That night, he teased Martha, who was very pretty but with a tendency to blush like a beetroot.
“So Marfochka, I hear you are being chased by all the boys?” Martha was so embarrassed she could not swallow her soup or answer. “So many boys are chasing you!” Stalin persisted. Svetlana came to her rescue: “Come on, Papa, leave her alone.” Stalin laughed and agreed, saying he always obeyed his darling khozyaika.
Dinner, recalled Martha, “was miserable for me,” but she was not afraid of Stalin because she had known him since childhood. Yet nothing was quite what it seemed for these children: so many of Svetlana’s parents’ friends had disappeared. Martha had just seen[125] her mother’s new lover arrested.1
For the children of the leaders who were not arrested, there had never been a time of greater joy and energy. The jazz craze was still sweeping the country: Alexandrov’s latest musical, Volga, Volga, came out in 1938 and its tunes were played over and over again in the dance halls. At parties for the diplomatic corps, the killers danced to the new sounds: Kaganovich hailed jazz as “above all the friend of the jolly, the musical organizer of our high-spirited youth.” Kaganovich wrote a jazz guide leaflet with his friend Leonid Utesov, the jazz millionaire, entitled How to Organize Railway Ensembles of Song and Dance and Jazz Orchestras in which “The Locomotive” commanded that there should be a “dzhaz” band at every Soviet station. They certainly needed cheering up.
“It was truly a time of huge hope and joy for the future,” remembers Stepan Mikoyan. “We were perpetually excited and happy—the new Metro opened with its chandeliers, the giant Moskva Hotel, the new city of Magnitogorsk, and all sorts of other triumphs.” The propaganda machine sung of heroes of labour like the super-miner Stakhanov, of aviation, of exploration. Voroshilov and Yezhov were hailed as “knights” in ballads. The movies had names like Tales of Aviation Heroes. “Yes, it was an age of heroes!” reminisces Andreyev’s daughter Natasha. “We were not afraid then. Life was full—I remember smiling faces and climbing mountains, heroic pilots. Not everyone was living under oppression. We knew as children the first thing to be done was to make people strong, to make a New Man, and educate the people. At school, we learned how to use different tools, we went into the countryside to help with the harvest. No one paid us—it was our duty.”
The NKVD were heroes too: on 21 December, the “Organs” celebrated their twentieth anniversary at a Bolshoi gala. Beneath flowers and banners of Stalin and Yezhov, Mikoyan, in a Party tunic, declared: “Learn the Stalinist style of work from Comrade Yezhov just as he learned it from Comrade Stalin.” But the crux of his speech was: “Every citizen of the USSR should be an NKVD agent.”
The country celebrated the anniversary of Pushkin’s death as well as the anniversary of the Georgian poet Rustaveli which was organized by Beria and attended by Voroshilov and Mikoyan. Stalin was deliberately fusing traditional Russian culture with Bolshevism as Europe lurched closer to war. The Soviets were now fighting the Fascists by proxy in the Spanish Civil War, sparking a craze for Spanish songs and Spanish caps, “blue with red edging on the visor,” and big berets, “tilted at a rakish angle.” Women wore Spanish blouses. “If Tomorrow Brings War” was one of the most popular tunes. All the children of the leaders wanted to be pilots or soldiers.
“Even we children knew that war was coming,” recalls Stalin’s adopted son Artyom, “and we had to be strong not to be destroyed. One day, Uncle Stalin called we boys and said, ‘What would you like to do with your life?’” Artyom wanted to be an engineer. “No, we need men who understand the artillery.” Artyom and Yakov, already an engineer, both joined the artillery. “This was the only privilege I ever received from my Uncle Stalin,” says Artyom. But aviators were the élite: more magnates’ children joined “Stalin’s falcons” than any other service: Vasily trained as a pilot, alongside Stepan Mikoyan and Leonid Khrushchev. 2
Yet the families of the leaders endured a special experience during that time. For the parents, it was a daily torment of depression, uncertainty, exhilaration, anxiety as friends, colleagues and relatives were arrested. Yet to read Western histories and Soviet memoirs, one might believe that this new Bolshevik élite were convinced that all those arrested were innocent. This reflects the postdated guilt of those whose fathers took part in the slaughter.
The truth was different. Zhdanov told his son Yury that Yezhov was right even in the most unlikely cases: “The devil knows! I’ve known him many years but then there was Malinovsky!” he said, referring to the notorious Tsarist spy. Andreyev knew there were Enemies but thought they had to be “thoroughly checked” before they were arrested. Mikoyan had his reservations on many arrests but his son Sergo knew his father was, in his words, a “Communist fanatic.” The wives were if anything more fanatical than the husbands: Mikoyan recalled how his wife utterly believed in Stalin and was least likely to question his actions. “My father,” says Natasha Andreyeva, “believed wreckers and Fifth Columnists were destroying our State and had to be destroyed. My mother was utterly convinced. We prepared for war.”
The magnates never discussed the Terror before the children who lived in a world of lies and murder. The “reluctance to reveal one’s thoughts even to one’s son was the most haunting sign of these times,” remembered Andrei Sakharov the physicist. Yet the children naturally noticed when their uncles and family friends disappeared, leaving unspeakable and unaskable voids in their lives. The Mikoyan children heard their parents and uncles whispering about the arrests in Armenia, but their father sometimes could not stop himself exclaiming, “I don’t believe it!” Andreyev “never mentioned it to us—it was our parents’ business,” recalls Natasha Andreyeva. “But if someone important was arrested, my father would call to Mama, ‘Dorochka, can you speak with me for a minute.’” Indeed, Dora told her family she could identify Enemies by looking into their eyes. They whispered behind the kitchen door. Whenever his wife asked him something dangerous, Mikoyan replied: “Shut up.” Before his death, Ordzhonikidze quietened his wife with a firm “Not now!” Parents were constantly going for walks in the woods or round the Kremlin.3
The inhabitants of the House on the Embankment, the hideous luxury building for younger leaders including the Khrushchevs, most of the People’s Commissars and Stalin’s cousinhood, like the Svanidzes and Redens, waited each night for the groan of the elevators, the knock on the doors, as the NKVD arrived to arrest their suspects.[126] As Trifonov relates in his novel House on the Embankment, every morning the uniformed doorman told the other inhabitants who had been arrested during the night. Soon the building was filled with empty apartments, doors ominously sealed by the NKVD. Khrushchev worried about the gossiping women in his family, furious when his peasant mother-in-law spent her time chattering downstairs, knowing well how loose talk cost lives.
Parents kept bags packed for prison and Mauser and Chagan pistols under their pillows, ready to commit suicide. The cleverer ones arranged a schedule for their children in case they were arrested: the mother of Zoya Zarubina, the stepdaughter of a Chekist, showed her how to gather warm clothes and take her little sister, aged eight, to a distant relative in the countryside. 4
125
Martha and her mother had been invited to Tiflis for the celebration of the poet Rustaveli’s 750th anniversary by Timosha’s new lover, Academician Lupel. There, through a slit in the door, she had seen him arrested at the dead of night: “I saw five men take him away,” she remembered. Timosha’s later affair with Stalin’s court architect, Merzhanov, also ended in his arrest. “I’m cursed,” Timosha Peshkova exclaimed. “Everyone I touch is ruined.”
126
Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote beautifully of how she and her husband had lain awake in the Writers’ Union building until the lift had passed their floor.