Beria’s NKVD discovered a self-styled “fascist organization” in Moscow, whose handful of members had evidently fashioned a flag, put up seventy posters on the eve of Red Army Day (February 23), drew some graffiti, and wrote poems. They seem to have discussed Nazism, anti-Semitism, and Russian nationalism. At least one turned informant, leading to four arrests. Three of the members turned out to have been nineteen when they joined the group; the organizer was seventeen. The NKVD produced five volumes on the case.105
ABSENT FATHER
Stalin received a troubling report in February 1939 from his son Vasily’s military aviation school. Now almost eighteen, he had become a candidate member of the party, but not long before, Stalin had written to one of Vasily’s teachers at his previous school that he was “a spoiled youth of middling capabilities, a wild beast (like the Scythians), not always truthful, loves to blackmail weak ‘bosses,’ not infrequently impudent, with a weak—more accurately—unorganized will. . . . He was spoiled by sundry ‘godfathers’ and ‘godmothers,’ who reinforced the circumstance that he is ‘Stalin’s son.’”106 With Vasily’s transfer to the military school in Crimea, Beria had reported to Stalin that the school’s bosses had met him with pomp at the train station. Stalin had ordered that Vasily be moved to a regular barracks.107 The latest report, cleverly worded, was framed in praise: “Politically literate. Dedicated to the cause of the party of Lenin-Stalin and our motherland. Actively interested and well versed in questions of the international and domestic situation.” But it also noted that Vasily was given to cramming, occasionally reported unshaven for duty, and “reacts badly to snafus in flight.”108 His friends found him generous—and a target. “Despite a nondescript appearance (small stature, scrawny, redheaded, chalky),” one acquaintance recalled of him that “all kinds of sycophants and especially girls clung to him like flies to honey.”109
Stalin continued to shower tenderness on his daughter, Svetlana—when he saw her. Now thirteen and without her brother or longtime housekeeper, Karolina Til, she continued to live in the Kremlin apartment, where her father appeared only for late-evening “lunches.” The dining room “had a large, carved sideboard with my mother’s cups on it and a table with the latest newspapers and magazines,” she recalled. “Above it was a large portrait of my mother, a blown-up print of one of the photographs taken at our house.” After the meal, Stalin would go back upstairs to the office or head out to the Near Dacha for the night. Svetlana spent summers partly at the old Zubalovo dacha, partly either in Sochi or Mukhalatka, Crimea. “Sometimes after school was out in the summer, he’d take me to Kuntsevo for three days or so,” she would recall of the Near Dacha. “He enjoyed having me around. But it didn’t work out, because it was impossible for anybody to fit in with his way of life. He’d have his first meal at two or three in the afternoon and lunch at eight in the evening. Then he’d sit up late at the table. . . . It was too much for me.” They did go for walks in the Kuntsevo woods, and, thanks to her nurse’s lessons, Svetlana would ace her father’s oral quizzes on the names of flowers, grasses, and singing birds. But soon he would have to return to his paperwork. “At that point he didn’t need me anymore,” Svetlana continued. “I’d get restless and bored and long to leave as quickly as possible for Zubalovo, where I could take one of my friends with me and there were so many things I enjoyed. Meantime, my father thought it was being with him that bored me, and that hurt his feelings.” Svetlana’s nanny would advise her to ask forgiveness, and he would talk to her again. “I heard him mutter angrily, ‘She went away! Imagine leaving her old father like that! Says she’s bored!’ But he was kissing me and had already forgiven me, for without me he had been lonelier than ever.”110
18TH PARTY CONGRESS