Stalin and His Hangmen by Donald Rayfield Page B

dictatorship of the proletariat, as distinct from the dictatorship of the party, ending]… as for the proletariat, the party cannot be a force for dictatorship. I ask you not to copy this letter of mine, not to make a noise about it.
Demian’s reply shows how taken aback he was by Stalin’s fanatical outburst: ‘Instead of a Circassian girl you warmed me up with a treatise’. In response to Stalin’s other remarks about his cunning political strategy – attacking leaders of the opposition and then wooing their adherents in order to put an end to fractions and factions – Demian felt himself on surer ground. Here he and Stalin were cronies again. Demian wrote: ‘If the best husband and wife start arguing sharply, even if the reasons are purely matters of principle, the argument can end with either the husband fucking somebody else or his wife being fucked by others. I am sure that you and I will not refuse somebody else’s and will not let go of our own, and if we do let go, then it will be because “she’s a whore”, even if she’s festooned with quotations.’
The Bedny-Stalin letters convey the contradictions in Stalin’s thinking: coarse in tactics and expression, arcane in professed ideology.
The same duality is apparent in Stalin’s relationships with his wives and children. Some of his behaviour is ascribable to Georgian custom: a wife must never show her husband up in public, must never act disrespectfully or frivolously. Children, too, however much loved, must defer in public. Among Georgian highlanders, a husband makes no display of affection in public to his wife or children, not even to single out his own child for rescue from general danger.
Stalin was, even by these standards, an exceptionally unfeeling parent. Not until his second marriage, after the 1917 revolution, did he take a cursory interest in Iakov, whom he had handed over as a baby to his sister-in-law and Mikhail Monaselidze her husband. When, in 1928,Iakov tried to shoot himself, Stalin greeted him with ‘Ha, so you missed!’ Iakov fled to his stepmother’s parents, the Alliluevs. Stalin wrote to Nadezhda, his second wife: ‘Tell Iakov from me that he has acted like a hooligan and a blackmailer with whom I do not and cannot have anything in common. Let him live where and with whom he wants.’
In 1941, less than a month after the outbreak of war, Iakov was captured by the Germans. Stalin refused Count Bernadotte’s offer to negotiate Iakov’s release. The refusal was interpreted as putting national before personal interests, but Stalin went further: he had Iakov’s wife imprisoned as a deserter’s spouse, and when Iakov’s picture was used by the Germans for propaganda leaflets, Stalin asked the Spanish communist Dolores Ibarruri (La Pasionaria) to infiltrate undercover agents among Spanish fascists in Germany in order to reach Iakov in his POW camp and presumably kill him. In 1943, however, Iakov was electrocuted and shot dead by the Germans.
To his daughter Svetlana Stalin was at first affectionate, even playful, calling her Khoziaika (housewife) or Satanka, but after she began a succession of ill-judged liaisons, she too fell out of favour and saw little of her father.
Stalin’s marital history falls just short of the pathological. The inquisitive mind of a pedant and autodidact, behind a brooding romantic face, attracted women. Old flames flare up in the letters Stalin kept in his archive: ‘Do you remember the beautiful neighbour Liza, who used to look after you… that’s me.’ 32 Stalin’s first wife Kato made no complaints – she was no mute peasant; she had been educated by private tutors and her brother had studied in Germany – but, a conventional Georgian wife, she kept in the background. Stalin’s subsequent liaisons with Onufrieva, Pereprygina and others, and his second marriage to the seventeen-year-old Nadezhda Allilueva – apart from a preference for adolescent girls and for solitude – do not suggest