Stalin: A Biography полностью

Like most of his male contemporaries, Stalin expected a wife to obey. Here he was disappointed, for Nadya refused to be meek. Disputes between them were frequent more or less from the start of their sustained cohabitation. She too had her moods. Indeed it is now clear that she had mental problems. Perhaps they were hereditary. Schizophrenia of some kind seems to have affected previous generations of her mother’s side of the family; and her brother Fëdor, after an acutely traumatic event after the Civil War when the former bank robber Kamo stage-managed a scene in which he threatened to shoot him, had a breakdown from which he never recovered.²³ Nadya had a volatile temperament and, although she remained in love with Joseph, the marriage continued to be rancorous between the patches of tranquillity.

Someone in the central party apparatus decided that Nadya was unsuitable for party membership. The rumour was that it was none other than Joseph. In December 1921 she was excluded from the party: this was a disgrace for anyone working as she did in the offices of Sovnarkom. Eventually she could have lost her job. The charge was that she had not passed the various tests applied to all party members and had not bothered to prepare herself for them. Nor had she helped with mundane party work; this was all the less acceptable inasmuch as she was ‘a person of the intelligentsia’. Only one Central Control Commission member spoke up for her even though Lenin himself had written warmly in her support.²⁴ Nadya begged for another chance and promised to make a greater effort in the way that was demanded. Initially the decision was made to ‘exclude her as ballast, completely uninterested in party work’; but finally the Central Control Commission allowed her to keep the secondary status of a ‘candidate’ party member.²⁵ She could have done without this contretemps in a year full of problems; but at least the eventual decision enabled her to go on working for Lenin’s office without a blemish on her record.

It cannot be proved that Joseph had been behind the move to take away her party card; and Nadya never expressly blamed him. But he belonged to the Politburo and the Orgburo and was already intervening in the Secretariat’s work in 1921:²⁶ he could have put in a good word for her if he had wanted. But she had survived. Stalin accepted the situation and avoided interfering with her professional aspirations again. She functioned as one of Lenin’s secretaries even while Lenin and Stalin were falling out. Krupskaya even asked her to liaise with Kamenev on Lenin’s behalf about the Georgian Affair.²⁷ It would be strange if Nadya kept this a secret from her husband. Perhaps he at last began to see the advantages of having a working wife.

At home Nadya was a severe mother and denied to the children the open affection she directed at Joseph. Strict standards of behaviour were enforced. Yakov, who hardly knew his father before moving to Moscow, reacted badly to this. Joseph’s work kept him away from the apartment and the bond between them never solidified. Such interest as he took in his son tended to involve pressure. He pushed books at him and expected him to read them. ‘Yasha!’ he wrote on the cover of B. Andreev’s The Conquest of Nature, ‘Read this book without fail!’²⁸ But it was Nadya who had to handle Yakov on a daily basis and, as her letter to Joseph’s mother in October 1922 indicated, she found him exasperating:²⁹

A papiroska is a cigarette with an empty tube at the end which acts like a cigarette-holder to allow smoking while wearing gloves in sub-zero temperatures. It was in character for Joseph to expect Nadya to enforce discipline while he himself disrupted it.