Stalin replied playfully if negatively: “Comrade Unfamiliar! I ask you to trust that I have no wish to disappoint you and I’m ready to respect your letter but I have to say I have no appointment (no time!) to satisfy your wish. I wish you all the best. J Stalin. PS Your letter and photograph returned.” But sometimes he must have told Poskrebyshev that he would be happy to meet his admirers. This gels with the story of Ekaterina Mikulina, an attractive, ambitious girl of twenty-three who wrote a treatise, “Socialist Competition of Working People,” which she sent to Stalin, admitting it was full of mistakes and asking for his help. He invited her to visit him on 10 May 1929. He liked her and it was said she stayed the night at the dacha in Nadya’s absence.[5] She received no benefits from this short liaison other than the honour of his writing her preface.
Certainly Nadya, who knew him best, suspected him of having affairs and she had every reason to know. His bodyguard Vlasik confirmed to his daughter that Stalin was so besieged with offers that he could not resist everyone: “he was a man after all,” behaving with the seigneurial sensuality of a traditional Georgian husband. Nadya’s jealousy was sometimes manic, sometimes indulgent: in her letters, she lovingly teased him about his female admirers as if she was proud of being married to such a great man. But at the theatre, she had recently ruined the evening by throwing a tantrum when he flirted with a ballerina. Most recently, there was the female hairdresser in the Kremlin with whom Stalin was evidently conducting some sort of dalliance. If he had merely visited the barber’s shop like the other leaders, this anonymous girl would not have become such an issue. Yet Molotov remembered the hairdresser fifty years later.
Stalin had had his share of affairs within the Party. His relationships were as short as his spells in exile. Most of the girlfriends were fellow revolutionaries or their wives. Molotov was impressed by Stalin’s “success” with women: when, just before the Revolution, Stalin stole a girlfriend named Marusya from Molotov, the latter put it down to his “beautiful dark brown eyes,” though luring a girlfriend away from this plodder hardly qualifies Stalin as a Casanova. Kaganovich confirmed that Stalin enjoyed affairs with several comrades including the “plump, pretty” Ludmilla Stal.[6] One source mentions an earlier affair with Nadya’s friend Dora Khazan. Stalin may have benefited from revolutionary sexual freedom, even, in his diffident way, enjoying some success with the girls who worked on the Central Committee secretariat, but he remained a traditional Caucasian. He favoured liaisons with discreet GPU staff: the hairdresser fitted the bill.
As so often with jealousy, Nadya’s manic tantrums and bouts of depression encouraged the very thing she dreaded. All of these things—her illness, disappointment about her dress, politics, jealousy and Stalin’s oafishness—came together that night.20
Stalin was unbearably rude to Nadya but historians, in their determination to show his monstrosity, have ignored how unbearably rude she was to him. This “peppery woman,” as Stalin’s security chief, Pauker, described her, frequently shouted at Stalin in public, which was why her own mother thought her a “fool.” The cavalryman Budyonny, who was at the dinner, remembered how she was “always nagging and humiliating” Stalin. “I don’t know how he puts up with it,” Budyonny confided in his wife. By now her depression had become so bad that she confided in a friend that she was sick of “everything, even the children.”
The lack of interest of a mother in her own children is a flashing danger signal if ever there was one, but there was no one to act on it. Stalin was not the only one puzzled by her. Few of this rough-hewn circle, including Party women like Polina Molotova, understood that Nadya was probably suffering from clinical depression: “she couldn’t control herself,” said Molotov. She desperately needed sympathy. Polina Molotova admitted the Vozhd was “rough” with Nadya. Their roller coaster continued. One moment she was leaving Stalin, the next they loved each other again.
At the dinner, some accounts claim, it was a political toast that inflamed her. Stalin toasted the destruction of the Enemies of the State and noticed Nadya had not raised her glass.
“Why aren’t you drinking?” he called over truculently, aware that she and Bukharin shared a disapproval of his starvation of the peasantry. She ignored him. To get her attention, Stalin tossed orange peel and flicked cigarettes at her, but this outraged her. When she became angrier and angrier, he called over, “Hey you! Have a drink!”
“My name isn’t ‘hey’!” she retorted. Furiously rising from the table, she stormed out. It was probably now that Budyonny heard her shout at Stalin: “Shut up! Shut up!”
Stalin shook his head in the ensuing silence: “What a fool!” he muttered, boozily not understanding how upset she was. Budyonny must have been one of the many there who sympathized with Stalin.
“I wouldn’t let my wife talk to me like that!” declared the Cossack bravo who may not have been the best adviser since his own first wife had committed suicide or at least died accidentally while playing with his pistol.21
Someone had to follow her out. She was the leader’s wife so the deputy leader’s wife had to look after her. Polina Molotova pulled on her coat and followed Nadya outside. They walked round and round the Kremlin, as others were to do in times of crisis.
Nadya complained to Polina, “He grumbles all the time… and why did he have to flirt like that?” She talked about the “business with the hairdresser” and Yegorova at the dinner. The women decided, as women do, that he was drunk, playing the fool. But Polina, devoted to the Party, also criticized her friend, saying “it was wrong of her to abandon Stalin at such a difficult time.” Perhaps Polina’s “Partiinost”—Party-mindedness—made Nadya feel even more isolated.
“She quietened down,” recalled Polina, “and talked about the Academy and her chances of starting work… When she seemed perfectly calm,” in the early hours, they said goodnight. She left Nadya at the Poteshny Palace and crossed the lane, home to the Horse Guards.
Nadya went to her room, dropping the tea rose from her hair at the door. The dining room, with a special table for Stalin’s array of government telephones, was the main room there. Two halls led off it. To the right was Stalin’s office and small bedroom where he slept either on a military cot or a divan, the habits of an itinerant revolutionary. Stalin’s late hours and Nadya’s strict attendance at the Academy meant they had separate rooms. Carolina Til, the housekeeper, the nannies and the servants were further down this corridor. The left corridor led to Nadya’s tiny bedroom where the bed was draped in her favourite shawls. The windows opened onto the fragrant roses of the Alexandrovsky Gardens.
Stalin’s movements in the next two hours are a mystery: did he return home? The party continued chez Voroshilov. But the bodyguard Vlasik told Khrushchev (who was not at the dinner) that Stalin left for a rendezvous at his Zubalovo dacha with a woman named Guseva, the wife of an officer, described by Mikoyan, who appreciated feminine aesthetics, as “very beautiful.” Some of these country houses were just fifteen minutes’ drive from the Kremlin. If he did go, it is possible he took some boon companions with him when the women went to bed. Voroshilov’s wife was famously jealous of her husband. Molotov and President Kalinin, an old roué, were mentioned afterwards to Bukharin by Stalin himself. Certainly Vlasik would have gone with Stalin in the car. When Stalin did not come home, Nadya is said to have called the dacha.
“Is Stalin there?”
“Yes,” replied an “inexperienced fool” of a security guard.
5
She became director of a gramophone factory from which she was sacked many years later for taking bribes. She lived until 1998 but never spoke about her short friendship with Stalin.
6
Another of his sweethearts was a young Party activist, Tatiana Slavotinskaya. The warmth of his love letters from exile increased in proportion to his material needs: “Dearest darling Tatiana Alexandrovna,” he wrote in December 1913, “I received your parcel but you really didn’t need to buy new undergarments… I don’t know how to repay you, my darling sweetheart!”