Red Fortress: History and Illusion in the Kremlin (57 page)

In such a system, it was also natural that the elite should have the best. The Kremlin was more exclusive than any club. First, in the early 1920s, came the shop (unimaginatively called ‘Kremlin’), located on the first floor of the former kitchen block, where merchandise could not be viewed, still less purchased, by anyone who did not have a special pass. The closed store turned out to be such a good idea that it was copied, with diminishing levels of opulence, by every public body from the secret police to larger factories and mines.
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To protect the privacy of Kremlin shoppers (especially when the premises moved out to GUM), the windows of the elite store were masked with giant posters of the champions of the world’s hungry and oppressed, Lenin and Marx.
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Next came the private clinics, private spas, and the private canteen. Lydia Shatunovskaya, who lived above the Kremlin canteen in the 1920s, recalled that it was always busy. In the early evening, as another witness, Sergei Dmitrievsky, confirmed, it was as if Moscow’s entire political class was there. The food was traditional and Russian, with home-baked bread and little pies, milk, kvass, and endless cups of tea, but the prices, as Shatunovskaya observed, were ‘practically symbolic’. While Moscow went hungry and the peasants starved, Kremlin diners lingered noisily over greasy soup and cucumbers, their conversation – in this secure place – always turning to the people at the top.
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But hygiene here was little different from the general public norm. It is perversely gratifying to learn that almost every member of this hypocritical elite was ill with something almost all the time.
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Though rumours of the closed shops and the private spas built up the charisma of power, it was vital, in the workers’ state, that the truth remained veiled. No-one was supposed to flaunt their wealth, and no-one could, for nothing was really secure, and the state could take everything away as quickly as it had given it. Even senior politicians and administrators had to petition the head of the Central Executive Commission, Abel Enukidze, for favours such as apartment repairs, sick leave, and the cash and permits for their holidays.
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There were no special, ostentatious robes for Stalin’s incarnation of the Kremlin court, either. ‘The tablecloths are clean,’ Dmitrievsky wrote, ‘but the atmosphere is domestic.’ He doubted that there were more than three dinner-jackets anywhere in the fortress in the 1920s, and Lunacharsky (‘the dandy’) was the only person who wore one regularly. The head of protocol at the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, a man called Florinsky, once tried to make the right impression by travelling to meet a foreign visitor in a borrowed top hat. When a group of boys caught sight of him in a street near the Kremlin they started to cheer, skipping beside his car and shouting: ‘The circus has come, the circus has come!’
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Stories of the domestic, even modest, style of life in the Kremlin are confirmed by almost every source. It was the corrupting miasma of power, rather than wealth alone, that ruined children like Vyacheslav Molotov’s daughter, who began abusing alcohol in her schooldays.
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Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, insisted that her childhood was comfortable but not opulent. ‘The apartment had two rooms for the children and I shared mine with Nanny,’ she wrote. ‘There was no room for pictures on the walls – they were lined with books. In addition there was a library, Nadya’s [Stalin’s wife’s] room, and Stalin’s tiny bedroom in which stood a table of telephones … It was homely, with bourgeois furniture.’
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Many other apartments felt more like sparse hotel-suites, and some seemed distinctly under-furnished, for the better relics from the palaces – fine chairs and sideboards, gilded mirrors and the like – had all been requisitioned and exported by the vultures from the Finance Commissariat.
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‘We lived as if on an island,’ Nami Mikoyan recalled. ‘But it was neither exotic nor luxurious. Behind its red-brick walls, it was more like a comfortable, silent prison.’
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Another resident did add, however, that the service in the citadel was faultless: ‘polite, discreet, modest’.
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In this land of proletarian freedom, the servants who loaded the Kremlin’s wood-burning stoves each morning were asked to wear soft slippers so that the commissars could sleep.
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‘The comfort was apparent,’ Nami Mikoyan remarked, ‘in the cleanliness of the linen.’
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There were maids and there were nurses, and any man in the circle of power could expect dancers and actresses to come and share a glass of wine after a performance. Vlasik and Poskrebyshev loved young women, Enukidze was keen on the ballet, Bonch-Bruevich held legendary parties for the artistic set, and Mikhail Kalinin, the ageing prime minister, was fond of operetta.
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Even the most popular theatrical stars knew that they had no option if they were asked to a late dinner. There were plenty of talented women in the Siberian labour camps.

