27. DEATH OF THE STALIN FAMILY
A Strange Proposal and the Housekeeper
Letting Beria into the family was like locking a fox in a chicken coop but Stalin shares responsibility for their fates. “All our family,” wrote Svetlana, “was completely baffled as to why Stalin made Beria—a provincial secret policeman—so close to himself and the government in Moscow.” This was precisely why Stalin had promoted him: no one was sacred to Beria.
The magnates and retainers all grumbled constantly about the self-importance of the “aunties.” Impertinent with the greatness of his new power and burning with the inferiority complex of a scorned provincial, Beria was determined to prove himself by destroying these glamorous but snobbish members of the new nobility. In the early thirties, Beria had tried to flirt with Zhenya while her husband and Stalin were sitting nearby.
Zhenya strode up to Stalin: “If this bastard doesn’t leave me alone, I’ll smash his pince-nez.” Everyone laughed. Beria was embarrassed. But when Beria began to appear more regularly at Kuntsevo, he still flirted with Zhenya who appealed to Stalin: “Joseph! He’s trying to squeeze my knee!” Stalin probably regarded Beria as something of a card. The family were typical of the élite he was trying to destroy. When Beria turned up in a turtleneck pullover for dinner, Zhenya, who was always dressed to the nines without a hint of Bolshevik modesty, said loudly, “How dare you come to dinner like this?” Grandfather Alliluyev regularly described Beria as an “Enemy.”1
In November 1938, Stalin’s family life really ended. Beria expanded the Terror to include anyone connected to Yezhov, who had not only appointed Stalin’s brother-in-law, Stanislas Redens, to run the NKVD in Kazakhstan but had even requested him as his deputy: this was the kiss of death. Relations had certainly been warm when Stalin received the Redens family before they set off for Alma-Ata. We know little about Redens’s role in the Terror but thousands in Moscow and Kazakhstan had been slaughtered on his watch. The arrival of Beria, his nemesis in Tiflis in 1931, was bad news but even without it, Stanislas would probably have been doomed.2
Meanwhile Pavel Alliluyev’s job, as a tank forces commissar, placed him in harm’s way: close to the executed generals, he was also involved in spying on German tank production. When he saw the Soviet spy Orlov before his defection, Alliluyev warned him: “Don’t ever inquire about the Tukhachevsky affair. Knowing about it is like inhaling poison gas.” Then Pavel had been out in the Far East where the generals appealed to him and he had flown back, according to his daughter Kira, with evidence that proved their innocence. He clearly did not understand that evidence only existed to persuade others, not to prove guilt. Pavel is said to have put together a letter for Stalin, co-signed by three generals, suggesting the Terror be brought to a close. The generals’ timing seemed fortuitous; the Terror was ebbing. Stalin did not openly punish them, but he had clearly tired of Pavel’s interference.[140]
After holidaying in Sochi, Pavel returned on 1 November. The next morning, Pavel ate breakfast and went to the office where he found that most of his department had been arrested, according to Svetlana: “He attempted to save certain people, trying to get hold of my father, but it was no use.” At two in the afternoon, Zhenya was called: “What did you give your husband to eat? He’s feeling sick.” Zhenya wanted to rush over but they stopped her. He was sent to the Kremlevka clinic. In the words of the official medical report, “When he was admitted, he was unconscious, cyanotic and apparently dying. The patient did not recover consciousness.” This was strange since the doctor who telephoned Zhenya to tell her this news said: “Why did it take you so long? He had something to tell you. He kept asking why Zhenya didn’t come. He’s already dead.” So died the brother who had given Nadya her pistol. The inconsistencies in an already suspicious death, at a time when medical murder was almost routine, makes foul play possible. Stalin kept the death certificate. Zhenya was later accused of murdering Pavel. Stalin sometimes accused others of his own crimes. We will never know the truth.
