Young Stalin

EPILOGUE An Old Tyrant—in Remembrance of Things Past

Oh mother! Many a time
With his “hyena” sickle swinging,
Bare-chested, at the end of the cornfield
He must have suddenly burst out with a roar.

He must have piled up mountains
Of sheaves side by side,
And on his face governed by dripping sweat
Fire and smoke must have poured out.

But now he can longer move his knees,
Scythed down by old age.
He lies down or he dreams or he tells
His children’s children of the past.

From time to time he catches the sound
Of singing in the nearby cornfields
And his heart that was once so tough
Begins to beat with pleasure.

He drags himself out, trembling.
He takes a few steps on his shepherd’s crook
And, when he catches sight of the lads,
He smiles with relief.

—SOSELO (Josef Stalin)

On the lush hills above Gagra on the Black Sea coast, an old Georgian man, small, squat, paunchy, with thinning grey hair and a moustache, wearing a grey tunic and baggy trousers, sat on the verandah of a clifftop mansion, a fortified eyrie, with panoramic views, and talked to his elderly guests about how they grew up together…

The mtsvadi kebabs and spicy vegetable dishes of a Georgian supra were spread around the table with bottles of local red wine as the men talked in Georgian about their boyhoods in Gori and Tiflis, their seminary studies and their youthful radicalism. It did not matter that they had parted and followed their different paths, because the host “had never forgotten his schoolmates and fellow seminarists.”

In the years before his death, Generalissimo Stalin, Premier of the Soviet government and General Secretary of the Communist Party, conqueror of Berlin and supreme pontiff of world Marxism, the old Soso, exhausted by more than fifty years of conspiracy, thirty years of government, four years of total war, would retire for many months to his favourite seaside villa on the semi-tropical Black Sea of his homeland, to spend the days gardening, conspiring and reading—and the warm evenings talking in remembrance of things past.

Sometimes he talked to his magnates Molotov or Voroshilov, sometimes to his younger Georgian viceroys and protégés, but often “Stalin invited Georgian houseguests whom he’d known in his youth. When he had time,” recalls Candide Charkviani, First Secretary of the Georgian Party, whose name reminded Stalin of his patron, Father Kote Charkviani of Gori, “he kept in touch with his schoolmates. Stalin used to tell stories of his childhood and then remember his friends and decide he wanted to see them. So it was arranged to invite them to the house in Gagra.” Stalin enjoyed planning this dinner-party: “Let’s invite Peter Kapanadze and Vaso Egnatashvili… I wonder how Tseradze is? He was a famous wrestler… It would be good to get him along and…”

Whereupon Kapanadze, Egnatashvili and the other old men were gathered and driven from Tiflis to the Black Sea up into the hills, along the precipitous drive, through the steel gates and the drive-through guardhouse, to Stalin’s secret and heavily guarded mansion, Coldstream.

There, the guards brought them to Stalin, who was often clipping roses or weeding around his lemon-trees, reading on the verandah, writing in the wooden summerhouse that was balanced on the edge of the cliff or playing billiards. Dinner would be laid by almost invisible ladies in aprons who then disappeared. Stalin opened the Georgian wine. Everyone helped themselves to food, set out as a buffet.

“The guests had a good time,” says Charkviani. Stalin was friendly and nostalgic—but there were also flashes of dictatorial fury. “During the dinner, there was an unpleasant moment when Stalin noticed a pack of Georgian cigarettes with an illustration of a saucily posed girl.” Abruptly, he lost his temper: “When have you ever seen a decent woman in such a pose? This is unacceptable!”

Charkviani and the other apparatchiks promised to redesign the cigarettes. Stalin calmed down. Mostly, Soso and the old friends “talked about theatre, art, literature and partially about politics.” He poignantly remembered his two wives, Kato and Nadya; he talked about the problems of his children—and Peter Kapanadze walked solemnly round the table to whisper his condolences for the death of Stalin’s son Yakov. Stalin nodded sadly: “Many families lost sons.” Then he recounted his father’s drinking, the Gori wrestling bouts, his adventures in 1905, the antics of Kamo, Tsintsadze and his bank robbers, and his increasingly Herculean exploits in exile. But always the fearsome shadow of the Terror, the shameful human cost of the Revolution and the wicked price of Stalin’s lust for power hung over them all.

“Stalin recalled the lives of other Old Bolsheviks and told anecdotes about them.” He mentioned names that made the guests shiver slightly, for they were people whom Stalin himself had wantonly murdered. Sometimes he mused that they had been wrongly executed—on his orders. “I was surprised,” says Charkviani, “that when he mentioned people who were unjustly liquidated, he talked with the calm detachment of a historian, showing neither sorrow nor rage—but speaking without rancour, with just a tone of light humour…” The only time Stalin explained this sentiment was, much earlier, in a letter to his mother: “You know the saying: ‘While I live, I’ll enjoy my violets, when I die the graveyard worms can rejoice.’”

Looking back into his secret past, the old dictator reflected: “Historians are the sort of people who’ll discover not only facts that are buried underground but even those at the very bottom of the ocean—and reveal them to the world.” He asked, almost to himself: “Can you keep a secret?”

Stalin casually looked through a glass darkly as he remembered the lives of his family, friends and acquaintances whose mixed destinies form a microcosm of the colossal tragedy of his reign.^{253}

Stalin “was a bad and neglectful son, as he was father and husband,” writes his daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalin. “He devoted his whole being to something else, to politics and struggle. And so people who weren’t personally close were always more important to him than those who were.” But, worse, he permitted, indeed encouraged, his politics to destroy and consume his loved ones.

By 1918, most of the Alliluyev children were working for Soso. When Stalin was sent down to Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) in 1918 during the Civil War, he took his girlfriend Nadya Alliluyeva and her brother Fyodor on his armoured train as his assistants. When they returned, Nadya was effectively his wife, moving into his apartment in the Kremlin and blessing him with two children, a son, Vasily,[185] and a daughter, Svetlana. After the Civil War, Nadya worked for a while as one of Lenin’s secretaries.

Anna Alliluyeva also got married during the Civil War. She accompanied Stalin and Dzerzhinsky on their mission to investigate the fall of Perm, where she fell in love with Dzerzhinsky’s Polish assistant, Stanislas Redens, who became a senior secret policeman and a member of Stalin’s court. Their brother Pavel served as a diplomat and military commissar in the Defence Commissariat. All flourished in Stalin’s entourage. Yet Stalin’s effect on the family was nothing short of apocalyptic.

185

Since he used Vasily as his Party alias, he in some ways named his son after himself.