Liaisons between politicians and attractive female stars were permitted (and, in the hidden eyries of the secret police, welcomed) because they left the perpetrators open to blackmail.
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Scandals, however, were a different affair, for Soviet leaders were expected to present a moral public face. Their most indulgent parties took place safely out of Moscow, in their dachas and at holiday resorts. Everyone knew that Enukidze liked his dancers and that secret-police chief Yagoda was dissolute, but if their private lives stayed out of sight the myth of the good Bolshevik endured. When Kalinin and a glamorous guest, the prima donna Tatiana Balch, were caught in a Moscow city traffic-jam one evening, they paid dearly for their indiscretion. A crowd formed round the marooned car, and citizens, recognizing the politician and the soft-fleshed beauty at his side, began to whistle and to throw insults, followed by stones and lumps of mud.
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Like a naughty schoolboy, the grand old man of Russian politics faced an awkward audience with Stalin the next morning.

It was not the white sheets and the scented soap, then, but access to information and to a stock of patronage that made life in the Kremlin such a prize. To leave the fortress was to lose almost everything. Even in the 1920s, when parts of the citadel were real slums, it had proved near-impossible to move residents out.
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From Bonch-Bruevich to the proletarian poet Demyan Bedny, the Kremlin’s occupants used every guile to hold on to their flats.
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If someone died, there was a stampede to secure their space. In 1931, in an attempt to reduce overcrowding on the hill, some were invited to move into the newly completed House on the Embankment, a luxury apartment block with views over the Moscow river, but the response was very slow. The new place might have had its own spa and closed shops, a clinic and a cinema, and it even boasted central heating and unlimited hot water in place of the Kremlin’s shared old bathrooms and old-fashioned stoves, but everyone knew that the only place for an ambitious politician was inside the fort.

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On the night of 8 November 1932, while her husband was lingering at a Kremlin dinner to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, retreated to her prettily furnished bedroom with its raspberry-pink rug. She was dressed for a party, but she pulled out the rose she had been wearing in her hair. She then threw off the coat that she had donned to take her final, troubled, walk around the palace. Stepping over to the dressing-table where she kept her bottles of Chanel perfume, she picked up the Walther pistol that her brother had sent her from Berlin and shot herself through the heart.
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Stalin did not look for her when he went to bed in his own small chamber, so it was the housekeeper, Karolina Till, who found the body lying in a pool of blood the following morning. ‘It was all so strange,’ recalled Svetlana, who was not yet seven at the time. ‘Suddenly everyone was crying and we were sent away to the dacha, to Zubalovo.’
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Nadezhda had succumbed to depression and strain. She could no longer tolerate the tales of peasant suffering, the deaths, the lies. Stalin did not attend her burial at the Novodevichy Monastery, but the loss struck him more deeply than he ever acknowledged. In the short term, he quit the Kremlin apartment that they had shared (he swapped with Bukharin at first, and then moved into the Senate). More generally, however, the death, which Stalin seems to have experienced as a betrayal, drove him to take extreme measures. As the official news went out that Nadezhda had died of appendicitis, his staff prepared to stifle the truth. Kremlin servants who knew the story were dismissed or arrested one by one. By the end of 1935, it was safe to assume that every cleaner and every cook who served in the citadel reported directly to the secret police. Files in the archive of Nikolai Ezhov, who later headed the Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), show that the campaign to cover up the reasons for Nadezhda’s death began at once and dragged on until the eve of the coming war. Among the victims were the Kremlin commandant, Rudolf Peterson, who was held to account for the fact that the story had leaked at all, and Nadezhda’s godfather, Abel Enukidze, the head of the Central Executive Commission and the man who really ran the Kremlin lives of the elite.

