Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

3. MORE REVOLTING RED RAVERS

Communist dictators are not supposed to be concerned with sex. They are supposed to think only of the good of the people. The personal gratification involved in making love is irredeemably bourgeois. Take, for example, Soviet Secretariat member Boris Bazhanov’s description of the greatest dictator of them all, Comrade Stalin: “This passionate politician has no other vices. He loves neither money nor pleasure, neither sport nor women. Women, apart from his own wife, do not exist for him.” This simply was not true.

Stalin’s first wife was a Georgian woman named Ekaterina Svanidze. Her brother Aleksandr was at the same theological seminary that Stalin attended before he gave up the priesthood for the Revolution. They married in 1903. Although Stalin was already an atheist, to please Ekaterina’s mother the ceremony took place in an Orthodox Church. Ekaterina was also very religious and, while he was away at his revolutionary meetings, she would be on her knees praying that he would turn away from ideas that were displeasing to God and live a life of quietness and contentment. They had one son, Yakov.

Although he saw little of her, Stalin must have loved his wife. He was devastated when she died in 1910. At the gates of the cemetery, he said: “This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for human beings.” Then he placed his right hand over his heart and said: “It is all so desolate here inside, so unspeakably desolate.” Millions died as a consequence.

Although the loss of his first wife hardened his heart, his sexual feelings did not die with her. During the Civil War in 1919, he met Nadya Alliluyeva, the daughter of a railwayman. She was very beautiful, with a distinctly oriental appearance. He was on the run and they met when her parents-who had known him for twenty years -harboured him. She was just sixteen when he took her virginity. He was thirty-nine. Although he was more than twice her age, she found his fanatical revolutionary ideas wildly romantic. Nadya too became a revolutionary and, despite her mother’s opposition, married Stalin as a revolutionary act.

Stalin fulfilled her girlish fantasies by taking her to Moscow in an armoured car. They honeymooned in Tsaritsyn, where Stalin organized the defences against the White Russian Army. He re-organized the police force, uncovered counter-revolutionary plots and had the plotters executed. The city was renamed Stalingrad. It was there that Nadya lost her political virginity. Stalin’s ruthless suppression of anyone who opposed him was her first exposure to the naked use of power.

Nadya became one of Lenin’s secretaries and she lived with Stalin in an apartment in the Kremlin, which she hated. Their first child, a son, Vasily, was born in 1920; their daughter, Svetlana, in 1926.

When Stalin took over the reins of power after Lenin’s death, Nadya became disturbed by the power and privileges that went with his position. It offended her Communist principles. She decided to go to college. There, from other students, she began to learn about what was happening in the Ukraine, where her husband’s policy of forked collectivization had caused a famine which cost five million lives.

Raising such issues at home was not a recipe for domestic bliss. Stalin would respond with the crudest of insults. He also swore at Lenin’s wife, greatly upsetting her. Even his own mother was called an “old whore” to her face.

Stalin would complain to others that Nadya had never been much to his taste, she was “a woman with ideas …a herring with ideas — skin and bones”. Much more to his taste was the former waitress — “a young one with a snub nose and a gay, ringing laugh” — who he employed as a housekeeper at his dacha. Svetlana summed up her virtues in her father’s eyes: “Plump, neat, served softly at table and never joined in the conversation.”

By the time the waitress joined the household, Svetlana believed that her parents” sexual relationship had come to an end. Nadya had her own bedroom, while Stalin slept in his office or in a small room with a telephone in it, next to the dining-room. It was rumoured that he was having an affair with a ballerina.

There was also a rumour that it was Stalin who had made the sixteen-year-old daughter of Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich pregnant. Trotsky believed that Stalin had another daughter besides Svetlana, whose mother was not Nadya.

Matters came to a head between Stalin and Nadya on the night of 8 November, 1932. There was a party in the Kremlin celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution. Stalin insisted that she drink, though he knew she was teetotal. There was a row and Stalin threw a lighted cigarette at her. Nadya ran from the room, humiliated. She walked around the grounds of the Kremlin for a long time, trying l compose herself. When she returned to their apartment, she found Stalin in bed with the wile of a party official. Nadya went to her room and shot herself.

Stalin was unconcerned about her death. At her open coffin, he was heard to say: “She left me as an enemy.”

