The request was granted. Lenin and his comrades in Moscow accepted that tighter co-ordination of military and economic measures was vital in Tsaritsyn for the security of food supplies. Stalin was delighted. Setting himself up not in a hotel but in a sequestered railway carriage halted outside the city station, he looked a new man. On arriving in Tsaritsyn, he called for a cobbler to order a pair of black, knee-length boots to go with his black tunic. The cobbler arrived at the railway carriage and took the measurements. ‘Well,’ asked Stalin, ‘when will they be ready?’ ‘In five days,’ replied the cobbler. Stalin exclaimed: ‘No, you can’t mean that! Come on! My father could make two pairs of such boots a day!’11 The anecdote shows how little Stalin had learned about shoemaking. Nevertheless from summer 1918 till the day he died, military-style clothing was normal for him. Stalin became known not only for his long boots but also for his light-coloured, collarless tunic. He abandoned suits, ordinary shirts and shoes for ever.12 He started to comport himself with a soldierly bearing. He carried a gun. He adopted a brisk way of carrying himself as a commander. This was a deeply congenial development for him; Stalin enjoyed himself in Tsaritsyn despite the dangers.13
He also gained contentment in his personal life. Nadya Allilueva, who had accompanied him from Moscow, was no longer merely his secretary but had become his wife. According to their daughter’s account many decades later, they had already been living as a married couple in Petrograd after the October Revolution.14 Chronological exactitude is impossible. Bolsheviks in those days rejected weddings as bourgeois flummery. What is certain is that on his return from Siberia he did not intend to remain celibate. There were plenty of Bolshevik women to take his eye and he went out with a few in 1917.15 But he wanted the settled home life which his nomadic existence had prevented. (His cohabitations in Siberia had been of the seigneurial variety.) In the flush of their passion they went off to serve the Revolution together on the North Caucasus and Southern Fronts.
Joseph was a communist party leader and Nadya’s family were dedicated to the party’s cause. He was amusing and still in his physical prime, and probably his talent for handling political business appealed to Nadya. The fact that Alliluev family life had been constantly disrupted by revolutionary commitments may also have drawn Nadya towards an older man who seemingly offered dependability. She may have seen him as the father she had seen little of when growing up.16 Nadya had not discerned Joseph’s curmudgeonly egotism. Joseph, though, had yet to witness the symptoms of Nadya’s mental volatility.17 So while he glowed in the warmth of her admiration of him, she enjoyed his attentions. Without being a beauty, she had long dark hair parted down the middle and tied up in a bun; her lips were broad and her eyes friendly even if her teeth ‘gappy’.18 He liked women with a full figure like Nadya’s. He did not worry that she was less than half his age. He had read more than her and seen more of life, and he surely thought he would always dominate the marriage. The Alliluevs had given him succour and all of them got on well with him. He was gaining not only a wife but also — at last — a stable and supportive wider family.19
There was only one thing about his situation in Tsaritsyn that annoyed Stalin. This was the interference in his activities from Moscow, and nobody irritated more than Trotski. Stalin had formed the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front on 17 September. Immediately he received orders from Trotski, his military superior as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, to cease challenging his decisions.20 Stalin telegraphed to Lenin that Trotski was not on the spot and failed to understand conditions across the region:21
