Today I can say that things are better since I had an exam in written maths which went well but in general everything is not so successful. To be precise, I had to be at the I[ndustrial] A[cademy] by nine o’clock and of course I left home at 8.30, and what happens but the tram has broken down. I started to wait for a bus, but there wasn’t one and so I decided to take a taxi so as not to be late. I got into it and, blow me, we’d only gone 100 yards and the taxi came to a halt; something in it as well had gone bust.
While claiming to find this catalogue of service breakdowns funny she pleaded a bit too hard for this to convince. Nadya had high standards in everything and was annoyed by the deterioration in conditions. She was making sure that Joseph learned something about the kind of life facing ordinary metropolitan inhabitants: the noise, mess and disorder.48
Even Joseph sometimes encountered such unpleasantness for himself. On one occasion in the late 1920s he and Molotov were walking outside the Kremlin on some business or other. Molotov never forgot what ensued:49
I remember a heavy storm; the snow was piling up and Stalin and I were walking across the Manège. We had no bodyguard. Stalin was wearing a fur coat, long boots and a hat with ear-flaps. No one knew who he was. Suddenly a beggar stuck to us: ‘Give us some money, good sirs!’ Stalin reached into his pocket, pulled out a ten-ruble note and handed it to him, and we walked on. The beggar, though, yelled after us: ‘Ah, you damned bourgeois!’ This made Stalin laugh: ‘Just try and understand our people. If you give them a little, it’s bad; if you give them a lot, it’s also bad!’
But generally he was insulated from experiences of this kind.
What worried Nadya, though, was that he had cut himself off from a sustained family commitment. He was bad-tempered and domineering at home. She suspected him of having flings with attractive women who came his way. And he otherwise seldom thought of anything but politics. He felt fulfilled not in their Kremlin flat or at Zubalovo but in his office a few hundred yards across Red Square on Old Square. This was where the Central Committee was situated from 1923. He had his office on an upper floor near Molotov, Kaganovich and others.50 Stalin spent most of the day and often a large part of the evening there. Nadya did not nag him about being left on her own, but she did feel that his behaviour at home — when he was there — left a lot to be desired. Her unhappiness was understandable. Stalin had no interests outside work and study apart from the occasional hunting expedition. Unlike Molotov and his other cronies, he did not play tennis or skittles. He did not even go to the cinema. The marriage of Joseph and Nadya looked like a divorce waiting to happen.
