“WHAT WONDERFUL TIMES THOSE WERE,’ EKATERINA VOROSHILOVA wrote in the 1950s, nostalgically remembering the social life of the team back when Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s young second wife, was alive. “What simple, genuinely good, comradely relations. And it’s incomprehensible almost to the point of pain how, as time passed, life in the party became more complicated, and our mutual relations too.” Kaganovich looked back on the early 1920s, when he first got to know Stalin, with equal affection. He and the others used to work until midnight at the Central Committee offices on Old Square and then go home to the Kremlin together. Kaganovich remembered walking home one winter night with Stalin, Molotov, and Kuibyshev—a cheerful bunch of young revolutionaries, still thin and hungry, with full heads of hair and moustaches. Kaganovich particularly remembered the moustaches, Kirov being the only one of the team without one, until hairless and moustache-less Khrushchev and Beria joined in the 1930s. There was no security detail back then. Stalin, in a fur hat with the earflaps dangling, was laughing and talking along with the rest, cracking jokes. They were a brotherhood of free men, Kaganovich said, using the Russian expression from the days of serfdom, vol’nitsa, which could also mean a gang of outlaws. Although they lived in the Kremlin, like the tsars, they did not see themselves as heirs to the tsars, and had trouble even seeing themselves as rulers.
“Old Bolsheviks” was the term coming into use for the select few who had joined the party before 1917. They were linked by memories of shared underground organization, exile, prison, emigration, and, above all, struggle. Within Stalin’s team in the 1920s, relations were comradely, often friendly. The familiar form of address (ty) was often used even in official correspondence. This was a break with the conventions of the Lenin team, where the familiar form of address was less dominant, notably with regard to Lenin: none of his comrades appears to have addressed him with the familiar form in business correspondence, nor he them. But Lenin was older and more upper-class than the Stalin team, and, moreover, in the 1920s Stalin was not a Lenin to his circle. Many of them used the familiar form in writing to him, as they did to one another, and continued to do so well into the 1930s. According to Mikoyan, those who were on familiar terms with Stalin were himself, Ordzhonikidze, Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Bukharin, and Kamenev. Molotov and Voroshilov often addressed Stalin as Koba in letters, Mikoyan as Soso, a Georgian diminutive for Joseph.1
By the early 1930s, some of the team had put on weight and a few were losing hair, but the casual military mode of dress remained in fashion for a few more years, and so did the informal habits within the team. To subordinates, the team favored a quasi-military tone of command, gruff and peremptory, sometimes abusive (Kaganovich was the past master of this); with common people, the preferred manner was simple, kindly, and approachable, a style set by the homespun Kalinin; and with one another, they behaved as comrades and in many cases as friends. Stalin’s repudiation of friendship in politics (in connection with his fight with Bukharin) should not be taken too seriously. Friendship meant a lot to him (which is not to say that he couldn’t be disloyal), and in the beginning, it was one of the things cementing his team. This changed after the deaths of Kirov (in 1934) and Ordzhonikidze (in 1936), and under the impact of the Great Purges, which inhibited and corrupted personal relations within the team. Yet even after the purges, Stalin continued to rely on team members for companionship, and would do so until the end of his life. Like most of the team (Rudzutak and Kuibyshev, preferring the artistic milieu, were exceptions), his own friendships and social contacts were primarily with other Old Bolsheviks, in addition to family, and after his wife’s death at the end of 1932, he relied on the team all the more.
The social core of the team in social terms were the “Caucasians,” comprising two Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze) and one Armenian (Mikoyan), plus two (Voroshilov and Kirov) who had served on the Southern Fronts and bonded with the ethnic Caucasians during the Civil War. These five were personally close in a way none of them were to Molotov, an uxorious man to whom male camaraderie did not come naturally, although the Stalins and the Molotovs had got on well when they shared an apartment together in the Kremlin in the early 1920s. The Ordzhonikidzes, along with Bukharin and his 1920s partner Esfir Gurvich and the Georgian Avel Enukidze (Nadya’s godfather), seem to have been the closest family friends of the Stalins in the later 1920s, along with Leningrad-based Kirov, whose presence was less frequent.
Ordzhonikidze, a man with a warm personality and a gift for friendship, was a general favorite. Almost everyone on the team used the familiar form with him, and his particularly close friends, such as Kaganovich and Mikoyan, often added an endearment. He was punctilious about remembering to ask about the welfare of wives and children, and to send greetings to them. The other general favorites were Kirov, Mikoyan, and, until the great bust-up, Bukharin. Kirov was friendly with Kuibyshev (whom he knew from prison in Tomsk in 1909), Bukharin, and Tomsky, as well as Ordzhonikidze and both Stalins (he had known Nadya from childhood, being an old friend of her father’s). The Voroshilovs were friendly with the Kaganoviches and Andreevs, as well as the Mikoyans, and Bukharin and Voroshilov were close. The bachelor Rudzutak was friendly with Rykov and Tomsk, and sometimes went hunting with Voroshilov. Kuibyshev had been friends with Mikoyan and Kirov since the Civil War; he was also on good terms with the Andreevs, particularly after their daughter married his son. Andreev was close to Kalinin (who was also a favorite of Mikoyan’s) and quite friendly with Ordzhonikidze and Voroshilov.2
In the early 1920s, much of the team’s socializing took place in the Kremlin, where the erstwhile revolutionaries and their wives and children were in and out of one another’s modest quarters, much as they had been in the old days of share-flats and casual bunking wherever there was a bed or a floor. The Molotovs were an exception to this pattern; other wives sometimes had cutting things to say about Polina’s bourgeois inclinations. Later, dachas became centers of team social life, particularly Stalin’s at Zubalovo, which was not far from the dachas of the Mikoyans, Voroshilovs, and Svanidzes (Alyosha Svanidze was Stalin’s brother-in-law by his first marriage). Stalin welcomed the company, both for himself and his young children, Vasily (Vasya) and Svetlana. The Ordzhonikidzes were often at Stalin’s dacha, along with the Mikoyans (with their five young sons, a major social presence), the Voroshilovs, the Kaganoviches, the Andreevs, and the Molotovs. Bukharin was often there after he became an intimate of Stalin’s and friend of Nadya’s in the mid-1920s. So was Avel Enukidze, who in addition to being Nadya’s godfather was an old friend of Stalin’s from the prerevolutionary Caucasus underground who had known him back in seminary days. Kirov came when he was in town, as did Pavel Postyshev, a hero of the struggle in the Far East during the Civil War who worked with Stalin as a Central Committee secretary in the early 1930s, and his wife, Tatyana.
