Stalin

Gossip in Moscow had Stalin tendering his resignation, only to have it rejected.³⁰⁴ In fact, the inner circle closed ranks behind him. “Now,” Kirov stated in a report (October 8, 1932) on the plenum to the Leningrad party, published in Pravda, “everyone can see that we were utterly correct, that the further we proceed on the path of constructing socialism, the more manifest is the counterrevolutionary character of every oppositionist tendency.” Ryutin got ten years. He was remanded to the prison near the large Urals village of Verkhne-Uralsk, joining Trotskyites he had once condemned.

³⁰⁵ On November 7, 1932, the revolution’s fifteenth anniversary, in the first of Ryutin’s many letters from prison to his wife, Yevdokiya—aware that any correspondence was read by the authorities—he wrote, “I live now only in the hope that the party and the Central Committee will in the end forgive their prodigal son.” He added, “You will not be touched. I have signed everything.”³⁰⁶

A PERSONAL BLOW

For someone building a new world, Stalin’s home life was unremarkable. As only insiders knew, he lived in an apartment on the second floor of the three-story Amusement Palace, the Kremlin’s only surviving seventeenth-century boyar residence, with vaulted ceilings and wood-burning stoves. He slept on a divan in an undersized bedroom. Nadya had her own, more ample room, with an oriental carpet of distinct color, a Georgian takhta (divan) on which she placed embroidered pillows, as well as a bed, desk, and drawing table. Her window opened onto the Kremlin’s Alexander Garden and scenic Kutafya Tower. Between the couple’s bedrooms was the dining room, “large enough to have a grand piano in it,” their daughter, Svetlana, would recall. Down a hall were bedrooms for Svetlana and Vasily; Svetlana shared hers with a nanny, Alexandra Bychkova. (“If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person,” Svetlana would later write, “I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”)³⁰⁷ Vasily bunked with Artyom, known as Tom (also the nickname for the boy’s deceased father). Stalin’s grown son from his first marriage, Yakov, no longer lived with them. Farther down the same hall, the governesses had a room, as did Karolina Til, an ethnic German from Latvia who oversaw the household. The children could see their father everywhere—on posters and newspaper front pages—but not so much at home.

Most visitors to the Kremlin apartment were regime officials. Stalin had no surviving siblings, and his father was deceased. Keke, his mother, lived alone in Tiflis; Nadya, in letters, expressed regret that Keke could not come to Moscow because of the severe climate. The one surviving letter from Keke to her son, from the 1920s, has her wishing him complete annihilation of his enemies.³⁰⁸ Eighteen of Stalin’s letters to her (in Georgian) have survived, containing a word about his health and the children and wishes for her health and long life, all brief and signed “Your Soso.”³⁰⁹ They invariably included an apology for their rarity (“I, of course, am guilty”).³¹⁰

Stalin had nothing to do with his mother’s or father’s relations. Relatives from both of Stalin’s marriages would stop by the Kremlin apartment: Alexander Svanidze (the brother of Stalin’s deceased first wife, Kato) and his wife, Maria, a former opera singer from a well-off Jewish family; Kato’s sisters, Mariko and Sashiko; Nadya’s father, Sergei Alliluyev, and mother, Olga; Nadya’s brothers, Fyodor and Pavel, and the latter’s fetching wife, Yevgeniya (Zhenya); and Nadya’s sister Anna, who had married Redens (they lived in Kharkov).³¹¹ Several of them lived at the Zubalovo dacha complex, where the Stalins had a dacha that they had remodeled, adding a balcony to the second floor and an outdoor bathhouse. He planted an orchard, and raised pheasants, guinea fowl, and ducks, and liked to lie down on the warm tiled stove in the kitchen to alleviate the pain in his joints.³¹² He also liked to wind up the player piano or gramophone and sing. While Kirov, Voroshilov, and even Molotov danced, he watched.³¹³