letters fly back and forth with secret-police couriers and the notes follow each other in such quick succession that they resemble e-mails. Even among these ascetic Bolsheviks, there were hints of sex: the “very passionate kisses” she recalled in her letter quoted above. They loved each other’s company: as we have seen, he missed her bitterly when she was away and she missed him too. “It’s very boring without you,” she wrote. “Come up here and it’ll be nice together.” 7
They shared Vasily and Svetlana. “Write anything about the children,” wrote Stalin from the Black Sea. When she was away, he reported: “The children are good. I don’t like the teacher, she’s running round the place and she lets Vasya and Tolika [their adopted son, Artyom] rush around morning till night. I’m sure Vaska’s studies will fail and I want them to succeed in German.” She often enclosed Svetlana’s childish notes.8 They shared their health worries like any couple. When Stalin was taking the cure at the Matsesta Baths near Sochi, he reported to her: “I’ve had two baths and I will have ten… I think we’ll be seriously better.”
“How’s your health?” she inquired.
“Had an echo on my lungs and a cough,” he replied. His teeth were a perennial problem: “Your teeth—please have them treated,” she told him. When she took a cure in Carlsbad, he asked caringly: “Did you visit the doctors—write their opinions!” He missed her but if the treatment took longer, he understood.9
Stalin did not like changing his clothes and wore summer suits into winter so she always worried about him: “I send you a greatcoat because after the south, you might get a cold.”10 He sent her presents too: “I’m sending you some lemons,” he wrote proudly. “You’ll like them.” This keen gardener was to enjoy growing lemons until his death.11
They gossiped about the friends and comrades they saw: “I heard Gorky [the famous novelist] came to Sochi,” she wrote. “Maybe he’s visiting you—what a pity without me. He’s so charming to listen to…”12 And of course, as a Bolshevik handmaiden living in that minuscule wider family of magnates and their wives, she was almost as obsessed about politics as he was, passing on what Molotov or Voroshilov told her.13 She sent him books and he thanked her but grumbled when one was missing. She teased him about his appearances in White émigré literature.