Only his daughter Svetlana enjoyed the love of her father, but she became a prisoner of the Kremlin. He would call her his "housekeeper" and she would have to sit on his right during working dinners. He had affectionate nicknames for her - "little sparrow" and "little fly" - and his letters to her always ended "I kiss you". He was always kissing her.
A great distance grew between them when Svetlana learnt, through the
Illustrated London
News
, that her mother had not died of appendicitis as she had been told.
Stalin would lose his temper completely if she formed any kind of friendship with a man.
He stopped kissing her - she was not his "clean little girl" any more. When Svetlana defied Stalin, he would talk crudely of her sexual activity in front of her and his male colleagues. He had the NKVD - the forerunner of the KGB investigate her lovers. While she was still a schoolgirl, Stalin discovered that she was having an affair with a middle-aged Jewish film-maker named Aleksei Kapler. He confronted her.
"I know the whole story," he said, brandishing the NKVD file. "I've got all your telephone conversations right here."
"But I love him," she protested.
"Love!" he said, slapping her across the face. "Your Kapler is a British spy. He's under arrest."
Kapler served five years in the mining camps at Vorkuta, in the Arctic Circle.
Stalin was delighted when Svetlana's first marriage broke up, but when she married again soon after, they became estranged. After Stalin died, Svetlana defected to the West. She lived in Britain, America and Switzerland, and after four broken marriages, at the age of 70, she became a nun "to atone for the sins of my father", she said.
While, at the beginning, there were kisses for his daughter, his sons were handled brutally from the outset. Yakov, his son from his first marriage, was treated with contempt, perhaps because he reminded Stalin of his own Georgian origins. He only came to live with his father in the Kremlin at Nadya's insistence. He probably wished he hadn't.
"The boy Yakov was subjected to frequent and severe punishments by his father,"
Trotsky related.
When Yakov tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in 1928 or 1929, Stalin said
callously: "Ha, he couldn't even shoot straight." When he was captured during World War II, Stalin denounced hire w a traitor a s "no true Russian would ever surrender". He refused a German offer to exchange hint oral had Yakov's wife imprisoned.
His younger son, Vasily, was also beaten.
"At home, he would knock the boy down and let him have it with his boots," Svetlana said.
After a disastrous career in the Red Air Force, Vasily died an alcoholic wreck at the age of forty-one. One of his sons died of a heroin overdose. One daughter was an alcoholic; another was confined to a mental asylum.
Stalin loved to be photographed with young children and the party machine trumpeted his love for them. A story frequently told at the time is of a three-year-old child coming home from his first day at school and telling his father: "You are not my father any more."
"What do you mean I am not your father?" the man would exclaim, horrified.
"You are not my father," the child would say. "Stalin is my father. He gives me everything I have."
In fact, Stalin turned his brutality towards his own sons into public policy. In 1935, Stalin changed the law so that children could be hanged. Children as young as ten were arrested and tortured into informing on their parents or confessing that they were "counterrevolutionary, Fascist terrorists". The children of adults who had been arrested were also vulnerable to arrest. When asked why, Stalin replied: "For being freethinkers, that's what."
During the famine of 1932, Stalin personally issued orders to shoot the hungry children who were stealing food from railway trucks and who, for some reason, Stalin thought had contracted venereal diseases. In all, it is estimated, that "Uncle Joe" was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children plus two or three million children who starved to death during the famines of the 1930s.
There was a joke in the old Soviet Union that ran this way:
A schoolteacher asked one of her pupils: "Who is your father?"
The child answered: "Comrade Stalin."
And who's your mother?"
The child said: "The Soviet motherland."
And what do you want to become?" the teacher asked.
The child said: An orphan."
Stalin had a thing about boots. Not only were they useful for kicking his son, his own father was a cobbler. When drunk, he had kicked the young Stalin with his boots. He also beat Stalin's mother, leaving Stalin with a deep misogyny.