The Stalins and their guests played tennis, billiards, bowls, and chess; skied; went horseback riding; danced to the gramophone; sang; drank Georgian wine; and played with their own and other people’s children. Kirov and Molotov danced Russian dances with their wives; Voroshilov danced the Ukrainian hopak. Athletic young Mikoyan performed the Caucasian lezghinka, “kicking his legs in front of [Stalin’s wife] Nadya, trying to persuade her to join him,” while she “shyly covered her face with her hand” as the dance demands (but she really was shy and demure). Stalin was not much of a dancer, but he liked acting as DJ and putting the records on.
There were lots of Georgian relatives around, in-laws from both of Stalin’s marriages: Svanidzes from the first (his young first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died after only a year of marriage in 1907), Allilyuevs from the second. Ekaterina’s brother Alyosha Svanidze, deputy chairman of the State Bank, was a particular friend of Stalin’s; in the 1930s he often used to stay overnight with Stalin at the dacha to keep him company. Svanidze had a son called John-Reed (named for the famous American Leftist who wrote Ten Days that Shook the World) with his wife Maria, a former actress with a worshipful and proprietorial attitude toward Stalin, whose diary carefully chronicled who was at his dacha. In November 1934, for example, it was Kaganovich, Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, and the new team member Andrei Zhdanov, plus “the kids,” Vasya and Svetlana Stalin, Tomik Sergeev (Stalin’s adopted son and Vasya’s companion), and John-Reed (Johnny) Svanidze. The next month, Stalin’s fifty-fifth birthday was celebrated at the dacha with “all his close friends, that is, people with whom he not only works with but meets informally,” including the Molotovs, Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze, the Andreevs, Enukidze, Mikoyan, the Ukrainian Vlas Chubar and wife, Beria (up from the Caucasus), and Kalinin, along with a bunch of Stalin’s relatives: Maria, with husband and son; Nadya’s sister Anna Alliluyeva, with husband Stanislav Redens, head of the Moscow NKVD; and Nadya’s brother Pavel Alliluyev, a military man, and his wife Zhenya. Mikoyan was toastmaster for the first half of the evening, Ordzhonikidze for the second; the Caucasians harmonized on some melancholy songs, with “the boss” on tenor.3
Wives and children were an important part of this lively company. Most of the long-established partners were Old Bolsheviks themselves, with their own jobs and professional interests. A number (Polina Zhemchuzhina-Molotova, Maria Kaganovich, Ekaterina Voroshilova, Dora Khazan-Andreeva, Evgenia Kogan-Kuibysheva, Maria Markus-Kirova) were Jewish, although all except Kaganovich’s wife were married to Slavs. A few had substantial careers of their own. Polina Molotova, usually called by her party name Zhemchuzhina, worked in a perfume factory in the 1920s, rose from party secretary to director, went on to build an entire cosmetics industry in the 1930s, and later served as deputy minister of light industry and minister for fisheries. Mikoyan thought highly of her abilities, as did Stalin, and she was the only one of the wives allowed to attend formal receptions, when such things started to matter in the years before the war. Maria Kaganovich headed the garment workers’ trade union.
Kalinin’s wife Ekaterina Lorberg was a manager in the textile industry in the 1920s, and later worked in the Russian Supreme Court. Industrial management jobs also awaited Dora Khazan and Nadya Alliluyeva when they finished their studies at the Industrial Academy. Nadya didn’t live long enough to graduate, but Dora rose to head a wool industry body, becoming, like Polina Zhemchuzhina, a deputy minister of light industry. Bukharin’s 1920s partner, Esfir Gurvich, graduated from the Institute of Red Professors and later became a doctor of economics. Kuibyshev’s second wife, Evgenia Kogan, held senior positions in the Moscow Party Committee; his fourth wife (Olga Lezhava) ended up as deputy director of an industrial research institute. In the younger cohort joining the team in the mid-1930s, two had serious professional careers. Malenkov’s wife Valeria Golubtsova became director of the Moscow Power Institute after graduating in engineeering, while Beria’s wife Nina was a chemist who, after their move to Moscow in the late 1930s, held a scientific research position at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy.4
A number of Bolshevik leaders’ wives worked in the Russian education ministry, but the most senior of them—deputy ministers Nadezhda Krupskaya and Varvara Yakovleva, along with Zinoviev’s first wife, Zlata Lilina, who headed the Leningrad education department—were Zinovievites, not members of Stalin’s team. Kamenev’s first wife, Olga Kameneva, similarly, had a higher status in cultural administration as head of VOKS, the Society for Cultural Ties Abroad, than any of the wives of the Stalin team. But a number of those wives did hold humbler positions in the “soft” employment sectors like cultural administration, propaganda and party history, women’s departments, and museums, where women tended to congregate. Ekaterina Voroshilova worked for many years in the Higher Party School (Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, remembered that in the postwar period, when Zinaida Zhdanova was working there too, young people joked that they were there as “visual aids to learning the history of the CPSU”). But her job was important to Voroshilova: as she wrote late in life, she worked “for moral comfort, so as not to seem just a housewife.” Teaching had been the prerevolutionary profession of a number of Old Bolshevik wives, including the two housewives among the team wives in the 1920s, Zina Ordzhonikidze and Ashkhen Mikoyan. Nina Kucharchuk-Khrushcheva, also a former teacher, went into party work in a factory after the Khrushchevs moved to Moscow but gave it up when her youngest son Sergei was born in 1935.