But Stalin’s better-planned campaigns were always designed to hit more than one target. Nadezhda’s death coincided with his long-running vendetta against Lenin’s one-time aides, Lev Kamenev and Grigorii Zinoviev. Neither presented a viable threat to anything in 1932, but Stalin’s preferred tactic was to destroy an enemy completely, not just move him aside. For that reason, the files that the police assembled from the summer of 1933, case by case, included questions that touched on Nadezhda, on Kremlin gossip, but also on the supposed crimes of Stalin’s old foes. Everything was made to connect, and the first that many frightened witnesses (or defendants) would know about the overall design was when an odd, irrelevant and unexpected question came up in their second, third or later police interrogation. By that stage, most would have been too confused to dodge the bullet.

In the summer of 1933, a member of staff in the Central Executive Commission’s library in the Kremlin reported that some people in her team were borrowing foreign journals. One librarian in particular, a former aristocrat with a professional interest in Persia, also appeared to be following too much gossip, to the point of noticing the cars that Party leaders drove. According to her boss, this woman, called Mukhanova, had an interest in signalling systems, and her brother was an engineer. To crown it all, she happened to be a friend of the Kamenevs, and her circle included several former Trotskyists.
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They were all helping each other, sometimes over apartments or food, sometimes over Kremlin passes. Such things were just what the police needed to know.

The case (a web of fabrication) went no further that summer, and it could have ended, like many others, as a file in the vaults of the Lubyanka: stamped, bound and crumbling. Mukhanova, whom her employer described as ‘a typical bourgeois, always ill’, left her job in the Kremlin library in December 1933.
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But the file lay waiting, and in 1935 it was reopened. By then, Sergei Kirov had been murdered, a crime that seemed to prove how devious the regime’s foes could be. Though Kirov had been shot in Leningrad (and his killer was almost certainly a man he had cuckolded
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), Stalin responded by putting the Kremlin into lockdown. The cooks and cleaners had to enter through a different gate and follow new routes on their way to work.
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It was time, at last, to rid the place of every lurking enemy, and Stalin’s men knew just how to do that. Ezhov, who ran the campaign, made frequent private visits to Stalin’s Kremlin office in the Senate building all that spring, no doubt reporting on the tactics and the progress of it all.
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By April 1935, with some prompting from his inquisitors, even the women who mopped the Kremlin floors were calmly admitting that they knew of secret caches of strychnine and hidden guns.

Several birds at once were lined up for the coming stone. As everybody knew, there were still staff in the Kremlin who had worked for the palace in the days of the last tsars. Such retainers, whose appointments owed nothing to the new regime, were no longer regarded as reliable. There were questions, too, about a large number of the rest. The police interrogators of 1935 found that many cleaners and maids had been recruited to the Kremlin in the 1920s through friends and family on the inside.
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The right security checks might have been made, but any small circle of friends was a spy-network in the making, a web of mutual loyalty and protection, owing nothing to the Boss, Stalin. There were also far too many Kremlin passes in circulation generally (another lapse for which the Kremlin commandant, Rudolf Peterson, was soon to pay). The fortress seemed to leak gossip.
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As Stalin read the file on his own staff, the list of reasons to get rid of the whole bunch ran on and on.

In the spring of 1935, the questioning began in earnest. An issue that came up in nearly every file was Nadezhda’s death. A librarian may have heard that Stalin shot her or that she did not die in her sleep. A cleaner might have listened as a guard suggested that she killed herself, perhaps because she disagreed with her husband’s politics but maybe, too, because he beat and insulted her. As they drank their tea in steamy kitchens, some may have reasoned that there must be other plots, and that Nadezhda had simply been the first to die.
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Like most reports of NKVD interrogations, the records are replete with clues about the things that Soviet people were not supposed to be thinking or saying at the time. It was worth noting down, for instance, that a few Kremlin staff had been caught gossiping about the good life that most Europeans seemed to live. There had also been some overt talk (the truth, and therefore very dangerous) about a famine in Ukraine.
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