The Soviets even had some jokes about his boots:
Question: Why did Lenin wear botinki [ankle-high boots], while Stalin wore sapogi [high
boots]?
Answer. Because during Lenin's time, in Russia, the shit was only up to the ankles.
Official photographs always show Stalin in high boots, usually with his trousers tucked in them, peasant style. He rarely took his own boots off, and he always slept with his socks on, but this may have been to hide his deformed left foot. According to Tsarist police records, the second and third toes of his left foot were joined together.
Stalin even had one of his bodyguards sent to the gulag for abandoning his boots. The man wore slippers instead so as not to wake Stalin when he was sleeping. Stalin accused the man of planning to sneak up and assassinate him.
Stalin wore boots on even the most inappropriate occasions. On holiday in Georgia in the late twenties, he was in the garden with his guests, showing off his prize roses. He was wearing a lightweight tussore silk suit and heavy black riding boots which were quite out of keeping.
"Joseph Vissarionvich," asked one of his guests, "it's so hot, but you are still wearing boots. How can you stand it?"
"What can I say?" said Stalin. "Boots are really comfortable things. And useful. You can kick someone in the head with them - so hard he'll never find all this teeth." And he burst out laughing.
This was typical cal Stalin's sadistic fantasies. He always identified with the aggressor -
even his own father. In power, he modelled himself" on the Tsars, particularly Ivan the Terrible and Alexander I who defeated Napoleon. Stalin even compared himself to Nicholas II, who had imprisoned and exiled him.
Stalin's all-time favourite aggressor was Hitler. He used Hitler's Night of the Long Knives as a model for his own purges. Even when Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, he ordered frontline troops not to fight back, thinking there had been some mistake. He simply could not believe Hitler was attacking, even though everyone else saw it coming.
Many political commentators had remarked on a homosexual element in the Nazi-Soviet pact, but Stalin had strong feelings about homosexuality. In 1933, he made all homosexual acts illegal, giving no clear reason. For propaganda purposes, a "homosexual conspiracy" was dreamt up. Gays were ganging up to overthrow the state.
In January 1934, mass arrests of homosexuals began and Maxim Gorky published an
article in Pravda, saying: "Destroy homosexuals and fascism will disappear." Stalin often referred to his enemies as "prostitutka" - male prostitutes.
There were rumours that Stalin had a homosexual relationship in the mid-1930s with his chief bodyguard, the Hungarian Jew, K.V. Pauker. Pauker would have been the submissive partner in the relationship. He certainly knew what Stalin liked. His party piece was an imitation of Grigori Zinoviev who, when about to be executed, fell to his knees and embraced the boots of his executioner.
"Stalin watched every move of "Zinoviev" and roared with laughter," an eyewitness reported. "When they saw how much Stalin enjoyed the scene, his guests demanded that Pauker repeat the performance. Pauker obliged. This time Stalin laughed so much that he bent down and held his belly with both hands. And when Pauker introduced a new improvisation and, instead of kneeling, raised his hands to heaven and screamed, "Hear Israel, our God is the only God!" Stalin could bear it no longer and, choking with laughter, began to make signs to Pauker to stop the performance."
There were also some homosexual overtones to Stalin's all-male drinking parties after the war. Polish government official Jakub Berman attended one of these parties in 1948 and recalled dancing with Molotov.
"Don't you mean Mrs Molotov?" he was asked.
"No, she wasn't there," he said. "She'd been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov
- it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple, because I haven't a clue about how to dance and I just moved my feet to the rhythm."
"As the woman?"
"Yes, Molotov led," said Berman. "I wouldn't know how. He wasn't a bad dancer, actually."
Stalin wound the gramophone and watched. Berman said that Stalin really had fun.
This is not an isolated incident. Stalin often forced men to dance with each other at his parties. Indeed, there were fewer and fewer women around the Kremlin. Like Mrs Molotov, Stalin was arresting them all.