The wives had their own social connections, partly interwoven with those of their husbands, partly separate. Zina Ordzhonikidze and the younger Ashkhen Mikoyan, like their husbands, seem to have been general favorites and centers of social life. Nadya Alliluyeva is widely claimed and reported as a friend—of Polina Zhemchuzhina, Zina Ordzhonikidze, Ashkhen Mikoyan, and Dora Khazan, among others—but this is probably more a function of Stalin’s status and the Stalins’ dacha as a center of socializing than of Nadya’s character, which was reserved and not given to warmth. She wrote to her sister-in-law Maria Svanidze in 1926 that “it’s strange, but I haven’t made any good friends [in Moscow] after all these years,” adding that as far as women were concerned, she preferred those who were not party members. The bossy and elegant Polina Zhemchuzhina was not particularly popular with the other wives, and Nina Beria didn’t fit in well with the women either: “she was young and beautiful and all the other Politburo wives hated her.” On the other hand, Stalin really liked her, and so did his daughter, Svetlana, as she grew up, despite an aversion to Nina’s husband.5
The wives were not prudes, or at least hadn’t been once, as they were of the revolutionary generation that saw marriage as a bourgeois patriarchal convention. Marriages were not necessarily registered: that exemplary couple, the Mikoyans, never registered their marriage despite five children, and neither did Bukharin and his second and probably third wives. Stalin and Nadya lived together for several years before registering their marriage; Khrushchev and his wife Nina were together from the early 1920s but didn’t register until the 1960s. Polina Zhemchuzhina was one of the most emancipated of the Stalin team’s women: she and Molotov probably had an open marriage, though a devoted and long-lasting one, and she had a daughter from another relationship. Even those wives who later became extremely respectable “Soviet ladies,” like Ekaterina Voroshilova and Zinaida Zhdanova, had had their own sexual and marital adventures earlier. But as mores tightened up in the 1930s, affairs on the part of the wives—though not necessarily the husbands—became rarer. Even in the relatively liberated 1920s, there was usually a degree of censoriousness when an Old Bolshevik man left an Old Bolshevik wife for a younger woman, as Kuibyshev, Bukharin, and Kamenev did. In Kuibyshev’s case, the first of the younger women, his second wife, Galina Troyanovskaya, was the daughter of Stalin’s old friend Alexander Troyanovsky, and Stalin was furious when he heard that Kuibyshev had walked out on her after she became ill.6
Many of the team’s children were born after the revolution, and, as was normal in Russia in this period of upheaval, their households also included adopted children. Often these were the offspring of fallen comrades, like Artem (Tomik) Sergeev, taken into Stalin’s household as a companion for his son Vasily, or the sons of martyred Baku Commissar Sergei Shaumyan, whom the Mikoyans adopted, or the son and daughter of military commander Mikhail Frunze, Timur and Tatyana, who were consigned to the Voroshilovs’ care by the Politburo after their parents’ death in the mid-1920s. The Ordzhonikidze’s daughter Eteri, the Voroshilovs’ Petr, and the Tomsky’s Yury were adopted too, and the Kaganoviches’ Yury was reportedly selected in an orphanage by their teenage daughter Maya.
The Kremlin children grew up together, though not always in harmony. It was said that Polina Zhemchuzhina feared the bad influence of the noisy Mikoyan boys on her delicately raised Svetlana, one of the best students in the group. The Mikoyan boys and Andreev’s son and daughter went to School No. 32 (under Krupskaya’s special patronage and famous for its educational progressivism), mingling there with children of intelligentsia luminaries and foreign Communists. The two Svetlanas, Stalina and Molotova, went to the equally famous and admired School No. 25, where their fellow schoolmates included the American singer Paul Robeson’s son. Vasya went there too, causing distress to his teachers, whom Stalin urged to forget he was Stalin’s son and to discipline him severely. The team members were “uncles” to the Kremlin children, often with affection on both sides: Sergo Beria had fond memories of both Stalin and Kirov from his youth. Svetlana Stalin, whose postdefection memories were in general less fond, acknowledged that Kaganovich, Molotov, and Ordzhonikidze had been “uncles” to her in childhood, and Mikoyan and Khrushchev were also fond of her and tried to look out for her in later life. As a child, Svetlana and her father played a game in which he called her “the boss” (khoziaika) and assumed the role of her “secretary.” Kaganovich also played this game with Svetlana (“I made a report to our boss-girl today,” he wrote to Stalin in Crimea when Svetlana, left back in Moscow, was nine. “It seems that Svetlana found our activity satisfactory. She is in a good mood. Tomorrow she will start school”).7
In the real world, where Kaganovich, as party secretary, answered to Stalin, not Svetlana, the team was relatively stable in the years after the jettisoning of the Right, despite the strains put upon it by the Great Break. The Politburo elected in July 1930 had Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Kirov, Kalinin, Kuibyshev, Stanislav Kosior (general secretary of the Ukrainian party), and Rudzutak as full members. Ordzhonikidze was temporarily off the Politburo because he was head of the party Control Commission and you couldn’t hold both jobs, but he came back on once he began working in industry at the end of the year, at which point Andreev took over the Control Commission for a few years. In such cases, nonmembership of the Politburo was something of a formality: the nonmembers attended its meetings anyway, though not voting. Andreev, along with Mikoyan and the Ukrainians Grigory Petrovsky and Chubar, were candidate members; so also was a new but short-lived young favorite of Stalin’s from Siberia, Sergei Syrtsov. None of the Ukrainians, occupied with their jobs in Ukraine, were regular attendees of Politburo meetings in Moscow. Nor was Leningrad-based Kirov, but his status as team member was much firmer than the marginal Ukrainians. Pavel Postyshev, a Central Committee secretary in the early 1930s, was a regular attendee at formal Politburo meetings, as well as the informal ones in Stalin’s office, when he was in Moscow, and thus functioned as a team member during this period. Yakov Yakovlev, the agriculture minister, was also a regular attendee at Politburo meetings and in Stalin’s office.
As always under Stalin, Politburo membership and team membership were closely related but not identical categories. Stalin stuck to his old habits of gathering an inner circle—“the Five,” “the Seven,” and so on— that included only a chosen group from the Politburo. This offended the newcomer Syrtsov, and he complained that Kuibyshev, Rudzutak, and Kalinin, as well as himself, were excluded from inner-circle consultations. He called it “factionalism,” but that’s probably not the most accurate way of seeing it: the “in” faction could change, so it was basically a way of Stalin exerting control via the power of inclusion/exclusion over his associates. Kuibyshev was actually a fairly frequent visitor to Stalin’s office at this time, about on a par with Ordzhonikidze and Mikoyan, so it’s not clear that Syrtsov’s picture was accurate. Stalin’s closest associates, judging by how often they were in his office, were Molotov and Kaganovich, with Voroshilov in third place. Molotov was indispensable, clearly the team’s assistant captain in these years. Stalin got worried when Molotov planned to go on vacation at the same time that he would be gone in the summer of 1933: evidently, he thought that Kaganovich, who also had Moscow to run, was not enough of a heavyweight to manage alone, and Kuibyshev “might go on a drinking spree.”
