The fate of Stalin’s Bolshevik comrades was tragic, never mind the fate of the Soviet people. Kamenev and Zinoviev were shot in 1936, Bukharin in 1938; Trotsky was murdered with an icepick in 1940—all on Stalin’s orders. During 1937–38, around one and a half million people were shot. Stalin personally signed deathlists for almost 39,000 people, many of them old acquaintances. Georgia, where Stalin’s rising magnate Beria was in charge, was hit especially severely: 10 percent of the Communist Party were purged; 425 out of the 644 delegates to the Tenth Georgian Party Congress were shot.
The star victim was Stalin’s old friend, Budu “the Barrel” Mdivani, who had several times saved his life in earlier days. But Mdivani had resisted Stalin in 1921 and the loquacious ex-actor irreverently joked that Beria should put an armed guard around Keke’s house—not for her protection, but so she never gave birth to another Stalin. Stalin was reconciled with Budu in the 1920s. When he was in Moscow, Budu usually stayed with him. Stalin often visited the Mdivanis in Georgia—even becoming godfather to their son. But Stalin had not forgotten Mdivani’s opposition. In 1937, he was arrested for plotting to kill Stalin and shot soon afterwards, along with most of his family.
The case of three of Soso’s closest Georgian acquaintances reveals how differently things could turn out in the universe of diabolical randomness. Sunny, genial, hedonistic and conciliatory, Abel Yenukidze, Nadya Stalin’s godfather, became Secretary of the Central Executive Committee, in charge of the Kremlin, the Party villas and the Bolshoi Ballet, which he used as his own private dating agency, becoming notorious for his taste for teenage ballerinas (and their mothers).
Uncle Abel was close friends with Stalin, but always preserved his own opinion. In his memoirs about the Baku printing-presses, he refused to praise Stalin for things he had not done. “Koba wants me to tell him he’s a genius but I won’t do it,” he complained. He was sceptical of the growing repression, priding himself on sheltering persecuted Georgian comrades. Yet he and Stalin often holidayed together, sending each other affectionate notes. However, in 1936 Stalin selected Yenukidze as the first of his inner circle to be liquidated, even though he had never been a member of any formal opposition. He was arrested and shot in 1937.
Kavtaradze, on the other hand, had been a member of every opposition from the 1920s onwards. He not only threw a lantern at Stalin but later backed first Mdivani, then the Trotskyites. Yet each time Stalin saved, helped and promoted him.
In 1937, Kavtaradze was arrested (again) as a member of Mdivani’s “conspiracy” and sentenced to death for planning to murder Stalin. The others were all killed, but the dictator spared Kavtaradze by placing a dash next to his name on the deathlist. In 1940 Stalin, deciding that he missed him, freed him and invited him to dinner the same night. They got on well, even though Stalin teased him, “To think you wanted to kill me.” A few days later, he and Beria dined at Kavtaradze’s apartment: their host was made head of the State Publishing House, then Deputy Foreign Minister and Ambassador to Rumania. He survived Stalin, dying in 1961.
Sergo Ordzhonikidze was, by the 1930s, the last Old Bolshevik with the prestige to challenge Stalin. As Stalin’s enforcer he conquered the Caucasus in 1920–21, helped defeat the oppositions in the 1920s and ran heavy industry in the Five Year Plan into the 1930s. He and Stalin were inseparable, living in the same building, writing each other cosy notes, holidaying together. But in 1937 they clashed. Sergo committed suicide in the Kremlin.
Yet some of the earlier comrades survived.[191] Kalinin served from 1919 until his death in 1946 as head of state (Chairman of the Supreme Soviet). Marshal Voroshilov served as Defence Commissar, a vicious henchman during the Terror, and an inept bungler in the Finnish and Great Patriotic Wars. Stalin tormented Voroshilov with being “an English agent.” Yet he outlived his master to become Soviet head of state until 1960.
