Soviet Union / Russia

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Tanya Savicheva – a brief biography

Tanya Savicheva died near her hometown of Leningrad on 1 July 1944, aged only 14. Who was Tanya Savicheva? The name in Russia is what Anne Frank is to the West – a young innocent victim of World War Two, who left behind a small but lasting legacy.

But whereas Anne’s diary is a carefully kept journal over a period of two years, Tanya’s was little more than a few scribbled lines over six sheets of notepaper.

Leningrad Siege 

Leningrad (modern-day St Petersburg) was in the midst of a devastating 900-day blockade that lasted from September 1941 until January 1944. The German army had laid siege to the city, bombarded it, and cut off all supplies in its attempt to ‘wipe it off the map’, as Hitler had ordered.

The Savicheva family had all answered the call to help bolster the city’s defences. Tanya, only 11 years old, helped dig anti-tank trenches. On 12 September 1941, the largest food warehouse, the Badayev, was destroyed, having been bombed with German incendiaries. Three thousand tonnes of flour burned, thousands of tons of grain went up in smoke, meat frazzled, butter melted, and sugar turned molten and seeped into the cellars. ‘The streets that night ran with melted chocolate,’ said one witness, ‘and the air was rich and sticky with the smell of burning sugar.’ The situation, already severe, became critical.

Road of Life

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Russia’s Bloody Sunday – a summary

On Sunday, 22 January 1905, (9 January Old Style) the workers of St Petersburg organised a peaceful demonstration to demand political and constitutional reform. 150,000 demonstrators, including whole families, led by an Orthodox priest, Father Georgi Gapon, marched through the city streets armed with a petition to be presented to the tsar, Nicholas II.

Strike

Although trade unions were banned, Father Gapon had been allowed to set up a workers’ assembly in 1904 under the supervision of the Tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, with whom he had ties. In early January 1905, after four assembly members were sacked from their jobs at the huge Putilov Plant in St Petersburg, Gapon called his workers out on strike. The strike spread and culminated with the march on the Winter Palace and the delivery of the petition.

God Save the Tsar

Penned by Father Gapon, the petition, signed by a staggering 135,000 people, called for a reduction in the working day from 11 to eight hours; the right to strike; the introduction of universal suffrage; and an end to Russia’s ongoing and disastrous war with Japan.

Gapon and his legion of demonstrators were not anti-tsar – indeed, dressed in their Sunday best, they bore banners and portraits of the tsar, carried icons, and sung hymns and songs proclaiming their support for him, whom they affectionately called their ‘little father’. They believed that essentially, Nicholas II (cousin to Britain’s George V) was a good man who had their best interests at heart and that once he knew the extent of the workers’ discontent, he would put in place the means to address their grievances. The march was good-natured, with women and children leading the way. But, unbeknownst to the marchers, Nicholas II, forewarned of the demonstration, was not at the palace, but at his summer residence on the outskirts of the city.

‘Pools of blood on the white snow’

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Dmitri Bystrolyotov – Stalin’s Romeo Spy

Charming, dashing and aristocratic, Dmitri Bystrolyotov’s life reads like a far-fetched spy thriller. Addicted to danger, Bystrolyotov seduced French, British and German women procuring for Joseph Stalin vital information in the years leading up to the war, including, amazingly, Hitler’s plans for rearmament. He was, without question, Stalin’s most daring and successful spy.

Dmitri Bystrolyotov then, in 1938, at the height of Stalin’s purges, Bystrolyotov was arrested by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. Tortured and crippled, and made to ‘confess’ to fantastical charges, he was sentenced to 20 years of hard labour. Incarcerated and broken, Bystrolyotov felt the full force of the corrupt regime he had served so loyally for so long. But always one to take risks, Bystrolyotov recorded his experience within the gulags. With the help of contacts, he smuggled out, page by page, his damning first-hand account of Stalin’s labour camps.

Now, 40 years after his death, the life of Dmitri Bystrolyotov is retold in a dramatic new book, Emil Draitser’s Stalin’s Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB’s Most Daring Operative.

The name is Bystrolyotov, Dmitri Bystrolyotov

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Grigori Rasputin – a brief biography

When Prince Felix Yusupov offered his guest, Grigori Rasputin, refreshments at his palace in St Petersburg on the evening of 29 December 1916, the glass of red wine and Rasputin’s favourite cakes were laced with enough poison to kill five men. Rasputin, however, seemed totally unaffected as he gulped back the wine and wolfed down the cakes.