He did not attend her funeral or her memorial service and took his anger out on her family. Nadya’s sister Anna was sentenced to ten years” solitary confinement. Her brother Pavel died of a heart attack in 1938 during the purges. Pavel’s wife, Eugenia, was imprisoned on the trumped-up charge of having poisoned him. Anna’s husband, Stanislav Redens, was arrested and shot the same year. Many said that Nadya was lucky she committed suicide when she did, otherwise she would have fallen victim to the purges too.

Only his daughter Svetlana enjoyed the love of her father, but she became a prisoner of the Kremlin. He would call her his “housekeeper” and she would have to sit on his right during working dinners. He had affectionate nicknames for her — “little sparrow” and “little fly” — and his letters to her always ended “I kiss you”. He was always kissing her.

A great distance grew between them when Svetlana learnt, through the Illustrated London News, that her mother had not died of appendicitis as she had been told.

Stalin would lose his temper completely if she formed any kind of friendship with a man. He stopped kissing her — she was not his “clean little girl” any more. When Svetlana defied Stalin, he would talk crudely of her sexual activity in front of her and his male colleagues. He had the NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB investigate her lovers. While she was still a schoolgirl, Stalin discovered that she was having an affair with a middle-aged Jewish film-maker named Aleksei Kapler. He confronted her.

“I know the whole story,” he said, brandishing the NKVD file. “I’ve got all your telephone conversations right here.”

“But I love him,” she protested.

“Love!” he said, slapping her across the face. “Your Kapler is a British spy. He’s under arrest.”

Kapler served five years in the mining camps at Vorkuta, in the Arctic Circle.

Stalin was delighted when Svetlana’s first marriage broke up, but when she married again soon after, they became estranged. After Stalin died, Svetlana defected to the West. She lived in Britain, America and Switzerland, and after four broken marriages, at the age of 70, she became a nun “to atone for the sins of my father”, she said.

While, at the beginning, there were kisses for his daughter, his sons were handled brutally from the outset. Yakov, his son from his first marriage, was treated with contempt, perhaps because he reminded Stalin of his own Georgian origins. He only came to live with his father in the Kremlin at Nadya’s insistence. He probably wished he hadn’t.

“The boy Yakov was subjected to frequent and severe punishments by his father,” Trotsky related.

When Yakov tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in 1928 or 1929, Stalin said

callously: “Ha, he couldn’t even shoot straight.” When he was captured during World War II, Stalin denounced hire w a traitor a s “no true Russian would ever surrender”. He refused a German offer to exchange hint oral had Yakov’s wife imprisoned.

His younger son, Vasily, was also beaten.

“At home, he would knock the boy down and let him have it with his boots,” Svetlana said.

After a disastrous career in the Red Air Force, Vasily died an alcoholic wreck at the age of forty-one. One of his sons died of a heroin overdose. One daughter was an alcoholic; another was confined to a mental asylum.

Stalin loved to be photographed with young children and the party machine trumpeted his love for them. A story frequently told at the time is of a three-year-old child coming home from his first day at school and telling his father: “You are not my father any more.”

“What do you mean I am not your father?” the man would exclaim, horrified.

“You are not my father,” the child would say. “Stalin is my father. He gives me everything I have.”

In fact, Stalin turned his brutality towards his own sons into public policy. In 1935, Stalin changed the law so that children could be hanged. Children as young as ten were arrested and tortured into informing on their parents or confessing that they were “counterrevolutionary, Fascist terrorists”. The children of adults who had been arrested were also vulnerable to arrest. When asked why, Stalin replied: “For being freethinkers, that’s what.”

During the famine of 1932, Stalin personally issued orders to shoot the hungry children who were stealing food from railway trucks and who, for some reason, Stalin thought had contracted venereal diseases. In all, it is estimated, that “Uncle Joe” was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children plus two or three million children who starved to death during the famines of the 1930s.

There was a joke in the old Soviet Union that ran this way:

Stalin had a thing about boots. Not only were they useful for kicking his son, his own father was a cobbler. When drunk, he had kicked the young Stalin with his boots. He also beat Stalin’s mother, leaving Stalin with a deep misogyny.

The Soviets even had some jokes about his boots:

Official photographs always show Stalin in high boots, usually with his trousers tucked in them, peasant style. He rarely took his own boots off, and he always slept with his socks on, but this may have been to hide his deformed left foot. According to Tsarist police records, the second and third toes of his left foot were joined together.

