Born in Moscow on 9 October 1888 to two primary school teachers, the 17-year-old Bukharin joined the workers’ cause during the Russian Revolution of 1905 and, the following year, became a member of the Bolshevik Party. Like many of his radical colleagues, he was arrested at regular intervals to the point that, in 1910, he fled into exile.

At various times he lived in Vienna, Zurich, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Krakow, the latter where he met Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, and began working for the party newspaper, Pravda, ‘Truth’.  In 1916, he moved to New York where he met up with another leading revolutionary, Leon Trotsky.

‘Favourite of the whole party’

Following the February Revolution of 1917 and the overthrow of the tsar, Nicholas II, Bukharin returned to Moscow and was elected to the party’s central committee. Bukharin clashed with Lenin on the latter’s decision to surrender to Germany, thus ending Russia’s involvement in the First World War, believing that the Bolsheviks could transform the conflict into a pan-European communist revolution. Lenin got his way, and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsky was duly signed in March 1918.

Bukharin was a thinker and produced several theoretical tracts, works that didn’t always meet with Lenin’s full approval. In Lenin’s Testament, in which he passed judgement on various members of his Central Committee, Lenin wrote that Bukharin was ‘rightly considered the favourite of the whole Party,’ but ‘his theoretical views can be classified as fully Marxist only with the great reserve, for there is something scholastic about him.’ (Lenin’s Testament was particularly damning of Joseph Stalin but, following Lenin’s death on 21 January 1924, was quietly suppressed).

‘Not a man, but a devil’

In 1924, Bukharin was appointed a full member of the Politburo. It was here, during the immediate post-Lenin years, that Bukharin became an unwitting pawn in Stalin’s deadly power games. Bukharin had opposed collectivization and believed agriculture was best served by encouraging the richer peasants, the kulaks, to produce more. In this he was supported by Stalin – but only in order for Stalin to marginalise then remove those he saw as threats, men such as Trotsky, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev. Kamenev and Zinoviev soon caved in to Stalin. Trotsky, who did not, was exiled, first within the Soviet Union, then to Turkey and ultimately to Mexico where, in August 1940, he was killed by a Stalinist agent. Having defeated his opponents, Stalin then took their ideas and advocated rapid collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks, criticizing Bukharin for holding opposite views.

Bukharin realised what Stalin was doing: ‘He [Stalin] is an unprincipled intriguer who subordinates everything to his appetite for power. At any given moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone.’

During a visit to Paris in February 1936, where, on Stalin’s orders, he was retrieving the archives of Marx and Engels, Bukharin visited an exiled Menshevik and there, momentarily free from the all-seeing eyes of the Soviet state, talked of his boss: ‘If anyone can talk better than him, that person is doomed, Stalin won’t let him live. Stalin is a little evil man; no, not a man, but a devil.’

Downfall

Bukharin’s downfall was rapid – Stalin removed anyone who showed support for Bukharin and, in 1929, expelled Bukharin from the Politburo. Bukharin, realising the danger he was in, renounced his views. In 1934, speaking at a party congress, he said meekly: “The members of the Communist Party ought to stand together to make the ideals of Comrade Stalin come true.” Stalin seemingly forgave him and appointed Bukharin editor of Izvestia and asked him to oversee the text for the new Soviet Constitution. But it was all part of the cat-and-mouse games Stalin revelled in.

Meanwhile, Bukharin’s old comrades, Kamenev and Zinoviev, were put on show trial, accused of ludicrous crimes, and, in 1936, executed. Bukharin was not sorry, crowing that he was ‘glad’ they had been shot like ‘dogs’. It would not be long until it was his turn.

(Bukharin was a competent cartoonist and pictured is a cartoon he did of the man that would one day order his execution).

‘It is impossible to live’

In February 1937, the arrest duly came. He responded by going on hunger strike. Stalin criticized him: ‘How dare you give us an ultimatum. Who are you to challenge the Central Committee?’ Bukharin responded, ‘With such accusations hanging over me, it is impossible to live’, to which Stalin accused him of blackmail.

During his year of incarceration, awaiting trial within the feared walls of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, Bukharin wrote. And he wrote a lot – some 1,400 pages, including 200 poems and even a novel, How It All Began. Remarkable – given his circumstances, not just of imprisonment but knowing his life would soon end by an executioner’s bullet. The novel, a semi-autobiographical work, known in Russia as ‘the prison novel’, was left unfinished; indeed it ends mid-sentence.

Bukharin was accused, amongst many obviously false accusations, of planning to assassinate Stalin and of being a Trotskyite. (Soon, the word ‘Bukharinite’ came into common usage. To be labelled as such was almost as damning as being labelled a Trotskyite).