Meyer Wallach became Maxim Litvinov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs during the 1930s, later Soviet Ambassador in Washington. He was outspoken in his criticisms of Stalin, who planned a fatal car crash for him yet allowed him to survive, perhaps because he remembered Litvinov saving him from the dockers in London but more likely because of his international prestige. Stalin promoted his host in Vienna, Troyanovsky, making him the first Soviet Ambassador to the United States, and allowed him to live, even though he and Litvinov privately criticized him.
When he met Stalin again in 1918, Vyshinsky was clever enough neither to hide his unreliable political past nor to try to remind Stalin of the favours he had done him in Bailov Prison: he just formally, politely offered his services. As rebarbative, bloodthirsty and terrifying as he was cowardly and terrorized, he became the Soviet Procurator-General, the star inquisitor of the 1930s show-trials, and, in 1949, Stalin’s last Foreign Minister. He died in 1954.
Molotov served as Premier from 1930 to 1941 and Foreign Commissar from 1939 until 1949. Stalin started to view him as a potential successor and, in 1952, viciously denounced his old partner. Chosen for liquidation,[192] Molotov was saved by Stalin’s death but remained devoted to him. He became Foreign Minister again but failed to overthrow Khrushchev in 1957. Exiled as Ambassador to Mongolia, he lived until 1985, still seeing Stalin in his dreams.{262}
Until his last day, Stalin never ceased trying to glorify his past and conceal his early mistakes. The cult served his shameless vainglory and contributed to his political potency, yet he liked to assume a becoming modesty in front of colleagues. At heart, he was too intelligent not to appreciate that many of the paeans to his youth were ridiculous. When he saw Georgian writer Gamsakhurdia’s Youth of the Leader, he wrote: “I ask you to prohibit publication of Gamsakhurdia’s book in Russian. J. Stalin.”
He was even more outraged by Fedorov’s Kartvelian Novelties, published in 1940, scribbling in green penciclass="underline" “Comrade Pospelov was idiotic and tactless to approve Fedorov’s book about me without my agreement and knowledge. Fedorov’s book must be pulped—and Pospelov must be punished. Stalin.”
When Samoilova, an Old Bolshevik acquaintance from Baku days, asked if she could exhibit proofs of Stalin’s earlier books and articles in her museum, she received this handwritten note: “I never thought you’d be so stupid in your old age! If the book’s published in millions, why’d you need the manuscript? I burned all the manuscripts!” When a book was compiled of memoirs from 1905, Soso wrote three words: “Don’t publish! Stalin.”{263}
At dinner in his seaside villa, the ageing Stalin told stories to his old friends about these people from the past, some of whom had perished in their beds, many of whom had died in his dungeons with a bullet in the back of the head.
The old men had their say too. “They complained,” observes Molotov, “about bribery and corruption everywhere.” Another of these old Georgians “of whom Stalin was particularly fond,” says Khrushchev, “told Stalin about the bad situation among youngsters in Georgia.” Stalin was incensed and launched a purge of his homeland.
Presently the old men, several of whom had sung with Soso in the Gori and seminary choirs in white surplices, started to sing. “Georgian songs were heard late at night wafting from the Coldstream villa, sometimes accompanied by the host—a good old singer with a sweet voice…”
191
Mikha Tskhakaya, the greybeard who had promoted and protected Stalin in the early years before turning against Lenin and retiring to Genevan exile, survived to die in 1950 in his bed, an honoured Old Bolshevik. Inexplicably, Makharadze was allowed to survive the Terror. Stepan Shaumian, Stalin’s roommate in London and junior partner in the Tiflis bank robbery and then Baku, was the brutal master of the Baku Commune in 1918 when he oversaw the murder of around 15,000 Azeris. He was then overthrown and shot by the Whites and the British as one of the legendary Twenty-six Commissars. Stalin then adopted Shaumian’s son, Levan, and brought him up in his own household. Stalin’s Siberian roommate and Soviet head of state Yakov Sverdlov died of influenza in 1919.
192
His Jewish wife, Polina, was equally devoted to Stalin and became a Deputy Commissar in her own right, but her strident feminism irritated Stalin, while her friendship with Nadya made him uneasy. He almost destroyed her in 1939, considered having her murdered in a car crash and finally forced Molotov to vote for her arrest in 1949. The full story is in