Stalin valued his team, as did all its members. This wasn’t necessarily a matter of democracy, though the democratic instinct was not absent. These men had been professional revolutionaries since their teens in most cases; politics was their lives. They were bonded in the team like footballers, embracing in victory, swapping painful reproaches, and putting up with tongue-lashings from the playing coach after defeats. Although Stalin was capable of dressing down team members and playing them off against each other, he nevertheless valued the team and did not want to see its spirit eroded. When Ordzhonikidze had a particularly passionate disagreement in the Politburo with Molotov and Kuibyshev when Stalin was on vacation in the South, Stalin strongly condemned his behavior: the team (he called it “our leading group”) could fall apart that way. “Does he really not understand that on that path he will get no support from our side?” he wrote to Kaganovich, using even more underlinings than usual. “What stupidity!”
In the 1920s, Stalin’s associates, like Stalin himself, had generally had jobs in the party Central Committee office. The government, by contrast, was headed after Lenin’s death by a non-team member, Alexei Rykov, who at the end of the 1920s was part of the Rightist bloc with Bukharin and Tomsky. By the autumn of 1929, Stalin was becoming noticeably unhappy with this situation, especially because, by convention, Politburo meetings were chaired by the head of the government. “Why do you allow this comedy?” Stalin wrote angrily to Molotov from his vacation spot in the South when he noticed that Rykov was still chairing the Monday and Thursday meetings. Yet, true to his principle of dosage, he let the situation drag on for another year. It was not until the autumn of 1930 that he pointed out the obvious: that with Rykov politically disgraced, the government that he headed had become “sick with a fatal illness.” Stalin claimed that it was “paralyzed by Rykov’s insipid and essentially anti-party speeches,” but the truth was such paralysis was the fate of every institution headed by someone in political disfavor. Obviously, however, it was an unacceptable situation, regardless of the truth of Stalin’s allegation that the government was becoming a Rightist factional headquarters “opposing itself to the Central Committee.” The government included the economic ministries that were the keystones in implementation of the First Five-Year Plan. “It’s clear that this cannot go on,” Stalin told Molotov—and indeed, in a few months, Rykov was formally removed.8
But if Rykov was to go, who should head the government? To some members—probably a majority—of the Stalin team, it seemed obvious that Stalin should take over. Mikoyan and Voroshilov both wrote to Stalin urging him to do so, saying that Molotov, Kaganovich, and (with some reservations) Kuibyshev agreed. Lenin had headed the government as well as leading the party and the Comintern, they argued, and Stalin should too—“the leadership is in your hands anyway.” But Stalin had other ideas. He wanted Molotov to take over the job. With Molotov running the government and Stalin running the party in tandem, “we will be able to have complete unity of soviet and party leaderships, which will undoubtedly double our strength.” Molotov was a bit nonplussed by this, uncertain whether he had the necessary authority. Actually he, like Voroshilov, thought Stalin should take over because “that’s what is expected, that’s how it was under Lenin,” who had combined party and state leadership. But Ordzhonikidze, whom Stalin evidently consulted, said it was “rubbish” about the team not accepting Molotov—“we will all support him”—and Molotov thus took over the position that he would hold with distinction for a decade. Molotov was never quite sure why Stalin had balked at assuming Lenin’s mantle at this point: perhaps he wanted to keep up the appearance of separation of party and government, or perhaps he thought the government should be headed by a Russian. In any case, it was a good decision on Stalin’s part, not only because Molotov was an excellent organizer, a hard worker, and a details man, but because Stalin was impatient with administrative detail of the kind the job required.
With Molotov running the government and Ordzhonikidze moving from party control to heavy industry ministry, two of the most senior members of Stalin’s team moved their sphere of activity from party to government. It was an important shift, confirming a trend that had started four years earlier with the appointment of Mikoyan, Rudzutak, and Kuibyshev to major government positions. Now the chief branches of government—industry, economic planning, railways, the military—would all be headed by members of the Politburo, and, conversely, the majority of Politburo members now held government positions. Ordzhonikidze was in charge of heavy industry, Mikoyan of food supply, Kuibyshev of economic planning, and Voroshilov of the military. Railways were under Rudzutak, then Andreev, and later Kaganovich.9
Having specific government responsibilities changed the political behavior of Politburo members. As the drafters of proposed legislation in their areas, they acquired substantial, if circumscribed, power in policy making. Moreover, in budgetary and a host of other discussions, they became advocates of the institutional interests they represented. Ordzhonikidze took the lead, becoming almost overnight a passionate and effective advocate of the needs of heavy industry. But the others behaved in just the same way: Mikoyan represented the interests of supply and defended the food ministry when it was attacked, while Kaganovich did the same for railways. “The industrial people” (khoziaistvenniki) became a frequent term of reference in Stalin and Molotov’s discussions, meaning the industrial lobby in the Politburo and Central Committee. “The military people” (voennye) had a similar valence: Voroshilov was a dedicated defender of the interests of the military within the Politburo, periodically threatening to resign if its budget was cut. There were other kinds of institutional loyalties too, for a number of team members headed key regions and cities rather than ministries (Kosior the Ukraine; Kirov, Leningrad; Kaganovich and later Khrushchev, Moscow), and represented their interests in the Politburo with the same vigor as the industrialists and the military. Sometimes the cities and regions competed with each other, but they could also present a united front, for example, asking for more money for urban services. When Politburo members changed their government jobs—as Kaganovich, for example, did several times—they switched seamlessly from one advocacy position to another.
Only three members of Stalin’s team were outside this pattern of institutional representation. Molotov and Kalinin, respectively, headed the government (Council of People’s Commissars, later Council of Ministers) and the executive committee of the Soviet parliament (later called the Supreme Soviet). Stalin was general secretary of the party. Being above the institutional interests, adjudicating their conflicts, and taking the broader view were central components of Stalin’s leadership in the Politburo. In the early 1930s, when his own attention and that of his team was focused very strongly on rapid economic development requiring major investment, Stalin took on the additional role of budget overseer. When he was out of Moscow, he sent a stream of instructions to Kaganovich to hold the line on budget and resist “special interests” pressure from other members of the team: “You gave too much foreign currency to Vesenkha [the supreme economic council] … If you behave like this, its greed will have no end”; anyway, the industrial people “are rolling in money.” Nor was it only industry that felt Stalin’s razor. He told Kaganovich to limit the military budget for 1933, saying that Voroshilov’s estimate for army expansion was appallingly inflated.
The bureaucracies, in Stalin’s view, were always going to ask for more than they needed. The industrial ministry wanted to “squeeze the state treasury” instead of making its own bureaucracy work better. The agricultural ministry was no better: the aim of local officials was naturally “to squeeze out of the government as much money as possible,” and the ministry was giving in to them. The “bureaucratic self-esteem” of Mikoyan’s supply ministry was boundless. Stalin frequently had to remind Kaganovich to ignore “wailing and hysterics” from the team members when their bureaucratic interests were affected. “You’ll see,” he said, “if we refuse them they will still find ways and possibilities of satisfying their needs.”