Bukharin only confessed when his interrogators used a favourite tack and threatened to bring in his wife and family. Later, however, he retracted his confession. Ultimately, his confession, or lack of it, was immaterial – the result was a foregone conclusion. ‘The monstrousness of my crime is immeasurable,’ he said on the final day of his trial; ‘Everybody perceives the wise leadership of the country that is ensured by Stalin.’ The state prosecutor assigned to preside over his trial, Andrey Vyshinsky, dismissed Bukharin as a ‘hybrid: half fox, half pig’.

Bukharin had married three times. All three wives ended up in a gulag. He married his third wife, Anna Larina, in January 1934, and as newly-weds they lived for a while in the Kremlin apartment where Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, had committed suicide in November 1932.

Anna Larina’s Great Ordeal

Soon after his arrest, Bukharin wrote a letter to Anna, in which he warned: ‘A great ordeal awaits you. I beg you, my dearest, muster all your strength, tighten all the strings of your heart, but don’t allow them to break.’ But Anna herself had been arrested. She received the letter fifty-four years later, in 1992. One can only imagine the impact – reading a desperate letter written over a half a century before.

Following Bukharin’s arrest, Anna Larina spent 18 months in a cell, ankle-deep in water, during which time she learned from another prisoner, via the tapping on her cell wall, that her husband had been executed. She served a further eighteen years in a gulag and was only released in 1959. She spent years trying to clear Bukharin’s name which, in 1988, fifty years after his execution, she finally managed to achieve. She wrote This I Cannot Forget, published 1993, about Bukharin and their life together. She died in 1996 – five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Letters of a condemned man

While in prison awaiting his fate, Nikolai Bukharin wrote thirty-four desperate letters to Stalin. Not one was answered. In one he promises that if released he would ‘wage a mortal war against Trotsky’, even offering up his wife as a hostage for six months as an ‘added insurance’. In another letter, he asks of Stalin, ‘Koba, why do you need me to die?’ (‘Koba’ being a revolutionary nickname used by Stalin in his younger days. The letter was found hidden in Stalin’s desk following his death 15 years later.)

In his last letter to Stalin, Bukharin writes pathetically, ‘[I] have learned to cherish and love you wisely.’ He begs Stalin to allow him to die by poison not by a bullet: ‘I implore you beforehand, I entreat you … let me have a cup of morphine.’ Not only did Stalin ignore this request, but Bukharin was forced to sit and watch as others were shot before him.

In the same letter, Bukharin maintains his innocence, writing, ‘My heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes … Standing on the edge of a precipice, from which there is no return, I tell you on my word of honour, as I await my death, that I am innocent of those crimes to which I admitted.’ 

It did him little good – Nikolai Bukharin was executed 15 March 1938, aged 49, a victim of the system he helped create.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Joseph Stalin married twice. His first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in December 1907, aged 22, from typhus. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, shot herself and died on 9 November 1932, aged 31.

As a two-year-old in 1903, Nadezhda, or Nadya, Alliluyeva was reputedly saved from drowning by the visiting 25-year-old Stalin. When staying in St Petersburg (later Petrograd), Stalin often lodged with the Alliluyev family. We don’t know for sure but he may have had an affair with Olga Alliluyeva, Nadya’s mother and his future mother-in-law.

In March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd from exile to join the unrest following the February Revolution and the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. By then Nadya was 16 and she fell for the romantic revolutionary with his sweep of jet-black hair.

Mr and Mrs Stalin

Following the October Revolution of 1917, Nadya became Stalin’s personal assistant as he embarked on his job as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities and joined him in the city of Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War. They married in 1919 and had two children: Vasily, born 1921, and Svetlana, born 1926. (In 1967, Svetlana was to defect to the US, became known as Lana Peters and died in Wisconsin on 22 November 2011).

Following the civil war, they returned to the capital. Nadya found life in the Kremlin suffocating. Her husband, whom she once saw as the archetypal Soviet ‘new man’, turned out to be a quarrelsome bore, often drunk and flirtatious with his colleague’s wives. A manic-depressive and prone to violent mood swings, Stalin’s colleagues thought her ‘mad’.

Chemistry student

In 1929, bored of being cooped up in the Kremlin, Nadya enrolled on a course in chemistry. She diligently went to university each morning by public transport, shunning the official limousine. Her new-found student friends, not realising who she was, told her horrific stories concerning Stalin’s collectivization policy. When she confronted her husband, accusing him of ‘butchering the people’, he reacted angrily and had her friends arrested.

Days before her death, according to her daughter, Nadya confided to a friend that ‘nothing made her happy’, least of all her children.