Stalin only joined in on one occasion. After drinking Bruderschaft with Tito, he grabbed the Yugoslav dictator and span him around the floor to a Russian folk melody. Stalin danced so exuberantly that he lifted the bemused Yugoslav up in his arms several times.
William Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, reported a far more overt incident: "Stalin was very affectionate toward me. At one time when he had had a little too much to drink, he kissed me full on the mouth - what a horrible experience that was!"
* * *
notorious for his sexual attacks on young women and girls. When Stalin died he was waiting in the wings.
Like most would-be dictators, on the surface, his sex life seemed normal enough. He met his wife in 1920 in Georgia. At that time Stalin's home state was not yet Communist and Beria was in jail. The wife of one of his Bolshevik colleagues came to visit him and brought her niece, fifteen-year-old Nino Gegechkori. Beria was immediately struck by her beauty.
The following year, when the Communists had taken over and Beria was released, he met her in the street in Georgia's capital, Tbilisi. She was on her way to school and he asked her if he could meet her later for a talk. She agreed.
"We sat on a bench," Nino said. "Lavrenty was wearing a black topcoat and a student's service cap. He told me that for a long time he had been very taken with me. What's more, he said that he loved me and wanted to marry me. I was sixteen years old at the time."
Beria explained that the Soviet government wanted to send him to Belgium to learn about oil processing, but he could only go if he had a wife. She thought about his proposal and agreed to marry him.
They married quickly, fearing objections from her family. But the Belgian trip never materialized. As a loyal Communist, Beria was to head the Cheka (a forerunner of the KGB).
They had one son, Sergo.
Well, that's the official version of the story at least, but in a book called
Commissar
by Thaddeus Whittlin, himself a former inmate of the gulag at Vorkuta, another, more
harrowing, version is told. Whittlin maintains that Beria met Nino when he was already head of the secret police in Georgia. He had a luxurious train at his disposal, which he used as his travelling headquarters. One day at the station, he was approached by a young girl, who asked him to intercede for her brother who had been arrested. It was Nino. She was extremely beautiful - medium height with black eyes and a creamy white complexion.
Beria was taken with her and asked her to board the train so he could take more details of the case. He took her to his bedroom compartment and ordered her to undress. When she tried to leave, he locked the door and slapped her face. Then he grabbed her arms, twisted them behind her back, pushed her down onto the bed and raped her.
When it was all over, he went to call the guard to have her taken to jail. But he looked at her tear-streaked face and decided that she was, indeed, very attractive. In half an-hour or so, he might want her again. So he locked her in his compartment and went down to the
restaurant car for dinner and some vodka.
He kept the girl all night, raping her repeatedly. In the morning, he ordered breakfast for two. When he left the train to perform official duties, he left her locked in the compartment.
Despite the show of brutality, Beria was completely spellbound. Nino was the type of woman that appealed to him. She had small breasts, big eyes and a full ripe mouth. Although she was young and innocent, her body was full and mature.
He kept her on board the train with him for several days, while he travelled around supervising the progress of a Five-Year Plan in the Sukhumi region of Abkhazia. During that time, Beria started thinking how stupid it would be to throw away such a find. All his comrades and his superiors were married, while he spent his time seducing young girls.
Despite its ideological commitment to free love, the party, he knew, had a puritanical streak in it. If he was to get on, it would be best if he got married. So he did. Nino, his captive, had no say in the matter.
Whittlin's story seems to be more in keeping with Beria's character. An ugly child, girls had teased him at school. As an adolescent, they snubbed him and he hated them. He did not have enough money to pay good-looking prostitutes and had to make do with the older, uglier ones.
But, with the Revolution, everything changed. As head of the Cheka, he was charged with seeking out antiBolshevik elements. He did this largely in schools, where he would interrogate pupils personally, slapping their faces or beating their hands with a reed cane until they gave him the names of reactionary elements. He particularly liked interrogating girls -
the pretty ones, the sort who had teased him when he was younger and turned him down. The more helpless and innocent the girl the better. It was the violation of innocence that he liked and he would not stop even at murder to get it.