KIROV AND CHAPAYEV
Stalin’s return from southern holidays was still being marked by informal gatherings initiated by members of his extended family, who showed up at his apartment in the Imperial Senate at suppertime and played with the children, waiting, hoping to catch him. “Yesterday, after a three-month interval, I saw Iosif,” Maria Svanidze, his first wife’s sister-in-law, wrote in her diary (November 4, 1934). “He looked well, tanned, but he had lost weight. He suffered from flu there. . . . I[osif] joked with Zhenya, that she had again filled out, and he was very tender with her,” Svanidze added. “Now, when I know everything, I observed them.” Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Alliluyeva, an actress, was married to Pavel Alliluyev (the brother of Stalin’s second wife, Nadya), and a jealous Svanidze suspected an affair. Stalin had deeper interests. “After the meal Iosif was in a very good-natured mood,” she continued. “He took the Intercity vertushka and called Kirov, joking with him about the end of rationing and the price rise for bread. He advised Kirov to come to Moscow immediately, in order to defend the interests of Leningrad province against an even higher price rise than in other provinces. Evidently Kirov demurred, and Iosif gave the phone to Kaganovich, who urged Kirov to come for a day. Iosif loves Kirov and after returning from Sochi really wanted to see him, steam in a Russian bath together.”27
The revolution’s seventeenth anniversary approached. At the Bolshoi on the evening before the November 7 parade, the ballerina Marina Semyonova (b. 1908) performed a Caucasus dance. “She danced in a light gray Circassian vest and light gray Astrakhan ‘Kubanka,’ and when, with the last gesture, she held back her Kubanka on her head, her blond hair sprayed down her shoulders,” Artyom recalled. “This made a colossal impression on the audience; everyone shouted ‘Bravo, encore.’” Semyonova went to curtsy at the left loge, where Stalin sat, over the orchestra, practically on the stage. He bent down to the ballerina and said something. “She nodded, gave the orchestra a signal, and repeated the dance.” After the concert, Stalin said to his entourage, “Semyonova is the best of all.”28 She was the common-law wife of Karakhan, the former first deputy foreign affairs commissar, demoted by Stalin to ambassador to Turkey; rumors spread of her affair with Stalin.29
Stalin’s bachelor life was not all rumors. Kirov did come, after the November holiday. In the evenings, now that Nadya was gone, Stalin had taken to watching films with his entourage.30 On November 10 (and into the morning of the 11th), Boris Shumyatsky, head of the motion picture industry, screened the new film Chapayev for the dictator, Kirov, and Molotov.31 Shumyatsky had been born in Ulan Ude (1886) near Lake Baikal, was a former Soviet envoy to Iran and former rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and had replaced Martemyan Ryutin as head of the film industry back when it was considered a backwater, but had built it up. At the Kremlin cinema soft chairs with ample armrests and high backs, concealing who was in them, were placed three across, in several rows. The floor was covered in a drab gray cloth, over which was placed a runner, muffling noise from movement. Stalin issued comments during the screenings, in the dark, and afterward when the lights were back on. Tables for Georgian mineral water and wines sat alongside each chair.32 “We used to go after dinner, about nine in the evening,” Svetlana recalled. “It was late for me, of course, but I begged so hard that my father couldn’t refuse. He’d push me to the front with a laugh: ‘You show us how to get there, House Mistress. Without you to guide us, we’d never find it!’” Stalin often watched more than one film, and Svetlana would go to bed sometimes after midnight, even on school nights. “I’d get out of the movie late and go racing home through the empty, quiet Kremlin. The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.”33
Chapayev portrayed the civil war hero of that name as a real human being, warts and all, and the Whites as worthy foes. Stalin had already seen it twice and fallen in love with its down-home details. “You should be congratulated,” he had said to the always anxious Shumyatsky. “It’s done very well, cleverly and tactfully. Chapayev, Furmanov, and Petka are good. The film will have great educational significance. It’s a nice gift for the holiday.” Chapayev induced Stalin to push for construction of sound cinemas all across the Union (there were just 400 to 500 of them, out of some 30,000 film-showing installations).34 “I will be taking a greater interest in this than previously,” he had told Shumyatsky on November 9–10.35 At the November 10–11 screening, Stalin turned to Kirov and accused him of never visiting the film studio in Leningrad (Chapayev was their production). “You know, here people are speaking about your Leningrad films, and you don’t even know them. You don’t know the riches lurking there, probably you never even watch films.” Kirov, Stalin joked, had “bureaucratized.”36
Stalin invited Shumyatsky to stay for supper. The film boss seized the moment to point out that the state planning commission was being tight with funding, allocating 50 million rubles for the next year instead of the “minimal” 92 million requested. “You hear that, Molotov? That’s not the way,” Stalin said. “Look into it.” Shumyatsky also mentioned that initial reviews of Chapayev were favorable but had stressed the wrong themes.37 “Akh, those critics,” Stalin responded. “They disorient people.” The dictator phoned Mekhlis and ordered something more glowing, which Pravda published the next day (November 12). Stalin—now also joined by Kalinin and Molotov’s wife, Zhemchuzhina—decided to view Chapayev for a second time that night. “The more you watch it,” he said, “the better it seems, the more you find new aspects in it.” The evening lasted until 2:00 a.m.38 On November 13, after work, Kirov accompanied Stalin to the Zubalovo dacha, where they played billiards and watched a puppet show put on by Svetlana and other children, before repairing to Stalin’s new Near Dacha for supper. At Zubalovo, the Stalin family dined on the smelt and whitefish Kirov had brought. “With Kirov,” Svanidze noted, Svetlana “has a great friendship, because I[osif] is especially close and good with him.”39
UNDER THE GUN
Filipp Medved’s nerves were on edge. An ethnic Belorussian (b. 1889), he had joined the party in 1907 (one of his recommenders was Felix Dzierżyński) and had recently helped organize the White Sea–Baltic Canal construction. Now he headed the secret police in Leningrad, an international port and frontier city swimming with foreign consulates and military factories. Known to relish banquets, Medved had put on weight and taken to drink (Armenian brandy), while his wife, Raisa Kopylovskaya, came on to other men in public. (Rumors had Medved imprisoning the Leningrad torgsin shop manager after Raisa flirted with him; she might have been involved in self-enrichment schemes, too.) Whisperings about Medved’s supposed homosexuality (he had kissed the openly gay jazzman Utyosov on the mouth in public) further undermined his authority.40 His first deputy, Ivan Zaporozhets, was widely seen as Yagoda’s “spy.”41 And those were the least of Medved’s worries.