The Banquet

On the evening of 8 November 1932, Stalin and Nadya hosted a banquet to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. They often argued and this party was no different, with Nadya accusing Stalin of being inconsiderate towards her. His response was to humiliate her in front of their guests by flicking cigarettes at her and addressing her ‘hey, you!’  Nadya stormed out. Molotov’s wife chased after her and together they walked around the Kremlin grounds until Nadya calmed down and retired to bed.

The following morning, servants found Nadya dead – she had shot herself with a pistol given to her by her brother, Pavel Alliluyev, as a present from Berlin. (Pavel, who was there that morning and comforted his grieving brother-in-law, would die in suspicious circumstances six years later, aged 44. Indeed, most of the Alliluyev clan would suffer early deaths on the orders of Stalin. His daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, wondered whether Stalin would eventually have had her own mother arrested).

Straightaway, the rumour was that Stalin himself had killed her. But those who saw him in the immediate aftermath witnessed his heartbreak and the incomprehension that his wife should have punished him so by taking her own life.

Reproach and accusations

Nadya had left a note for Stalin which, according to Svetlana, was both personal and ‘partly political’. Although she never saw it, Svetlana described it as being ‘full of reproach and accusations’. Stalin certainly took Nadya’s death badly, believing that she had taken her own life to punish him. His anger and grief seemed genuine and he was unable to bring himself to attend her funeral or, later, visit her grave.

The public was told that Nadya Alliluyeva had died from appendicitis – as was her daughter, then aged six. It wouldn’t have been good for Stalin’s image to have a wife who had committed suicide. Svetlana found out the truth quite by accident a decade later.

On the day of her State funeral, Stalin muttered, ‘She went away as an enemy’.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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But they hadn’t come to arrest him, they’d come to plead with him, begging him to return and take control. Stalin had survived and was to remain in power until his death twelve years later. But what had brought about Stalin’s temporary collapse, and why did his Politburo colleagues fail to bring to an end his murderous rule?

We doubt the veracity of your information

On 23 August 1939, the Nazis and Soviets had signed a non-aggression pact. But both sides knew it was never meant to be more than a postponement of hostilities.

In September 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, invited the Soviet Union to join the Tripartite Pact, an alliance of initially three Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan) that was drawing more nations to its mast, including Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. In response, Stalin sent his foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to Berlin for talks. The talks failed dismally (Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, described Molotov and his companions as ‘Bolshevik subhumans’). Molotov returned empty-handed to Moscow whilst Hitler announced plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Over the next few months, Stalin permitted limited fortification of his western border but otherwise was determined not to do anything that might provoke the Germans. Stalin’s spies had forewarned him time and again of the expected attack but he refused to believe it. A German Communist spy, Richard Sorge, based in Tokyo, microfilmed detailed reports on the impending invasion, including troop numbers and even the date – 22 June 1941. His efforts were dismissed with the curt “We doubt the veracity of your information.”

Stalin even refused to listen to Winston Churchill, who warned him of an imminent attack, dismissing the British prime minister’s advice as provocative. When, on the eve of invasion, a German deserter crossed the border into the Soviet Union and informed the Red Army of the attack, Stalin ordered him shot for spreading misinformation.  Stalin even allowed the continuation of Russian food and metal exports to the Germans, as agreed in the Pact, and forbade the evacuation of people living near the German border and the setting up of defences.

War

At 3 a.m. on 22 June 1941, Stalin went to bed. An hour later, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Stalin’s determination not to prepare for war came at a heavy cost. Within the first day, one-quarter of Russia’s air strength had been destroyed – rows of planes sat on the airfields without camouflage providing the Luftwaffe, the German air force, an easy target. His soldiers were unprepared, often in the wrong place and lacking ammunition. Stalin’s generals believed that Hitler’s main thrust would aim towards Moscow via Minsk and Smolensk. Stalin, thinking he knew best, believed Hitler’s main thrust would be southwards towards the rich resources of Ukraine, so, accordingly, the bulk of the Red Army was moved south. The generals were proved right but no one dared remind Stalin.

Stalin went into overdrive despite looking, as Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, later described him, “a bag of bones in a grey tunic.” Everything went through Stalin – from what journalists wrote for the Soviet newspaper Pravda, down to the length of bayonet to be manufactured.

On 28 June, news came through that the Germans had taken Minsk, 300 miles into Soviet territory. The road to Smolensk and ultimately to Moscow lay open. Stalin, furious and by now exhausted after days without sleep, paid a visit to his top generals, including Georgy Zhukov. Stalin’s anger reduced Zhukov, a hard-nosed, bull-necked, merciless commander, to tears. Molotov offered Zhukov his handkerchief.