“The next time I saw him,” Kira says, “was lying in state at the Hall of Columns. He was only 44, and he was lying there all sunburnt, very handsome with his long eyelashes.” Looking into the casket, Sergei Alliluyev mused that there was no more tragic thing than to bury your own children.3
Redens himself headed back to Moscow where he arrived on 18 November. At Kuntsevo, Vasily heard Beria demand that Stalin let him arrest Redens. “But I trust Redens,” replied Stalin “very decisively.” To Vasily’s surprise, Malenkov supported Beria. This was the beginning of the alliance between these two who would not have pressed the arrest without knowing Stalin’s instincts: these scenes of pretend argument resemble the mooting exercises practised by trainee lawyers. Yet Stalin was highly suggestible. Redens had the misfortune, like Pavel Alliluyev, to be in two or three overlapping circles of suspicion. Beria is always blamed for turning Stalin against his other brother-in-law but there was more to it than that. Stalin had removed Redens from the Ukraine in 1932. He was close to Yezhov. And he was a Pole. Stalin listened to Beria and Malenkov and then said: “In that case, sort it out at the Central Committee.” As Svetlana put it, “My father would not protect him.” On the 22nd, Redens was arrested on his way to work and was never seen again.
Anna Redens started phoning Stalin. She was no longer welcome at Zubalovo. She could not get through to Stalin. “Then I’ll call Voroshilov, Kaganovich and Molotov,” she sobbed. When the children arrived, they found their mother, hysterical at the disappearance of her beloved Stan, lying in bed reading Alexandre Dumas. She appealed to everyone until finally Stalin took her call. Stalin summoned her to the Little Corner. Redens “would be brought and we shall make an inquiry about all this,” but he made one condition: “And bring Grandfather Sergei Yakovlevich with you.” Sergei, who had now lost two children, no longer waited for Stalin on the sofa every night but he agreed to come. At the last moment, he backed out. Beria either threatened him, or perhaps Sergei thought Redens was guilty of something in his unsavoury work at the Lubianka: Redens’s son Leonid stressed that there were tensions between Old Bolsheviks like Sergei and the brash élite like Redens. Grandmother Olga went instead, a brave but foolish move since Stalin loathed interfering women.
“Why have you come? No one called you!” he snarled at her. Anna shouted at Stalin, who had her removed.4 Redens and the Svanidzes were in jail; Pavel Alliluyev dead. Stalin had allowed the Terror to ravage his own circle. When the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dmitrov appealed for some arrested comrades, Stalin shrugged: “What can I do for them, Georgi? All my own relatives are in prison too.” This is a revealing excuse. Certainly, with Pavel, Nadya’s pistol must have always been on his mind but so were his military connections and intercession for “Enemies.” Perhaps Stalin was settling private scores against his over-familiar, interfering family who reminded him of Nadya’s rejection. But he did not regard the Terror as a private spree: he was cleansing his encircled country of spies to safeguard his vast achievements before war broke out. His family were among the casualties. He regarded them as his own sacrifice as the supreme pontiff of Bolshevism. But he was also asserting his own separation from private ties and, perhaps refreshingly, shaking off old obligations of family and friendship:[141] his vendettas were those of the Party because, as he told Vasily, “I’m not Stalin… Stalin IS Soviet power!” But they also provided a living excuse for demanding that his comrades sacrifice their own families. Nonetheless, he could have saved anyone he wanted and he did not.5 The familial world of Stalin and his children was still shrinking.
140
The other three generals who signed the letter were, apparently, Stalin’s Tsaritsyn crony, Grigory Kulik, and Commanders Meretskov and D. Pavlov. Commissar Savchenko also signed. Savchenko was executed in October 1941; the fates of the others are told later in this book. All suffered grievously at Stalin’s hands. Only Meretskov out-lived him.
141
His old lover of 1913, “my darling” Tatiana Slavotinskaya, is an example: Stalin had protected her well into the thirties, promoting her in the Central Committee apparatus, but now the protection stopped abruptly. Her family was repressed and she was expelled from the House on the Embankment. Slavotinskaya was the grandmother of Yury Trifonov, author of the novel