“Who’s with him?”
“Gusev’s wife.”
This version may explain Nadya’s sudden desperation. However, a resurgence of her migraine, a wave of depression or just the sepulchral solitude of Stalin’s grim apartment in the early hours are also feasible. There are holes in the story too: Molotov, the nanny, and Stalin’s granddaughter, among others, insisted that Stalin slept at home in the apartment. Stalin certainly would not have entertained women in his Zubalovo dacha, because we know his children were there. But there were plenty of other dachas. More importantly, no one has managed to identify this Guseva, though there were several army officers of that name. Moreover Mikoyan never mentioned this to his children or in his own memoirs. Prim Molotov may have been protecting Stalin in his conversations in old age—he lied about many other matters, as did Khrushchev, dictating his reminiscences in his dotage. It seems more likely that if this woman was the “beautiful” wife of a soldier, it was Yegorova who was actually at the party and whose flirting caused the row in the first place.
We will never know the truth but there is no contradiction between these accounts: Stalin probably did go drinking at a dacha with some fellow carousers, maybe Yegorova, and he certainly returned to the apartment in the early hours. The fates of these magnates and their women would soon depend on their relationship with Stalin. Many of them would die terrible deaths within five years. Stalin never forgot the part they each played that November night.
Nadya looked at one of the many presents that her genial brother Pavel had brought back from Berlin along with the black embroidered dress she was still wearing. This was a present she had requested because, as she told her brother, “sometimes it’s so scary and lonely in the Kremlin with just one soldier on duty.” It was an exquisite lady’s pistol in an elegant leather holster. This is always described as a Walther but in fact it was a Mauser. It is little known that Pavel also brought an identical pistol as a present for Polina Molotova but pistols were not hard to come by in that circle.
Whenever Stalin came home, he did not check his wife but simply went to bed in his own bedroom on the other side of the apartment.
Some say Nadya bolted the bedroom door. She began to write a letter to Stalin, “a terrible letter,” thought her daughter Svetlana. In the small hours, somewhere between 2 and 3 a.m. when she had finished it, she lay on the bed.
The household rose as normal. Stalin always lay in until about eleven. No one knew when he had come home and whether he had encountered Nadya. It was late when Carolina Til tried Nadya’s door and perhaps forced it open. “Shaking with fright,” she found her mistress’s body on the floor by the bed in a pool of blood. The pistol was beside her. She was already cold. The housekeeper rushed to get the nanny. They returned and laid the body on the bed before debating what to do. Why did they not waken Stalin? “Little people” have a very reasonable aversion to breaking bad news to their Tsars. “Faint with fear,” they telephoned the security boss, Pauker, then “Uncle Abel” Yenukidze, Nadya’s last dancing partner, the politician in charge of the Kremlin, and Polina Molotova, the last person to see her alive. Yenukidze, who lived in Horse Guards like the others, arrived first—he alone of the leaders viewed the pristine scene, knowledge for which he would pay dearly. Molotov and Voroshilov arrived minutes later.
One can only imagine the frantic uproar in the apartment as the oblivious ruler of Russia slept off his drink down one corridor while his wife slept eternally down the other. They also called Nadya’s family—her brother Pavel, who lived across the river in the new House on the Embankment, and parents, Sergei and Olga Alliluyev. Someone called the family’s personal doctor who in turn summoned the well-known Professor Kushner.
Peering at her later, this disparate group of magnates, family and servants, searching for reasons for this act of despair and betrayal, found the angry letter she left behind. No one knows what it contained—or whether it was destroyed by Stalin or someone else. But Stalin’s bodyguard, Vlasik, later revealed that something else was found in her bedroom: a copy of the damaging anti-Stalinist “Platform,” written by Riutin, an Old Bolshevik who was now under arrest. This might be significant or it might mean nothing. All the leaders then read opposition and émigré journals so perhaps Nadya was reading Stalin’s copy. In her letters to Stalin, she reported what she had read in the White press “about YOU! Are you interested?” Nonetheless, during those days in the country at large, the mere possession of this document warranted arrest.
No one knew what to do. They gathered in the dining room, whispering: should they wake up Stalin? Who would tell the Vozhd? How had she died? Suddenly Stalin himself walked into the room. Someone, most likely it was Yenukidze, Stalin’s old friend who, judging by the archives, had assumed responsibility, stepped forward and said: “Joseph, Nadezhda Sergeevna is no longer with us. Joseph, Joseph, Nadya’s dead.” 22
Stalin was poleaxed. This supremely political creature, with an inhuman disregard for the millions of starving women and children in his own country, displayed more humanity in the next few days than he would at any other time in his life. Olga, Nadya’s mother, an elegant lady of independent spirit who had known Stalin so long and always regretted her daughter’s behaviour, hurried into the dining room where a broken Stalin was still absorbing the news. Doctors had arrived and they offered the heartbroken mother some valerian drops, the valium of the thirties, but she could not drink them. Stalin staggered towards her: “I’ll drink them,” he said. He downed the whole dose. He saw the body and the letter which, wrote Svetlana, shocked and wounded him grievously.
Nadya’s brother, Pavel, arrived with his dimpled sunny wife Yevgenia, known to all as Zhenya, who would herself play a secret role in Stalin’s life—and suffer for it. They were alarmed not only by the death of a sister but by the sight of Stalin himself.
“She’s crippled me,” he said. They had never seen him so soft, so vulnerable. He wept, saying something like this lament of many years later: “Oh Nadya, Nadya… how we needed you, me and the children!” The rumours of murder started immediately. Had Stalin returned to the apartment and shot her in a row? Or had he insulted her again and gone to bed, leaving her to kill herself ? But the tragedy raised greater questions too: until that night, the existence of the magnates was a “wonderful life,” as described by Ekaterina Voroshilova in her diary. That night, it ended forever. “How,” she asks, “did our life in the Party become so complex, that it was incomprehensible to the point of agony?” The “agony” was just beginning. The suicide “altered history,” claims the Stalins’ nephew, Leonid Redens. “It made the Terror inevitable.” Naturally Nadya’s family exaggerate the significance of her death: Stalin’s vindictive, paranoid and damaged character was already formed long before. The Terror itself was the result of vast political, economic and diplomatic forces—but Stalin’s personality certainly shaped it. Nadya’s death created one of the rare moments of doubt in a life of iron self-belief and dogmatic certainty. How did Stalin recover and what was the effect of this humiliation on him, his entourage—and Russia itself? Did vengeance for this personal fiasco play its part in the coming Terror when some of the guests that night would liquidate the others?
Stalin suddenly picked up Nadya’s pistol and weighed it in his hands: “It was a toy,” he told Molotov, adding strangely, “It was only fired once a year!”
The man of steel “was in a shambles, knocked sideways,” exploding in “sporadic fits of rage,” blaming anyone else, even the books she was reading, before subsiding into despair. Then he declared that he resigned from power. He too was going to kill himself: “I can’t go on living like this…”23