Stalin found it natural that people would defend the interests of the institution or branch of the economy they led; indeed, if they had not behaved in this way, he would have lost some of his edge as the team leader who was above special interests. He found it natural, also, that bureaucracies would give false information to protect themselves (though he considered it the duty of the Communists at their heads to sort this out before it reached the Politburo); it was part of the job description for bureaucrats to “lie and play games” and to practice “thin end of the wedge” tactics. If you once gave in to their demands, that became a precedent that they would then use “as a means of pressure” on Moscow.” Stalin was proud of his skill at seeing through the stratagems of bureaucracies and local officials. He regarded himself as a master decoder, able to see through the smokescreen to the real interest that was being prettified or concealed.
When a lower official or even a member of his own team with an institutional interest told Stalin that something was impossible, his immediate response was to suspect the speaker of trying to protect his institution from too much exertion. He saw bureaucracies as naturally prone to entropy, falling back into inertia, retreating from radical policies into moderate “opportunistic” ones if not constantly watched and prodded. To borrow from the Bolshevik lexicon during collectivization, the main danger in policy implementation was not “bending the stick too far” but failing to bend it far enough. Confronted with an example of the latter, the suggestion that kulaks might have the chance to get their civil rights back, Stalin sighed: “I just knew that asses from the petty bourgeoisie and philistines would have to creep into that mouse hole.” In other words, if the officials and politicians were pushed into a radical policy like dekulakization, after a while they inevitably tried to water it down.
Defense of institutional interest was never described as anything but an evil, but in practice it was an important modus operandi within the Politburo and Soviet government. Stalin was suspicious of disagreements within the leadership that stemmed from ideology, and disapproved of those where a personal or family interest was involved, but he took it for granted that team members would defend the interests of the institutions they headed. He might rebuke team members for pushing too hard for his institution, but in his eyes, it was a venial sin—not even a sin, really, but behavior that went with the job. Stalin could even joke about it, as when in 1934, in a convivial mood at the dacha and wanting to persuade his friend Kirov to come over from Leningrad, he called him to say that he had better come immediately to defend Leningrad’s interests after the recent abolition of rationing and consequent likely rises in the price of bread.10
The early 1930s was the time when a Soviet version of the entrepreneurial spirit—the can-do, risk-taking, flamboyant style personified by Ordzhonikidze—ruled in industry. Leadership of this kind included the capacity for energetic and effective advocacy of one’s institutional interest (factory, branch of industry, industrial ministry), the ability to get it on to the endlessly contested priority lists that were crucial in the distribution of Soviet goods. Ordzhonikidze personified this ability, and it was in large part thanks to his dynamic leadership that Soviet industry developed so dramatically in the first half of the 1930s. Of all the team members, he was the most likely to insist on getting his own way and the most capable of throwing fits if he didn’t. Molotov and Stalin often reminded each other to tread carefully because of his volatile temperament and easily injured vanity. But Molotov, after he became head of the government, had frequent problems with Ordzhonikidze’s tendency to act as if his ministry was a totally independent institution; he once protested that it was acting as “a state within a state.” When, in Stalin’s absence, these conflicts led to open hostilities between Ordzhonikdze and Molotov in the Politburo, Stalin was indignant at Ordzhonikidze’s “hooliganism”: Who did he think he was to override policy directives from the government and the Central Committee? Equally, why couldn’t Molotov and Kaganovich stop him?
There were limits, of course, to Stalin’s tolerance of overassertiveness on behalf of their bailiwicks by individual team members, and Ordzhonikidze came close to those boundaries. Probably his very success came to annoy Stalin: by the mid-1930s, Ordzhonikidze was worshipped by “his people” in industry, and industrial plants and projects under his jurisdiction were clamoring to be named after him. Relations with Stalin soured in the last years of Ordzhonikidze’s life, and his suicide in 1937 occurred immediately after a serious disagreement with Stalin. These disagreements involved institutional interest but also something to which Stalin paid particular attention: personnel. Ordzhonikidze had long annoyed Stalin by his habit of vigorously defending any of his subordinates who fell under NKVD suspicion, and in 1936 this was happening increasingly often, notably with the arrest of his indispensable deputy, the former Oppositionist Yury Pyatakov. Worst of all, from Stalin’s point of view, Ordzhonikidze would not accept the team convention that you didn’t defend your own family members. When his brother was targeted by the NKVD, he defended him with passion, and was furious when Stalin refused to rescue him.11
Stalin was a suspicious man. He was suspicious even of his own team, particularly those who were not at a given moment at the core of the inner circle. He kept tabs on them, encouraged informing, liked to keep them off balance, and sometimes set traps for them. He often told them (particularly Molotov and Kaganovich) what he was up to in his many political intrigues, but this could not be relied on. When he felt like it, Stalin was a master of the blatant lie. During collectivization, for example, he blamed lower officials (“dizzy with success”) for the excesses of collectivization that the center had pushed them into, and a year or so later, in the midst of an unprecedented population outflow from the villages to escape collectivization, he could calmly announce that under Soviet power the peasant no longer felt a need to flee the countryside. These lies were for public consumption, of course, though team members better informed about the countryside from firsthand observation might hesitate to approach the subject, just in case Stalin actually believed his public statements. He could practice “conspiracy”—a concept and set of practices dear to the Bolsheviks—not only with respect to the broader world but even with respect to the team. It was “in the interests of conspiracy” that in 1930 he instructed his secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev to tell people he would not be back from vacation until the end of October, although in fact it was his intention to return several weeks earlier. This caused problems with Nadya, who, on the basis of information from her godfather, Avel Enukidze, thought she was the one who had been misled. Stalin had to write reassuringly to her explaining his conspiratorial strategy. “I put about the rumor through Poskrebyshev … Avel evidently fell victim to [it].” Some of the inner circle, however, had been trusted: “Tatka [Stalin’s pet name for Nadya], Molotov and, I think, Sergo know the [real] date of my return.”12
There were moments of affection and trust between Stalin and his wife, but they were increasingly few. Their relationship had long been rocky because of his preoccupation with work and her jealousy. She rarely accompanied him on his annual trips to the South, and their correspondence when he was away was sparse and, on Nadya’s part, cold and hostile. Pregnant with a second child in 1926, she made it clear in a letter to her sister-in-law that the last thing she wanted at this time was another child tying her to Stalin and domestic duties. After Svetlana was born, Nadya apparently tried to leave Stalin, taking the two small children with her to Leningrad (where her parents still lived) and “hoping to find a job there and make a new life for herself,” but was persuaded to return, partly through the good offices of Tomsky’s wife Maria on Stalin’s behalf. In the last years of her life, Nadya was in poor health, mental as well as physical. Her studies at the Industrial Academy should have opened new opportunities for the future. But they may also have increased the psychological strain, as these were the years of agricultural crisis, and the academy was full of Rightists who disapproved of Stalin’s policies. What she learned from her fellow students about opposition with the party, arrests, and the situation in the countryside, along with the hounding of Bukharin, who had been a friend, no doubt increased her critical attitude to her husband, although she kept her own counsel and hard evidence of her political views is difficult to find. Her daughter, Svetlana, later remembered her nanny telling her that Nadya was irritated by visits from her mother and sister, Anna, “because these good-hearted, open women demanded openness from her.”13
The last straw came at an evening party at the Voroshilovs’ apartment in the Kremlin. Stalin was flirting with someone—the glamorous wife of General Egorov, Galina, according to Molotov’s recollections—and Nadya stamped out in a rage. Polina Zhemchuzhina followed, walking her around the Kremlin until she seemed to calm down and went home to bed. But once at home, alone, her distress evidently returned, and she shot herself with a little pistol her brother Pavel had brought back as a souvenir from Berlin. The date was 9 November 1932. Her motives, and even the fact that it was suicide, are uncorroborated; no note is known to have been left. Although rumors that Stalin had murdered her started immediately, there is no evidence of this, and the behavior of family and associates after her body was discovered the next morning suggests that they all believed it to be suicide. Six-year-old Svetlana didn’t know what had happened, but remembered Uncle Klim (Voroshilov) taking her and Vasya out to play that morning, when everything at home was so strangely out of kilter, and everyone was weeping.
