The Great Terror

But it seems that the human moments, few as they were, arose in connection with his wives. When the first, Ekaterina Svanidze, died, a friend who went to the cemetery with him says that he remarked, “… this creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her died my last warm feelings for all human beings.”¹⁴

His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, held to the old revolutionary ideas. She is said to have become horrified with what she had learned of the sufferings of the collectivization campaign. She seems to have obtained most of her information from students at a course she had been allowed to take, and they were arrested as soon as Stalin found out.

Her suicide on 9 November 1932 took place as the result of the last series of violent quarrels with her husband, whom she accused of “butchering the people.” All early accounts agree that Stalin lost his temper with her and cursed her in front of his friends (though this is somewhat toned down in the version later given to his daughter).¹⁵ For if Nadezhda, following Ekaterina, touched him in a comparatively soft spot, it was not as soft as all that, and remarkable only in comparison with his usual conduct. She left him a letter which “wasn’t purely personal: it was partly political as well.”¹⁶ We are told that this made him think—and, of course, rightly—that he had enemies everywhere, and that it much exacerbated his suspiciousness. Stalin seems to have been deeply affected by Nadezhda’s death. He felt it for the rest of his life, blaming it on “enemies” (and on Michael Arlen, whose book The Green Hat

she had been reading at the time).¹⁷

Nadezhda’s brother, the Old Bolshevik Paul Alliluyev, was Political Commissar of the Armored Forces. After a time, he was put under special surveillance. Later he told an old acquaintance that he was being kept away from Stalin and had had his Kremlin pass taken from him. It was clear to him that Yagoda and Pauker had suggested that he might be personally dangerous to Stalin in revenging his sister. He was removed from his post in 1937 and given a minor job in the Soviet Trade Delegation in Paris.¹⁸ The causes of his early death in 1937 have been variously interpreted, but his wife was later given ten years for allegedly poisoning him.

¹⁹

An interesting family sidelight arises too in Stalin’s attitude toward his younger son, Vasili. With his elder son, Yakov, by his first wife, he was always on poor terms, occasionally subjecting him to minor persecutions. The feeling was mutual. With Vasili, Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s son, his attitude was quite different. The young man is described with contempt and detestation by all who came in contact with him. He was a stupid bully, a semiliterate drunkard, “a beastly pampered schoolboy let out into the world for the first time.”²⁰ In spite of a very poor record at the Kachinsky Flying School, where he received special tuition, he was passed into the Soviet Air Force without a single bad mark, and by the time he was twenty-nine was already a Lieutenant General. In his intemperate outbursts, he invariably traded on his father’s name.²¹

But Stalin finally removed Vasili from his command for drunken incompetence. And it does not seem that he ever intervened directly to advance his career. It was rather that his subordinates did not dare to do other than recommend the young man enthusiastically in spite of his lack of qualifications. All the same, there seems to be a faint echo here of Napoleonic vulgarities. H. G. Wells writes of Napoleon’s relation to the French Revolution:

And now we come to one of the most illuminating figures in modern history, the figure of an adventurer and a wrecker, whose story seems to display with an extraordinary vividness the universal subtle conflict of egoism, vanity and personality with the weaker, wider claims of the common good. Against this background of confusion and stress … this stormy and tremendous dawn, appears this dark little archaic personage hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar.²²

Many people have felt something of the same about the squat, vulgar figure of Stalin against the tremendous dawn of the Russian Revolution. But, in the first place, Wells is more than a little unfair to Napoleon. His political, as well as military, talents were considerable. Doubtless the Emperor vulgarized the Revolution, but it had already vulgarized itself.

No doubt all revolutions are doomed to vulgarization. But the idealization of the first glories of the new regime often contains a large element of vulgar sentimentalism, and the change to vulgar cynicism may constitute only a comparative deflation. Both Napoleon and Stalin, however that may be, established their rule largely, though not entirely, by to some degree replacing the motivation of general ideas by that of careerism and personal loyalty.