Stalin even had one of his bodyguards sent to the gulag for abandoning his boots. The man wore slippers instead so as not to wake Stalin when he was sleeping. Stalin accused the man of planning to sneak up and assassinate him.

Stalin wore boots on even the most inappropriate occasions. On holiday in Georgia in the late twenties, he was in the garden with his guests, showing off his prize roses. He was wearing a lightweight tussore silk suit and heavy black riding boots which were quite out of keeping.

“Joseph Vissarionvich,” asked one of his guests, “it’s so hot, but you are still wearing boots. How can you stand it?”

“What can I say?” said Stalin. “Boots are really comfortable things. And useful. You can kick someone in the head with them — so hard he’ll never find all this teeth.” And he burst out laughing.

This was typical Stalin’s sadistic fantasies. He always identified with the aggressor — even his own father. In power, he “modelled himself” on the Tsars, particularly Ivan the Terrible and Alexander I who defeated Napoleon. Stalin even compared himself to Nicholas II, who had imprisoned and exiled him.

Stalin’s all-time favourite aggressor was Hitler. He used Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives as a model for his own purges. Even when Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, he ordered frontline troops not to fight back, thinking there had been some mistake. He simply could not believe Hitler was attacking, even though everyone else saw it coming.

Many political commentators had remarked on a homosexual element in the Nazi-Soviet pact, but Stalin had strong feelings about homosexuality. In 1933, he made all homosexual acts illegal, giving no clear reason. For propaganda purposes, a “homosexual conspiracy” was dreamt up. Gays were ganging up to overthrow the state.

In January 1934, mass arrests of homosexuals began and Maxim Gorky published an article in Pravda, saying: “Destroy homosexuals and fascism will disappear.” Stalin often referred to his enemies as “prostitutka” — male prostitutes.

There were rumours that Stalin had a homosexual relationship in the mid-1930s with his chief bodyguard, the Hungarian Jew, K.V. Pauker. Pauker would have been the submissive partner in the relationship. He certainly knew what Stalin liked. His party piece was an imitation of Grigori Zinoviev who, when about to be executed, fell to his knees and embraced the boots of his executioner.

“Stalin watched every move of “Zinoviev” and roared with laughter,” an eyewitness reported. “When they saw how much Stalin enjoyed the scene, his guests demanded that Pauker repeat the performance. Pauker obliged. This time Stalin laughed so much that he bent down and held his belly with both hands. And when Pauker introduced a new improvisation and, instead of kneeling, raised his hands to heaven and screamed, “Hear Israel, our God is the only God!” Stalin could bear it no longer and, choking with laughter, began to make signs to Pauker to stop the performance.”

There were also some homosexual overtones to Stalin’s all-male drinking parties after the war. Polish government official Jakub Berman attended one of these parties in 1948 and recalled dancing with Molotov.

“Don’t you mean Mrs Molotov?” he was asked.

“No, she wasn’t there,” he said. “She’d been sent to a labour camp. I danced with Molotov — it must have been a waltz, or at any rate something simple, because I haven’t a clue about how to dance and I just moved my feet to the rhythm.”

“As the woman?”

“Yes, Molotov led,” said Berman. “I wouldn’t know how. He wasn’t a bad dancer, actually.”

Stalin wound the gramophone and watched. Berman said that Stalin really had fun.

This is not an isolated incident. Stalin often forced men to dance with each other at his parties. Indeed, there were fewer and fewer women around the Kremlin. Like Mrs Molotov, Stalin was arresting them all.

Stalin only joined in on one occasion. After drinking Bruderschaft with Tito, he grabbed the Yugoslav dictator and span him around the floor to a Russian folk melody. Stalin danced so exuberantly that he lifted the bemused Yugoslav up in his arms several times.

William Bullitt, U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, reported a far more overt incident: “Stalin was very affectionate toward me. At one time when he had had a little too much to drink, he kissed me full on the mouth — what a horrible experience that was!”

Stalin’s heir apparent was Lavrenty Beria. He was head of Stalin’s secret police and notorious for his sexual attacks on young women and girls. When Stalin died he was waiting in the wings.

Like most would-be dictators, on the surface, his sex life seemed normal enough. He met his wife in 1920 in Georgia. At that time Stalin’s home state was not yet Communist and Beria was in jail. The wife of one of his Bolshevik colleagues came to visit him and brought her niece, fifteen-year-old Nino Gegechkori. Beria was immediately struck by her beauty.