Stalin’s reactions are variously reported, but grief, guilt, and a sense of betrayal were evidently all present. Long after the event, Molotov reported hearing Stalin mutter at the graveside, “I didn’t keep her safe”—an uncharacteristically sentimental statement from Stalin, but by the same token uncharacteristic of Molotov, so it may be true. Svetlana remembered that for a long time her father was “thrown out of equilibrium,” wouldn’t talk about her mother, and seemed to take her death as a hostile act (the last is perhaps hindsight, as she was almost grown-up before she learned that it had been a suicide). His personal life was hard since Nadya’s death, Stalin acknowledged, but “a brave man must always be brave.” Since he wrote this more than a year after the event, however, to a mother whom he kept at more than arm’s length, it tells us little about his inner feelings.
In a political culture that avoided public comment on the leaders’ private lives, there were no precedents about how to announce such a death, but it was handled with surprising openness. The Central Committee’s notice of her death in Pravda described Nadezhda Alliluyeva as “an active and devoted party member” and student at the Industrial Academy, who had died “unexpectedly.” That implied sudden illness, accident, or suicide, but top party officials, at least in Moscow, were officially informed that it was suicide. Rumors flew around regardless: in the Industrial Academy, Nadya’s fellow students were saying that Stalin had shot her, either out of jealousy or because of political disagreements. The funeral, at 11:00 AM on 11 November at Novodevichy Cemetery, was open to the public, and documentary film footage shows an expressionless Stalin and twitchy Voroshilov standing by the open coffin as ordinary people, mainly young women, file past. Nadya’s godfather Enukidze headed the funeral commission, which included Dora Khazan, the Politburo wife who was her friend and fellow student; Kaganovich spoke. In an unprecedented move, never to be repeated, the main tribute to the deceased was signed by Politburo members and their wives, though as not all of the wives used their husbands’ names, they were not necessarily identifiable as such to the public. The wives who signed were Ekaterina Voroshilova, Polina Zhemchuzhina (Molotova), Zinaida Ordzhonikidze, Dora Khazan (Andreeva), Maria Kaganovich, Ashkhen Mikoyan, and Tatyana Postysheva—the last something of an anomaly, as her husband Pavel (also a signatory) was a Central Committee secretary but not a Politburo member. Their tribute was the only one to identify Nadya as “wife, close friend and faithful helper of comrade Stalin.”14
Nadya’s death marked the end of Voroshilova’s “wonderful times” for the team. The year that followed was a terrible one for the party and the country. The annual battle with the peasantry about grain deliveries, which had been running since collectivization, was particularly tense in the autumn of 1932. Mass arrests and deportations, incompetence on part of newly formed collective farms, and foot-dragging on the part of angry peasants, meant that the harvest, which in weather terms should have been good, was going to be mediocre. Traveling through the Northern Caucasus and Ukraine in July, Voroshilov was appalled to see the fields full of weeds, and peasants approaching their work “listlessly.” “Why won’t people work properly, in a socialist way?” he wrote to Stalin sadly, admitting that his “soul aches” from what he had seen.
Stalin had his own version of what was happening. The peasants were staging a go-slow strike, issuing a political challenge to the regime that was no less dangerous because it avoided open revolt. After Nadya’s death, a heightened note of paranoia is evident in his comments in the weeks on the situation in the countryside. As far as Ukraine was concerned, the failure of peasants to deliver grain, the alleged famine, and the flight of starving peasants from the stricken countryside were the work of Polish spies infiltrating across the border. Stalin was beside himself at the failure of Communists in Ukraine to see things his way (though in fact few were brave enough to express their disagreements openly), and furious at Ukrainian bosses Kosior and Chubar.