Despairing, Yusupov shot Rasputin in the back and then, satisfied, left to join his fellow conspirators. Returning a little later to check on the body, Rasputin sat up and lunged at the prince. The prince’s friends came to his rescue, shooting the ‘mad monk’ a further three times, once in the forehead. But still refusing to die, Rasputin’s attackers resorted to clubbing him senseless then wrapping his body in a blue rug and throwing him in the icy waters of the River Neva.

The subsequent autopsy found that Rasputin had died by drowning, implying he had survived the huge dose of poison, four bullets, and the severe clubbing.

At least, this is the story that has filtered down through the decades.

The Russian people will be cursed

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Lenin’s Testament – a summary

In December 1922, while recovering from a stroke, Bolshevik party leader, Vladimir Lenin, wrote his 600-word ‘Testament’ in which he proposed changes to the structure of the party’s Central Committee and commented on its individual members, comments that caused turmoil within the party leadership following his death in January 1924.

Lenin began his Testament with his concerns over the open antagonism between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, fearing that their hatred of each other would cause a split within the Centre Committee: ‘Relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split,’ he wrote. He suggested doubling the membership from 50 to 100.

Trotsky

But it is Lenin’s judgements on individual members of the Centre Committee that make his Testament such a fascinating document. Leon Trotsky, for example, is described as ‘distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.’

Bukharin

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Lavrenty Beria – a brief biography

On 23 December 1953, Lavrenti Beria was executed. Born in Georgia on 29 March 1899, Beria had risen to prominence in Georgia during the Russian Revolution of 1917 and, during the 1920s, became a firm favourite of fellow Georgian, Joseph Stalin. In 1938 Beria was appointed head of the dreaded secret police, the NKVD.

‘Perfidy and cunning’

A brutish, inhumane man, Lavrenti Beria declared in 1937 that enemies ‘of the party of Lenin and Stalin [would] be mercilessly crushed and destroyed’. He was true to his word and played a major role in Stalin’s Great Purges of the 1930s, sending countless numbers to the gulags or to be executed. Stalin called Beria ‘our Himmler‘. It was meant as a compliment.

Yugoslavian writer, Milovan Djilas, described Beria as ‘plump, greenish, and pale, with soft damp hands… with [a] square-cut mouth and bulging eyes behind his pince-nez.’ Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, described him as ‘more treacherous, more practised in perfidy and cunning, more insolent and single-minded’ than even her own father.

Uncle-figure

A lover of Rachmaninov’s music and a cuddly uncle-figure to Svetlana Alliluyeva, pictured, Beria had his bodyguards abduct young girls off the streets for his devious sexual pleasure. Those that refused his predatory advances risked being packed off to a gulag.

Beria had risen through the ranks as first secretary of the Georgian Communist party, forcing through collectivisation and quashing nationalistic tendencies. His first task as head of the NKVD, was to purge his predecessor, Nikolai Yezhov (or Ezhov), and wind down the Great Terror that had reached a climax in 1937. The worst may have been over but the arrests continued and Beria, according to contemporary accounts, was not shy in getting his hands dirty while interrogating suspects; relishing in torture and beatings meted out to the unfortunates brought before him.

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The Birth of Joseph Stalin

On 18 December 1878, in the town of Gori, Georgia, was born one history’s greatest tyrants, Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, better known to history by his adopted name – Stalin, ‘man of steel’. For reasons that remain a mystery, Joseph Stalin always maintained he was born on 21 December 1879 and it was this date that was celebrated throughout his life. The change of date may possibly be to do with Stalin’s attempts to confuse and evade the tsar’s secret police.

Joseph Stalin’s father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, known as Basu, was a shoemaker. An alcoholic, he spent much of his time in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, 50 miles east of Gori) producing shoes for the Russian army. On his drunken and increasingly rare appearances at home, he would beat his wife and son. (Pictured is Stalin, aged 15, in 1894).

‘Like a Tsar’

Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina, or ‘Keke’, also meted out punishment on her son but generally was protective of her ‘Soso’ (Georgian for ‘Little Joey’), especially on account that her first two children, both boys, had died in infancy. Stalin only learnt to speak Russian when aged about nine but never lost his strong Georgian accent.

In later life, Stalin arranged for his mother to move into a large mansion in Tiflis but a woman of humble needs, she felt uncomfortable with such luxury and confined herself to one small room. She turned down her son’s requests to visit him in Moscow and Stalin, never fond of travelling, visited her only rarely. She once asked her son, ‘Joseph, what exactly are you now? He replied, ‘Do you remember the tsar? Well, I’m like a tsar.’ ‘You’d have done better to have been a priest,’ she said in response.