“We’ve fucked it up”

The very survival of the Soviet Union was at stake and Stalin was at a loss. “Lenin founded our state,” he said despondently as he left, “and we’ve fucked it up.” And with that, he retired to his dacha.

And there he stayed for three days – refusing to answer the telephone, refusing to see anyone. He may well have suffered a form of collapse. He had made some disastrous decisions in the years leading up to the war and now they were coming back to bite him.

During the late 1930s, in an act of paranoia and jealously, he purged his military, getting rid of his ablest field marshals and generals and decimating the officer corp. 40,000 Red Army personnel, deemed politically out of step, were purged. Amongst the victims were men who advocated a reform of the Soviet Union’s military methods, calls that Stalin, on the whole, ignored. Stalin now found himself bereft of his finest military thinkers.

Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs, “There is no question that we would have repelled the fascist invasion much more easily if the upper echelons of the Red Army command hadn’t been wiped out. They had been men of considerable expertise and experience.”

But Stalin’s motive for disappearing for three days may have been more sinister. Ivan IV, the sixteenth-century Russian tsar, more commonly remembered as Ivan the Terrible, had once faked a disappearance to see how his men reacted, and which ones remained loyal. Stalin, who knew well the history of Ivan the Terrible, may have been employing the same trick.

None more worthy

Either way, after three days, a small delegation came knocking at his door. Headed by Molotov (pictured to Stalin’s right), Lavrenty Beria (Stalin’s Chief of Secret Police), Kliment Voroshilov (Defence, to Stalin’s left) and Anastas Mikoyan (Foreign Trade), they found Stalin sitting at his desk. He had on his face a look of fear. Mikoyan later wrote, “I have no doubt – he decided we had come to arrest him.” Stalin was looking thinner, haggard and hadn’t changed his clothes.

“Why have you come?” he asked.

Molotov stepped forward, “We’re asking you to return to work.”

Stalin dithered, “But can I live up to people’s expectations? Can I lead the nation to a final victory? There may be more deserving candidates.”

“There’s none more worthy,” said Voroshilov.

Molotov told Stalin of their idea to form a State Defence Committee, to which Stalin asked, “Yes, but with whom at its head?”

”You, Comrade Stalin,” came the answer, “You.”

The Politburo was nothing without their leader, and at this time of national crisis only Stalin had the force to lead them out of danger, only Stalin had the strength to unite the vast empire. And thus, Stalin survived.

“We were witness to his moment of weakness,” recalled Beria later, “and for that he’ll never forgive us.”

On 3 July, Stalin delivered his first speech to the nation since the invasion eleven days previously. His usual political rhetoric, whilst still there, was played down, instead, he spoke in patriotic terms, pulling together his people to defeat the beast that was now in their midst: “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, men of our Army and Navy! My words are addressed to you, dear friends!” he began. “The Red Army, Red Navy and all citizens of the Soviet Union must defend every inch of Soviet soil, must fight to the last drop of blood for our towns and villages, must display the daring, initiative and mental alertness that is inherent in our people.”

Stalin was back.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

The post The Day Stalin Almost Had a Breakdown first appeared on Rupert Colley.

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‘Why stir up the past?’

Joseph Stalin had died three years earlier, on 5 March 1953. In late 1955, Nikita Khrushchev had been mulling over the idea of ‘investigating Stalin’s activities’ for some months. It was a momentous prospect – Stalin had ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist for the best part of three decades; he had taken the nation to victory over the fascist Germans, and his legacy was still everywhere to be seen.

Khrushchev’s colleagues were aghast at his proposal, especially the ones who had served in senior positions under Stalin, men like Kliment Voroshilov and Stalin’s foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. These were men with blood on their hands, who, under Stalin’s orders, had facilitated and organised the liquidation of tens or hundreds of thousands of their countrymen and women. Not surprisingly they asked, ‘Why stir up the past?’

And Khrushchev himself was far from blameless, having been the regional boss in Ukraine during the mid-1930s, a time of mass terror, liquidations and deportations. But, as Khrushchev pointed out, ‘if we don’t tell the truth at the Congress, we’ll be forced to tell the truth sometime in the future. And then we won’t be the people making the speeches; no, then we’ll be the people under investigation.’

Khrushchev ordered a report on Stalin and his activities. The investigative team, headed by one Comrade Pospelov, spent months sifting through huge amounts of files and paperwork. Khrushchev knew what he wanted to say – that Vladimir Lenin, the first Bolshevik leader, had used terror but had employed it in a legitimate manner – against class enemies and to safeguard the progress of the October Revolution; whereas, as his successor, Joseph Stalin had misused his power, employing terror in an arbitrary and illegitimate manner. Pospelov’s report, when finally it came, provided him with the ammunition.

