Karolina Til, the longtime Stalin family housekeeper, an ethnic German from Riga who had been the one to find Nadya’s dead body, went on pension in 1938. In the fall, Vasily (age seventeen) would leave home to attend the Kachinsk Higher Military Aviation School, in Kucha, Crimea, near Sevastopol. Artyom, Stalin’s informally adopted son, was in artillery school; Yakov Jughashvili was enrolled in the advanced Artillery Academy. Svetlana (age twelve) was still attending Moscow’s Lepeshinsky Experimental School-Commune, on Ostozhenka; she lived in the Kremlin apartment. Stalin adored but rarely saw his lonely daughter. Following the arrests of the heads of the bodyguard directorates—Pauker and then Kursky and Dagin—in quick succession, a new person would enter the Stalin household: Nikolai Vlasik (b. 1896), the son of Belorussian peasants who himself had completed just a few years of school before becoming an unskilled laborer.149 His modest education, short stature, and doglike loyalty seem to have made him unthreatening to Stalin. Vlasik’s purview, like Pauker’s, included Stalin’s security, food, personal life, and children. Poskryobyshev continued to handle all regime matters and, inevitably, became close with Vlasik (who stood guard in the outer reception office). The promotion also put Vlasik in charge of the Bolshoi, as well as other top Moscow theaters (the Maly, the Arts, Vakhtangov), and he came to know many of the artists personally, especially the females.150 Stalin saw more of Poskryobyshev and Vlasik than anyone else. Vlasik became Beria’s venomous rival.
Stalin was profoundly alone in the sulfuric aquifers of his being. But he hated to be alone. His awkward character exacerbated the isolation that inevitably befalls a tyrant upon whom everyone’s life depends. Not only had he driven his second wife to suicide, but most of his closest friends were gone: Kirov, Lakoba, Orjonikidze. Stalin was complicit in the death of the third, and perhaps of the second, while being blamed, in whispers, for the first. He had deliberately murdered almost all his comrades in arms, including those he had been genuinely fond of, such as Bukharin. The few who survived—Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoyan—had largely been reduced to minions. Beria would come into this group as a minion, too, but he would be more enterprising.
STALIN MANUFACTURES A TOP FOREIGN AGENT
Japan’s ambassador to Moscow complained to Tokyo that Soviet counterintelligence officials “steal suitcases from military attachés.”151 But Japanese reconnaissance aircraft were flying over Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Komsomolsk on cloudy days, then shutting down their engines and gliding noiselessly, photographing Soviet military installations with their Fairchild cameras. With the assistance of Finnish cryptographers, the Japanese had broken the codes used in the Soviet Far East. They also had dug underground cables into Soviet territory from Manchukuo to eavesdrop on Soviet telephone conversations. Japanese intelligence rightly regarded Polish intelligence as the world’s top anti-Soviet service and held joint military intelligence conferences with the Poles, in Harbin and Warsaw.152 Stalin had the Japanese consulates in Odessa, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, and Blagoveshchensk shuttered.153 But four Japanese consulates remained in the Soviet Far East (Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk, Okha, and Aleksandrovsk), while Manchukuo, Japan’s puppet state, maintained consulates in Chita and Blagoveshchensk. Nonetheless, when
Gamarnik, who had committed suicide just prior to his likely inclusion in the Tukhachevsky “trial,” had been a commander in the Soviet Far East, and his former subordinates were being arrested. Insinuations of spying on behalf of the Japanese also implicated the current commander of the Soviet Far Eastern Army, Blyukher, whose subordinates were being arrested.154 But it was not Gamarnik, Blyukher, other Soviet officials, or former kulaks who served the Japanese cause, but Stalin himself. His orders for sweeping arrests of Japanese “spies” ended up delivering windfall details of Soviet military capabilities, dislocation, and war plans to Tokyo.