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Ekaterina Svanidze – Stalin’s first wife

Alexander Svanidze, an old school friend of Stalin’s and a fellow revolutionary, introduced the 28-year-old future dictator to his sister, Ekaterina Svanidze. Nicknamed Kato, Ekaterina was born in Georgia on 2 April 1885. The two fell for each other and decided to get married. Respecting her devoutness, Stalin put aside his atheism and the couple were married in an Orthodox church in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), capital of Georgia, in 1906.

Together they had a son, Yakov, born 18 March 1907, but with Stalin away so much, inciting unrest, his wife and son saw little of their wandering revolutionary. Certainly Stalin never did have that much time for his eldest son. (When Yakov was taken prisoner-of-war in 1941, Stalin refused a deal with the Germans that would have freed his son).

Meanwhile, Ekaterina Svanidze was struck by typhus and died, possibly in Stalin’s arms, on 5 December 1907. She was twenty-two.

‘My last warm feelings for humanity’

Her death greatly affected Stalin and he later claimed that, beside his mother, also called Ekaterina, Kato was the only women he had loved. At her funeral, which, again, Stalin allowed to take place in an Orthodox church, he reputedly said, ‘This creature softened my heart of stone. She’s died and with her have died my last warm feelings for humanity.’

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Kliment Voroshilov: Defender of Leningrad – a brief biography

During the 900-day siege of Leningrad, the man initially charged with the city’s defence was one of Stalin’s old favourites, Kliment Voroshilov, born 4 February 1881. Rupert Colley summarises his efforts.

During the Second World War, the city of Leningrad (modern-day St Petersburg) was in the midst of a devastating 900-day blockade that lasted from September 1941 until January 1944. The German army had laid siege to the city, bombarded it and cut off all supplies in its attempt to ‘wipe it off the map’, as Hitler had ordered.

The men in charge of the defence of Leningrad were Andrey Zhdanov and 60-year-old Kliment Voroshilov, one of Stalin’s old favourites. During the Russian Civil War, Voroshilov, working closely with Stalin, had gained a reputation for his fierce defence of Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925).

Utterly reliable 

But Voroshilov’s military experience was stuck in the 1920s and ill-suited to the demands of the Second World War. His command of Soviet forces in the ‘Winter War’ against Finland (1939-1940) was disastrous. But Stalin realised that under the pressure of a siege, the people of Leningrad would question the regime and his leadership in particular. He needed a man of utter political reliability to instil in Leningrad the right political thinking. And Kliment Voroshilov was that man.

Voroshilov and Zhdanov were loyal supporters of the party and devoted to Stalin but, like everyone else, they feared him. Their fear of Stalin overrode all other considerations and directed strategy and policy. When, in July 1941, a convoy of trains carrying vital foodstuff was heading towards Leningrad, the two men, afraid that accepting the consignment might appear to the boss as defeatist, turned the convoy away, stating that the city lacked ‘sufficient warehouse space’. Their political self-preservation was more important than the welfare of their city.

Will there be an end to these losses?

Voroshilov was certainly brave and liked to rush around the front line brandishing his revolver under heavy German shelling but, despite his many years’ experience, he was unable to form any strategy that could stop or even reverse the German assault. Continue reading →

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Sergei Kirov – a brief biography

One bullet that killed a million people. As the assassination of John F Kennedy is to the US, so the assassination, 29 years earlier, of Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s number two, was to the Soviet Union. Everyone in the Soviet Union remembered where they were when they heard of the assassination of Kirov. Millions would die as a direct consequence of that single bullet as Stalin sought to unmask the perpetrators.

Sergei Kirov, a dashing forty-seven-year-old and the rising star of the Bolshevik party, was killed on 1 December 1934 in a corridor outside his offices of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. His assassin, 30-year-old Leonid Nikolaev, had acted alone. Kirov’s death threw the nation into a state of shock. Joseph Stalin, who rarely left the Kremlin, made an exception and caught the overnight train to Leningrad specifically to interview Nikolaev. Upon arriving in the city, Stalin was greeted by the local secret police chief and slapped the man across the face. On 29 December, Leonid Nikolaev was executed, soon followed by his wife (spuriously suspected of having had an affair with Kirov, thereby providing the motive), and his 85-year-old mother.

Stalin’s Purge Continue reading →