Stalin полностью

Stalin’s return from southern holidays was still being marked by informal gatherings initiated by members of his extended family, who showed up at his apartment in the Imperial Senate at suppertime and played with the children, waiting, hoping to catch him. “Yesterday, after a three-month interval, I saw Iosif,” Maria Svanidze, his first wife’s sister-in-law, wrote in her diary (November 4, 1934). “He looked well, tanned, but he had lost weight. He suffered from flu there. . . . I[osif] joked with Zhenya, that she had again filled out, and he was very tender with her,” Svanidze added. “Now, when I know everything, I observed them.” Yevgeniya “Zhenya” Alliluyeva, an actress, was married to Pavel Alliluyev (the brother of Stalin’s second wife, Nadya), and a jealous Svanidze suspected an affair. Stalin had deeper interests. “After the meal Iosif was in a very good-natured mood,” she continued. “He took the Intercity vertushka and called Kirov, joking with him about the end of rationing and the price rise for bread. He advised Kirov to come to Moscow immediately, in order to defend the interests of Leningrad province against an even higher price rise than in other provinces. Evidently Kirov demurred, and Iosif gave the phone to Kaganovich, who urged Kirov to come for a day. Iosif loves Kirov and after returning from Sochi really wanted to see him, steam in a Russian bath together.”²⁷

The revolution’s seventeenth anniversary approached. At the Bolshoi on the evening before the November 7 parade, the ballerina Marina Semyonova (b. 1908) performed a Caucasus dance. “She danced in a light gray Circassian vest and light gray Astrakhan ‘Kubanka,’ and when, with the last gesture, she held back her Kubanka on her head, her blond hair sprayed down her shoulders,” Artyom recalled. “This made a colossal impression on the audience; everyone shouted ‘Bravo, encore.’” Semyonova went to curtsy at the left loge, where Stalin sat, over the orchestra, practically on the stage. He bent down to the ballerina and said something. “She nodded, gave the orchestra a signal, and repeated the dance.” After the concert, Stalin said to his entourage, “Semyonova is the best of all.”²⁸ She was the common-law wife of Karakhan, the former first deputy foreign affairs commissar, demoted by Stalin to ambassador to Turkey; rumors spread of her affair with Stalin.²⁹

Stalin’s bachelor life was not all rumors. Kirov did come, after the November holiday. In the evenings, now that Nadya was gone, Stalin had taken to watching films with his entourage.³⁰ On November 10 (and into the morning of the 11th), Boris Shumyatsky, head of the motion picture industry, screened the new film Chapayev for the dictator, Kirov, and Molotov.³¹ Shumyatsky had been born in Ulan Ude (1886) near Lake Baikal, was a former Soviet envoy to Iran and former rector of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, and had replaced Martemyan Ryutin as head of the film industry back when it was considered a backwater, but had built it up. At the Kremlin cinema soft chairs with ample armrests and high backs, concealing who was in them, were placed three across, in several rows. The floor was covered in a drab gray cloth, over which was placed a runner, muffling noise from movement. Stalin issued comments during the screenings, in the dark, and afterward when the lights were back on. Tables for Georgian mineral water and wines sat alongside each chair.³² “We used to go after dinner, about nine in the evening,” Svetlana recalled. “It was late for me, of course, but I begged so hard that my father couldn’t refuse. He’d push me to the front with a laugh: ‘You show us how to get there, House Mistress. Without you to guide us, we’d never find it!’” Stalin often watched more than one film, and Svetlana would go to bed sometimes after midnight, even on school nights. “I’d get out of the movie late and go racing home through the empty, quiet Kremlin. The next day at school, I could think of nothing but the heroes I’d seen on film the night before.”³³