The following year, when the Communists had taken over and Beria was released, he met her in the street in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. She was on her way to school and he asked her if he could meet her later for a talk. She agreed.

“We sat on a bench,” Nino said. “Lavrenty was wearing a black topcoat and a student’s service cap. He told me that for a long time he had been very taken with me. What’s more, he said that he loved me and wanted to marry me. I was sixteen years old at the time.”

Beria explained that the Soviet government wanted to send him to Belgium to learn about oil processing, but he could only go if he had a wife. She thought about his proposal and agreed to marry him.

They married quickly, fearing objections from her family. But the Belgian trip never materialized. As a loyal Communist, Beria was to head the Cheka (a forerunner of the KGB). They had one son, Sergo.

Well, that’s the official version of the story at least, but in a book called Commissar by Thaddeus Whittlin, himself a former inmate of the gulag at Vorkuta, another, more harrowing, version is told. Whittlin maintains that Beria met Nino when he was already head of the secret police in Georgia. He had a luxurious train at his disposal, which he used as his travelling headquarters. One day at the station, he was approached by a young girl, who asked him to intercede for her brother who had been arrested. It was Nino. She was extremely beautiful — medium height with black eyes and a creamy white complexion.

Beria was taken with her and asked her to board the train so he could take more details of the case. He took her to his bedroom compartment and ordered her to undress. When she tried to leave, he locked the door and slapped her face. Then he grabbed her arms, twisted them behind her back, pushed her down onto the bed and raped her.

When it was all over, he went to call the guard to have her taken to jail. But he looked at her tear-streaked face and decided that she was, indeed, very attractive. In half an-hour or so, he might want her again. So he locked her in his compartment and went down to the restaurant car for dinner and some vodka.

He kept the girl all night, raping her repeatedly. In the morning, he ordered breakfast for two. When he left the train to perform official duties, he left her locked in the compartment.

Despite the show of brutality, Beria was completely spellbound. Nino was the type of woman that appealed to him. She had small breasts, big eyes and a full ripe mouth. Although she was young and innocent, her body was full and mature.

He kept her on board the train with him for several days, while he travelled around supervising the progress of a Five-Year Plan in the Sukhumi region of Abkhazia. During that time, Beria started thinking how stupid it would be to throw away such a find. All his comrades and his superiors were married, while he spent his time seducing young girls.

Despite its ideological commitment to free love, the party, he knew, had a puritanical streak in it. If he was to get on, it would be best if he got married. So he did. Nino, his captive, had no say in the matter.

Whittlin’s story seems to be more in keeping with Beria’s character. An ugly child, girls had teased him at school. As an adolescent, they snubbed him and he hated them. He did not have enough money to pay good-looking prostitutes and had to make do with the older, uglier ones.

But, with the Revolution, everything changed. As head of the Cheka, he was charged with seeking out antiBolshevik elements. He did this largely in schools, where he would interrogate pupils personally, slapping their faces or beating their hands with a reed cane until they gave him the names of reactionary elements. He particularly liked interrogating girls — the pretty ones, the sort who had teased him when he was younger and turned him down. The more helpless and innocent the girl the better. It was the violation of innocence that he liked and he would not stop even at murder to get it.

In 1935, the People’s Commissar of Foreign Trade, Arkaday Rosengoltz, made the mistake of taking his beautiful young daughter, Yelena, on a trip to Sukhumi in Georgia. They were the guests of Nestor Lakoba, the Secretary of the Executive Committee of Abkhazia, and Lakoba arranged for his two cousins Basil and Michael to show Yelena around.

When Beria saw Yelena he was smitten. A few days later, Lakoba invited Beria to his country house, intimating it was for a stag party. When Beria arrived, Lakoba was nowhere to be seen, but Basil and Michael were there, along with Yelena. They played some records and Yelena danced with each of them in turn. Turkish delight, tea and wine were served.

When Yelena excused herself to go to the lavatory, one of the boys poured pure alcohol into her wine glass. When she returned, Beria proposed a toast “to the Queen of Beauty” and urged her to down her wine in one gulp.

