Nadya’s wish to work outside the home was conventional among young Bolshevik women, who combined a dedication to the revolutionary cause and to women’s emancipation. She did not object to supervising household management so long as she had servants and could continue to be employed in Lenin’s office. The double role was very heavy and the lack of support from Joseph made it scarcely bearable. He was frequently late in getting back to the Kremlin flat. He was uncouth in manners and had an obscene tongue when irritated. Nor was his language confined to phrases like ‘Go to the Devil!’ Hating to be contradicted, he used the foulest swear-words on his wife. His rough manner was extreme, and it cannot be discounted that he was compensating to some degree for personal insecurities. After hurting his arm as a boy, he had been unable to join in the normal rough-and-tumbles of childhood. He had been rejected on physical grounds by the Imperial Army in the Great War. Stalin wanted to be thought a man’s man. In fact, according to his grand-nephew Vladimir Alliluev, he had carefully manicured nails and ‘almost a woman’s fingers’.22 Did he have some residual doubts about his manliness by contemporary criteria? If he did, it was Nadya who paid the price.
Like most of his male contemporaries, Stalin expected a wife to obey. Here he was disappointed, for Nadya refused to be meek. Disputes between them were frequent more or less from the start of their sustained cohabitation. She too had her moods. Indeed it is now clear that she had mental problems. Perhaps they were hereditary. Schizophrenia of some kind seems to have affected previous generations of her mother’s side of the family; and her brother Fëdor, after an acutely traumatic event after the Civil War when the former bank robber Kamo stage-managed a scene in which he threatened to shoot him, had a breakdown from which he never recovered.23 Nadya had a volatile temperament and, although she remained in love with Joseph, the marriage continued to be rancorous between the patches of tranquillity.
Someone in the central party apparatus decided that Nadya was unsuitable for party membership. The rumour was that it was none other than Joseph. In December 1921 she was excluded from the party: this was a disgrace for anyone working as she did in the offices of Sovnarkom. Eventually she could have lost her job. The charge was that she had not passed the various tests applied to all party members and had not bothered to prepare herself for them. Nor had she helped with mundane party work; this was all the less acceptable inasmuch as she was ‘a person of the intelligentsia’. Only one Central Control Commission member spoke up for her even though Lenin himself had written warmly in her support.24 Nadya begged for another chance and promised to make a greater effort in the way that was demanded. Initially the decision was made to ‘exclude her as ballast, completely uninterested in party work’; but finally the Central Control Commission allowed her to keep the secondary status of a ‘candidate’ party member.25 She could have done without this contretemps in a year full of problems; but at least the eventual decision enabled her to go on working for Lenin’s office without a blemish on her record.
It cannot be proved that Joseph had been behind the move to take away her party card; and Nadya never expressly blamed him. But he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo and was already intervening in the Secretariat’s work in 1921:26 he could have put in a good word for her if he had wanted. But she had survived. Stalin accepted the situation and avoided interfering with her professional aspirations again. She functioned as one of Lenin’s secretaries even while Lenin and Stalin were falling out. Krupskaya even asked her to liaise with Kamenev on Lenin’s behalf about the Georgian Affair.27 It would be strange if Nadya kept this a secret from her husband. Perhaps he at last began to see the advantages of having a working wife.
At home Nadya was a severe mother and denied to the children the open affection she directed at Joseph. Strict standards of behaviour were enforced. Yakov, who hardly knew his father before moving to Moscow, reacted badly to this. Joseph’s work kept him away from the apartment and the bond between them never solidified. Such interest as he took in his son tended to involve pressure. He pushed books at him and expected him to read them. ‘Yasha!’ he wrote on the cover of B. Andreev’s The Conquest of Nature, ‘Read this book without fail!’28 But it was Nadya who had to handle Yakov on a daily basis and, as her letter to Joseph’s mother in October 1922 indicated, she found him exasperating:29
I send you a big kiss and pass on greetings from Soso: he’s very healthy, feels very well, works hard, and remembers about you.
Yasha [i.e. Yakov] studies, plays up, smokes and doesn’t listen to me. Vasenka [i.e. Vasili] also plays up, insults his mama and also won’t listen to me. He hasn’t yet started smoking. Joseph will definitely teach him to since he always give him a puff on his papiroska.
A papiroska is a cigarette with an empty tube at the end which acts like a cigarette-holder to allow smoking while wearing gloves in sub-zero temperatures. It was in character for Joseph to expect Nadya to enforce discipline while he himself disrupted it.
Life nevertheless had its pleasant side. The Stalins lived in two places after the Soviet–Polish War: their Kremlin flat and the dacha they called Zubalovo near the old sawmill at Usovo outside Moscow. By a bizarre coincidence, the dacha’s owner had belonged to the Zubalishvili business family which had built the hostel that became the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary. Probably it tickled the fancy of Stalin and his neighbour Mikoyan that they were living in homes put up by an industrialist from the south Caucasus against whom they had once helped to lead strikes.30
Several dachas were made state property in the same district in 1919 and the Stalins occupied Zubalovo-4. Stalin, who had never had a house of his own,31 cleared the trees and bushes to turn his patch into a spot to his liking. Near by was the River Moskva, where the children could swim in the summer. It was a beautiful spot which might have appeared in the plays of Anton Chekhov; but whereas Chekhov described how the old rural gentry were supplanted by the nouveaux riches, this was a case of the nouveaux riches being expelled by revolutionaries. While gloating over the Zubalishvilis’ forced departure, Stalin had no inhibition about creating a style of life that was similarly bourgeois. When they could, the entire Stalin family went out to Zubalovo. They gathered honey. They searched for mushrooms and wild strawberries. Joseph took pot-shots at pheasants and rabbits and the family ate what he killed. The Stalins kept open house and visitors stayed as long as they wanted. Budënny and Voroshilov often popped over to drink and sing with Joseph. Ordzhonikidze and Bukharin were others who spent time there. Gentle-mannered Bukharin was a particular favourite with Nadya and the children: he even brought a tame grey fox with him and did a painting of the trees by the dacha.32
In the summers they holidayed in the south of the USSR, usually in one of the many state dachas by the Black Sea. Stalin had material couriered to him whenever he needed to be consulted. But he knew how to enjoy himself. There were always plenty of Caucasian dishes and wines on his table and the visitors were many. Georgian and Abkhazian politicians queued to ingratiate themselves. His Moscow cronies, if they were staying in nearby dachas, called on the family; and picnics were arranged in the hills or by the seaside. Although Stalin could not swim, he loved the fresh air and the beach as well.