“Things in the Ukraine are terrible,” he wrote to Kaganovich, but he didn’t have starving peasants in mind. They were “terrible in the party,” with district committees saying grain collection targets were unrealistic (obviously a self-serving lie), “terrible in the soviet organs,” “terrible in the GPU.” Polish agents had infiltrated the Ukrainian party, as well as sending their agents into the Ukrainian countryside: “If we don’t make an effort now to improve the situation in the Ukraine, we may lose the Ukraine. Keep in mind that [Polish dictator] Pilsudski is not daydreaming, and his agents in the Ukraine are many times stronger than [Stanislav] Redens [police chief in Ukraine] or Kosior think.” New leadership was called for, Stalin told Kaganovich and Molotov in the summer of 1932. As usual, however, he went at this gingerly in practice, perhaps fearful of antagonizing the half-million-strong Ukrainian party. Chubar was called to Moscow to be one of Molotov’s deputies at the head of the government in 1934, but, although a similar honorific exile to the capital was contemplated for Kosior, he in fact stayed on as first secretary of the Ukrainian party until the Great Purges (which is not to say that Stalin had forgotten his disappointment with him). To whip the republic into line, Stalin sent out Pavel Postyshev to serve as his eyes and ears in Ukraine. Formally, Postyshev was Kosior’s subordinate as second secretary of the Ukrainian party, but increasingly he functioned there as top man.15
There was equally bad news from Kazakhstan, another major agricultural region, where attempts to forcibly settle the nomadic Kazakhs on collective farms had led to starvation of men and cattle, and mass flight into neighboring regions and across the border into China. The dire situation there was known to the team, as most of them had received a long, detailed report from a brave local colleague, but it made little impact on them. Kazakhstan was far away. Its closest neighbor, chaotic and decentralized China, did not represent the same kind of threat that Poland, as spearhead of the Western capitalists, did. Fleeing and starving Kazakhs were not visible from the Kremlin, whereas those from Ukraine sometimes even made it to Moscow, despite transport minister Andreev’s order that nobody from the Ukrainian countryside without special authorization should be sold train tickets, and that the OGPU should inspect all trains from Ukraine at the Russian border for stowaways.
Officials in Ukraine and other affected areas tried to get the message to Moscow that the peasants couldn’t be made to deliver more grain because they had no more to bring and were already digging into their own winter foodstocks and the grain set aside for spring planting. But Stalin would have none of it. He was proud of his shrewdness and the way he never let local officials get away with exaggerating problems so that Moscow would lower its demands. They’re all pretending, he insisted; they still have grain hidden away and are intentionally concealing it so as to starve the Soviet cities and demoralize the army. This notion of pretending was taken up by the press, which ran some extraordinary stories about peasants “staging a ‘famine,’” acting the part of victims, even starving their families “to make propaganda.” If the peasants’ hunger was just acting, in Stalin’s opinion, their anti-Soviet intentions were for real. It’s a “war of starvation” that the peasantry was waging against the regime, he told the writer Mikhail Sholokhov, who had written to inform him about the terrible situation in his homeland in the Cossack region of the Don; these peasants were not the innocent, suffering victims he supposed. In other words, it wasn’t Stalin waging war against the peasants but the other way around.
Collectivization had rescued poor peasants from exploitation, given them tractors and combine harvesters, created the collective farms as a “solid foundation” for their lives, and rescued them from the ever-present threat of ruin, Stalin told the Central Committee in January 1933, the height of the famine. There was no mention of hunger in his speech. Indeed, the term “famine” was taboo in the Soviet press and evidently within the team as well. The rosy picture wasn’t how it looked to officials on the spot, of course, not to mention peasants, who deluged the party leaders with letters about their plight. One Ukrainian regional party organization, not yet under good Stalinist control, issued a desperate order in February 1933 ordering local party committees “to eliminate rapidly extreme exhaustion among collective and individual farmers resulting from severe malnutrition” and put “all who have become completely disabled because of emaciation … back on their feet” by March 5. This miracle was to be achieved by feeding them, although with all cities on strict rationing by this time, no hint was given as to where the extra food was to be obtained.16
The team was not ignorant of the situation in the countryside, though the degree of their information varied. Like Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich presumably read the situation as a fight to break the anti-Soviet spirit of the peasantry and miscalculated how tough they could be without causing the economically undesirable outcome of mass death. Molotov and Kaganovich were sent out to troublespots time after time to get out the grain, which led to their posthumous conviction by a Kiev court in post-Soviet times, along with Stalin, of the crime of genocide in Ukraine famine (Holodomor). Decades later Molotov was still denying the severity of the famine. He had twice visited Ukraine at the height of the problems, he told an interviewer, and had seen “nothing of the kind.” But others on the team probably wavered. Kalinin, known as the peasants’ friend, was a prime recipient in his own right of desperate letters from peasants, and as head of the Supreme Soviet, he and his deputy Enukidze were flooded with information about and petitions from the social casualties of the Great Break; in May 1932, he voted against yet another kulak deportation, thus anticipating Stalin’s change of policy by a few weeks. After his annual trip South in August 1933, Voroshilov reiterated his distress at the sight of the empty, ravaged steppe, writing to Enukidze that it looked as it had after Genghis Khan or the White general Kolchak swept through in the Civil War.
Of all the great and terrible events the team was involved in over thirty years, the famine is the one on which the team said least, either at the time or later. None of them appear to have gone out on a limb for aid to starving peasants. Even in the 1970s, the subject was so touchy for Molotov that, when a sympathetic interviewer cited critical opinions on Moscow’s handling of the famine, he burst out that these were the petty bourgeois ideas of Communists who came along to an easy life when the hard stuff had already been done. In a later conversation, he added, more moderately, “I understand the … writers [who bemoan the suffering of the peasantry]: they are sorry for the peasant. But what can you do? There was no way of getting through it without sacrifices.” Khrushchev, who wrote at some length about the 1946–47 famine in Ukraine, which he had to deal with firsthand, said little about 1933–34 when he was far away in Moscow. There was “hunger in the land,” he knew, but as the man in charge of the city of Moscow, his preoccupations were local; he was “looking for ways to feed the working class.”
Stalin didn’t go out on regional inspection tours after the famous one of 1930, but he did make annual vacation trips to the South, which took him through famine territory in the North Caucasus. He could, like Voroshilov, have seen the devastation out the train window, but if he did, he chose not to comment. For several years, his stance was that the problem was basically disobedience and hostility to the regime, so massive repression was the answer. In addition to the huge number of peasants arrested and deported in 1930–31, an infamous law of 7 August 1932, said to be Stalin’s own work, declared collective farm property to be the “sacred and untouchable” property of the state and introduced the death penalty for any peasant, starving or not, who tried to steal grain from the fields. Large numbers of party and state officials, and collective farm chairmen in the countryside, were also arrested for failing to deal with the peasants and get the grain in—so many, in fact, that it left the countryside denuded of cadres and forced the authorities to issue a general annulment of such convictions in 1935. Stalin and Molotov, typically, had already done a volte-face (Stalin’s tactic with “Dizzy with Success” in 1930, to be repeated many times in the future), repudiating past policies without acknowledgment or apology and putting the blame for “excesses” on local officials: a secret instruction of 8 May 1933, not discussed beforehand in the Politburo, abruptly called off the “mass repressions” and deportations in the countryside. Although Molotov, as head of the government, had his signature on the instruction, along with Stalin’s, it has the ring of Stalin’s characteristic chutzpah.17
As Stalin’s maximalist policies had led to famine in the countryside and a tense situation in the towns, now overcrowded and on rationing, it is scarcely surprising that subterranean criticism of the leaders started to circulate. Kalinin came in for some special odium, as the “peasants’ friend” who had let them down, but Stalin was the major target of scathing comments and satirical songs about him that circulated widely in the countryside. Stalin was held personally responsible for the harshness of collectivization, and his rule was often compared unfavorably to Lenin’s. According to one popular anti-Stalin song, “When Lenin lived they fed us, / When Stalin came, they tormented us with hunger.” “Things would have been otherwise had Lenin lived, a man with higher education and much experience of life, but Stalin unfortunately does not have that,” was one of the comments the OGPU, snooping in the villages, picked up. If that one ever got to Stalin, it would have been peculiarly irritating: backward peasants were not meant to call the great socialist modernizer uncultured.