Soon after, she felt dizzy and hot, and went outside to get some air. The three men followed. Out on the lawn, she collapsed. When she came: to, they were fiddling with her clothes. To start with, she thought they were loosening her clothing, so that she could breathe more easily. The three of them raped her in turn.

Afterwards they began to panic. What if she told her father? He was a highly respected Bolshevik with a lot of influence in Moscow. So one of them put his hands round her throat and strangled her.

Beria telephoned the investigating magistrate. When he arrived, Beria explained that he was the Chief of the Secret Police in Georgia and informed the magistrate that the girl had had a few glasses of wine. A little drunk, she had become hysterical and run out into the garden where she had committed suicide. No autopsy was necessary. A statement signed by the First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Committee of the Communist Party, Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, corroborated by the Secretary of the Executive Committee of Abkhazia, Nestor Lakoba, would do. All the magistrate had to do was inform the dead girl’s father about the unfortunate accident.

Next day, Beria went back to Tbilisi.

As a fellow Georgian, Beria was one of the few people Stalin could trust, so his rise through the ranks of the Communist Party was effortless. In 1938, he moved to Moscow to head the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs — the NKVD — and ran the huge chain of labour camps that spread across the Soviet Union.

As deputy premier in charge of both internal security and war production, it is hard to work out when Beria could have had time for all his womanizing. Nevertheless, Moscow was abuzz with rumours of him seducing-or raping-young girls, but the truth was not widely known until after Stalin’s death in 1953, when Beria lost out in a power-struggle to Nikita Khrushchev.

When Beria was finally arrested during the struggle for power, one of his bodyguards produced a list of thirty-nine women with whom Beria had had sexual relations. He also claimed, rightly, that Beria had contracted syphilis in 1943. At Beria’s trial another bodyguard said that he had been employed to pick up women in the street and transport them to Beria’s home, where Beria raped them. U.S. embassy staff corroborated this. Their residence was in the same street as Beria’s home and they saw girls brought there late at night in a limousine.

Beria did not confine his activities to his office. At night, he would often risk taking girls back to his villa, despite the presence of his wife. To keep them quiet, his victims would be plied with wine until they fell asleep. Then Beria would rape them.

Outside Moscow, he was no better. The Minister of Culture for Georgia told of going for a ride in Beria’s cherished speedboat. Out in the lake, they came across a young woman swimmer, a member of a local sports club. Beria stopped the boat and insisted that she climb aboard. Then he began making lewd remarks and indicated his desire to seduce her, though she was plainly terrified of him. He turned to the Minister and told him to jump overboard and swim to the shore. When the poor man said he could not swim, Beria pushed him overboard. He would have drowned if he had not been spotted by one of Beria’s bodyguards who was watching from the shore and sent out a boat to rescue him.

Beria had a proclivity for sportswomen. He insisted on having the pick of the female athletes who travelled from Georgia to Moscow for the annual Day of Physical Culture.

The NKVD kept a special watch on the intelligentsia, while Beria himself kept a close eye on young actresses. He had an affair with Nina Alekseeka, a member of the Ensemble of Song and Dance that was sent to Finland in 1940 to entertain the troops.

After Beria’s arrest, his office was searched. Love letters and items of women’s clothing were found. Beria’s son, Sergo, leapt to his father’s defence, but even he was forced to admit that Beria had a secret love child.

Stalin, of course, knew all along what Beria was getting up to. The Soviet historian Dimitri Volkogonov said: “Even though he professed to value asceticism and puritanism, the General Secretary must have known that Beria was a notorious profligate.”

It is said that Stalin laughed when he heard of some of Beria’s escapades. Beria even tried it on with a close friend of Stalin’s, Eugenia Aleksandrovna, in front of Uncle Joe himself. One evening, at dinner, he put his hand on her knee under the table.

Joseph, he’s trying to squeeze my knee!” she said loudly. The whole table looked at Beria. That didn’t mean he didn’t try again.

Nadya, Stalin’s wife, hated Beria and warned her husband against him, but he took no notice. There is even a picture of Beria with Svetlana sitting on his lap. He has his arms around her and she is looking very uncomfortable.

During his trial Beria was accused of being an “imperialist agent” and conducting “anti-party and anti-state activities”, along with four counts of rape. The indictment cited orgies with teenaged girls incarcerated in his villa in Georgia as well as the girls he abducted and raped in Moscow. He was found guilty of all charges in December 1953 and immediately executed.