Stalin

Kirov’s personal qualities—straightforward, amiable—endeared him to more conniving Bolsheviks. “Stalin loved and respected Kirov above all others,” a longtime bodyguard would recall. “He loved him with a kind of touching, tender love. Kirov’s trips to Moscow and the south were for Stalin a genuine holiday. Sergei Mironovich would come for a week, two. In Moscow he would stay at Stalin’s apartment, and Stalin would literally not separate from him.”²⁶ “Stalin loved him,” Molotov recalled. “He was Stalin’s favorite.”²⁷ Kirov stood a mere five feet five inches (1.64 meters), shorter than the dictator.

²⁸ He sent game he hunted to Stalin and, following Nadya’s death, stayed with him when in the capital (Kirov had earlier bunked with Orjonikidze). “Kirov had the ability to dissipate misunderstandings, to convert them into jokes, to break the ice,” recalled Artyom (whose deceased father had also been friendly with Kirov). “He was astonishingly bright-natured, a person like a beam of light, and at home they loved him very much, the members of [Stalin’s] family and the service personnel. They always waited upon his appearances . . . and called him Uncle Kirov.” Kirov jestingly called Stalin “the Great Leader of All Peoples of All Times,” according to Artyom, and Stalin “would retort that Kirov was the ‘Most Loved Leader of the Leningrad Proletariat.’”²⁹

The canal held strategic promise for developing mineral-rich Soviet Karelia and opening a reliable pathway from Leningrad to the north, but it ran a mere sixty feet deep and eighty feet wide, limiting its use. Stalin was said to have been disappointed, finding it “shallow and narrow.”³⁰

Nonetheless, the pharaonic visit was recorded on Soviet newsreels. Kremlinologists noted Yagoda’s prominence in the footage, even though Mężyński remained OGPU chairman. Overseeing such construction was Yagoda’s forte, and he would receive the Order of Lenin for the canal. More than 126,000 forced laborers did the work, almost entirely without machines, and probably at least 12,000 died doing so, while orchestras played in the background. Some of the surviving builders were “amnestied” with fanfare; others were transferred to construction of a Moscow–Volga Canal.³¹

GOLDEN FLEECE

Nine-year-old Svetlana had gone ahead to Sochi with her nanny. “Hello, my Dear Daddy,” she wrote on August 5, 1933. “I received your letter and I am happy that you allowed me to stay here and wait for you. . . . When you come, you will not recognize me. I got really tanned. Every night I hear the howling of the coyotes. I wait for you in Sochi. I kiss you. Your Setanka.”³² On August 18, the dictator boarded a train with his son Vasily, Artyom, and Voroshilov for Nizhny Novgorod, whence they embarked with local party boss Andrei Zhdanov on the steamship Clara Zetkin down the Volga for four days. From Stalingrad, the group traversed the steppes by automobile to Sochi, reaching the resort on August 25, after a 2,000-mile journey. “Yet again,” Voroshilov wrote to Yenukidze, “I sensed the whole limitlessness of our expanses, the whole greatness of the proletariat’s conquests.”³³

^{, 34} No more than an hour after having arrived in Sochi, Stalin set out in his car with Voroshilov on a drive to Green Grove, near Matsesta. At the Riviera Bridge, in Sochi’s center, they collided with a truck. It was dark, and the road unlit. Stalin’s guard detail, in the trailing car, immediately opened fire. The truck driver, who appears to have been drunk, fled in the darkness. It is unclear how severe the collision was, but Stalin was unharmed.