Anti-Stalin sentiments were being expressed in party circles as well. The most notorious instance was an underground manifesto written by Martemyan Ryutin, a second-tier Communist official who had been expelled from the party for Rightism in 1930. The thrust of Ryutin’s criticism was that Stalin had carried out a Bonapartist coup and made himself dictator. His policies had put the regime on a collision course with the peasants, and it was time to get rid of him. Stalin was clearly very irked by this criticism, though the rumor that Stalin demanded the death sentence for Ryutin (who got ten years in prison) but was voted down in the Politburo has not been confirmed by archival research. His touchiness was already evident at the end of 1930, when criticisms of the leadership by former Stalin protégé Sergei Syrtsov and Beso Lominadze, an old friend of Ordzhonikidze’s, were under discussion. Stalin complained bitterly that Syrtsov and Lominadze found it “necessary to abuse and defame me. Well, that’s their business, let them abuse me. I’m used to it,” he concluded, but clearly the claim was bravado; he minded. He was annoyed with Ordzhonikidze, too. When Postyshev remarked in passing that Syrtsov should have told Ordzhonikidze of his concerns, since Ordzhonikidze was known to be approachable, Stalin interjected, “That’s all he [Ordzhonikidze] does, talk to people,” a barb he later removed from the minutes.18
The issue of Rightist criticism was raised again a month later, when the Politburo and party Control Commission met to deal with the “counterrevolutionary group” of Alexander Smirnov, an Old Bolshevik of peasant origins and former agriculture minister of the Russian republic who had been demoted, presumably for Rightism, to a lesser job in forestry in 1930; and Nikolai Eismont, who had worked in trade and supply under Mikoyan. Though the OGPU claimed there was a conspiracy, this seemed dubious on the basis of the evidence presented. But evidently Smirnov, Eismont, and others close to them, had expressed dissatisfaction of a kind that was becoming familiar: a mixture of moderate Rightist critiques of policy and hostility to Stalin and his leadership. Stalin again complained that Oppositionists were dumping everything on him, but he said they wouldn’t get away with it, as they were really criticizing the party line. Andreev supported him: “the aim of this group, like the others, is to get rid of comrade Stalin,” and that was completely unacceptable.
The team naturally stood behind Stalin. It was clear, nevertheless, that many of them were uneasy about the counterrevolution accusations, and it may well be that their lack of enthusiasm had the effect of putting the brakes on Stalin’s punitive urges, at least temporarily. Several showed signs of distress and human sympathy toward Smirnov, an old comrade, which was unusual on such occasions. Kuibyshev referred to Smirnov by his nickname, Foma, and said he knew him as a devoted Communist from way back in Narym exile before the revolution: evidently something extraordinary had happened that made the old Foma “completely unrecognizable.” Rudzutak, using the familiar form in addressing Smirnov, said it was “very hard to listen” to his speech. Both these formulations were deeply ambiguous as criticisms. Mikoyan, Eismont’s former boss and therefore potentially at risk of attack himself, stayed out of the discussion until late and then failed to come up with a clear indictment or repudiation; in a short exchange with Smirnov, he too used the familiar form of address. No personal sympathy came from Stalin: though he too had shared the experience of Narym exile with Smirnov: he heckled him (though later removing this from the minutes), using the formal mode of address. The former Rightist leaders Rykov and Tomsky were present at the meeting, not exactly in the dock themselves but on the defensive. (Bukharin had gone off hunting in the Pamirs, his absence prompting some malicious sallies.) Tomsky took most of the heat, but the team seemed divided on whether to treat him as a wayward friend or an emerging enemy. Tomsky was still on familiar (ty) terms with Ordzhonikidze, Kuibyshev, and Kirov, whose criticism of him was notably friendly and almost jocular in tone, but not with Molotov and Kaganovich. At a Central Committee meeting not long after, Voroshilov spoke of his friendship with Tomsky in the past tense, and seemed to feel that he and Rykov were hopeless cases. He was much more optimistic about Bukharin, however, saying that he had been doing “good honest work” recently, and he even hoped that Smirnov would ultimately return to the fold.
Rudzutak made a ringing endorsement of Stalin’s leadership at the January (1933) plenum. “We as members of the Central Committee vote for Stalin because he is ours,” he said. “You won’t find a single instance where Stalin was not in the front rank during the period of the most active, most fierce battle for socialism and against the class enemy. You won’t find a single instance where Comrade Stalin has hesitated or retreated. That is why we are with him. Yes, he vigorously chops off that which is rotten … He is the leader of the most revolutionary, most militant party in the world … And he would not be the leader of the party if he didn’t know how to chop off and destroy that which is slated for destruction.” An even more eloquent tribute came from Voroshilov, who praised Stalin’s magnanimity of spirit, as demonstrated by his personal concern for Rudzutak’s health. The odd thing about Voroshilov’s tribute was that it was written in a private letter to Enukidze, and in such fulsome terms that one wonders if it was really Enukidze he was addressing or (via OGPU perlustration) Stalin. As his wife would later bemoan, the team had had wonderful times together, until “life in the Party became more complicated, and our mutual relations too.” Voroshilov’s letter obliquely demonstrated the change in team relations with Stalin while trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed them. “A remarkable man, our Koba,” he assured Enukidze, an even older friend of Stalin’s than he was, who on the face of it didn’t need to be told about his virtues. “It’s simply unfathomable how he can combine in himself both the great intelligence of a proletarian strategist and equally great state and revolutionary leader and the soul of a quite ordinary, simple, good comrade, understanding every detail, being concerned about everything which relates to the people whom he knows, loves, and values. It’s good that we have Koba!”19