Stalin

Voroshilov and Orjonikidze were closer to Stalin personally (the former had known him since 1906, the latter since 1907), and while Voroshilov continued to oversee the military, Stalin appointed Orjonikidze head of the Supreme Council of the Economy, in place of the faltering loyal dog Kuibyshev, who was transferred to the state planning commission.³⁵⁰ Kuibyshev had gone from voicing skepticism about lunatic plan targets to promoting them zealously; now Orjonikidze went from sharply criticizing industrial cadres to being their protector, and gathered around him capable “bourgeois” experts, even if they had been imprisoned for a time.³⁵¹ Sounding a bit like the sacked state bank chairman and former Trotsky supporter Pyatakov, whom Orjonikidze would make his deputy, he pointed out, in a long memorandum on industry in December 1930, that “money is being spent without any budget. . . . Accounting is exceptionally weak and muddled.” Stalin made only superficial notes on the memo; these were Orjonikidze’s worries now.³⁵²

None of the men in Stalin’s faction had the revolutionary profiles of Zinoviev or Kamenev, let alone Trotsky, but the Stalinists were hardened Bolsheviks and, under the pressure of events, strove to enforce his line and resolve problems, sometimes presenting him with solutions.³⁵³ He confided in them, writing scathingly about everyone else in the regime, and to an extent he allowed them room to work, reserving the right to reverse any of their decisions; they acknowledged his power to do so, knowing the burdens he shouldered. The heart of the regime remained awkwardly divided between party headquarters on Old Square, where Stalin had his principal office, and the Imperial Senate in the Kremlin, where the government had its offices but where the secret department of Stalin’s apparatus had moved, the politburo met, and Central Committee plenums were held. Voroshilov, in his letter concerning Rykov’s replacement, had noted that “having the headquarters and main command point” on Old Square was “cumbersome, inflexible, and . . . organizationally problematic,” adding that “Lenin in the current situation would be sitting in the Council of People’s Commissars” in the Kremlin.³⁵⁴ Clara Zetkin’s empty apartment in the Kremlin had served as a kind of transition to a permanent move to the Kremlin by Stalin, but this transition would be gradual; he continued to use his top-floor Old Square suite.³⁵⁵ In any case, as Kaganovich had mentioned, the regime was now wherever Stalin’s person happened to be.

•   •   •

INTO 1929, his seventh year as general secretary, Stalin had continued to enlarge his personal dictatorship within the Bolshevik dictatorship, and by the end of 1930 he had amassed still vaster power. This process of acquiring and exercising supreme power in the shadow of Lenin’s supposed Testament calling for his removal and the criticisms in the party made Stalin who he was.

Around the time of the December 1930 plenum, Iona and Alexander Pereprygin, two of the six siblings of Lydiya Pereprygina—the orphaned, scandalously young teenager with whom Stalin had had a long cohabitation during his last Siberian exile—were arrested for long-ago White Army service. They wrote an appeal to Stalin, reminding him of the “former friendship you nourished with us.”³⁵⁶ The brothers did not mention the son (Alexander) whom Stalin had allegedly fathered with Pereprygina and abandoned, but it is possible that one of Pereprygina’s sons was Stalin’s. (“Ёsif was a jolly fellow, singing and dancing well,” Anfisa Taraseyeva, of Kureika village, would recall. “He desired girls and had a son here, with one of my relatives.”)³⁵⁷ Pereprygina, who had married a local fisherman, was now a widow with numerous children; Stalin never assisted her. What action, if any, he took in response to her brothers’ letter remains unknown.³⁵⁸ When doodling, Stalin would sometimes draw wolves, but his days in a remote eight-log-cabin settlement among the indigenous Evenki on the Arctic Circle—where he almost died in sudden blizzards while hunting or fishing through holes cut in the ice—were a world away.