Our greatest friend

Khrushchev wanted to criticise Stalin’s ‘Cult of the Personality’. Lenin had become a cult but an unwilling one: ‘Wherever you look,’ said Lenin, ‘they are writing about me. I consider this un-Marxist emphasis on the individual extremely harmful.’

Stalin, on the other hand, had glorified in the adoration and indeed both expected it and received it. In 1937, one of Stalin’s sycophants referred to Stalin as ‘our great leader’, ‘our greatest friend’, ‘genius’, etc, more than fifty times in the course of just three speeches. This particular sycophant was none other than Nikita Khrushchev himself (pictured here with his boss).

But despite being aware of this, despite the deeply-held reservations of his colleagues, and despite the upset he knew it would cause, Khrushchev went ahead and delivered his speech. It took huge ‘political courage’, as Mikhail Gorbachev, whose own grandfather was arrested in 1938 and tortured, was to say exactly forty years later. It was at the end of the eleven-day Twentieth Party Congress, the first national gathering of the Soviet leadership since Stalin’s death, just past midnight on 25 February 1956. It was a closed session; there were no guests in the auditorium, no foreigners, no journalists – just the very upper echelons of the party leadership.

Khrushchev’s Secret Speech

For over four hours, Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s methods, his abuse of power and criticized the regime built on ‘suspicion, fear and terror’. Khrushchev, aware of the impact his words were having, described how Stalin had chosen ‘the path of repression and physical annihilation.’ He described Stalin as a ‘very distrustful man, sickly suspicious … He could look at a man and say: “Why are your eyes so shifty today?”’

Khrushchev talked of Lenin’s ‘Testament’, in which Lenin had written of his doubts over Stalin’s capacity to lead the party; in which he called Stalin rude, impolite and capricious; and suggesting that his ‘comrades think about a way of removing Stalin.’ Following Lenin’s death in January 1924, the document had been suppressed and for most in the audience, it was the first they’d ever heard of it.

Khrushchev damned Stalin’s ‘cruel repressions’ and highlighted the catalogue of Stalin’s terror, starting with the assassination in December 1934 of Sergei Kirov, Stalin’s man in Leningrad, implying that Kirov had not been the victim of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, as always maintained, but that Stalin, fearful of Kirov’s increasing popularity, had sanctioned Kirov’s murder himself. But Khrushchev focussed on the political repressions, mentioning only in passing the mass repression of the population as a whole. And by cataloguing the terror from 1934 onwards, he ignored the mass man-made famines caused by Stalin’s policies of collectivisation, and the liquidation of the kulaks, the better-off peasants.

He condemned Stalin’s conduct during the war, calling Stalin a coward who ‘not once… visited the front during the whole war.’ He refused to take seriously warnings, even from Winston Churchill, that Hitler was planning an invasion of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the shock was such that days after the Nazi invasion, Stalin suffered something akin to a breakdown.

Deathly hush

Khrushchev described the ‘deathly hush’ that followed his speech as his pale-faced audience absorbed the heretical attack on the man who had ruled over them for so long. Many cried. Some of those present reputedly suffered heart attacks in the weeks that followed; some committed suicide. ‘De-Stalinization’ had started.

The text of Khrushchev’s secret speech, although secret and not officially made public in the Soviet Union until 1988, soon spread across Russia and abroad, causing shock that the great man’s name should be so besmirched but also relief that, through Khrushchev’s secret speech, the tyranny that had overshadowed the Soviet Union for so long was now something of the past.

But the speech caused riots in Georgia, Stalin’s country of birth, where they still viewed him as a hero: ‘Glory to the great Stalin,’ they chanted.

East Germany

The first signs of post-Stalin unrest came before Khrushchev’s secret speech, with the brief and unsuccessful East German Uprising in June 1953, just three months after Stalin’s death.

Poland

But following Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the expectation of greater freedom from centralised, Kremlin rule intensified. In June 1956 in Poland, in a repeat of the East German Uprising of 1953, the workers revolted demanding economic reform. The Polish government, in a conciliatory gesture to their people, replaced their hardline leader with the popular and reformist Wladyslaw Gomulka. The Poles had taken Khrushchev at his word and were following a ‘different road to socialism’. But Khrushchev was not impressed. Furious, he flew unannounced to Warsaw for a showdown with the Poles. Gomulka held his ground but promised that Poland would remain loyal to Moscow. Satisfied with this, Khrushchev withdrew.

Hungary

But it was the Hungarian Uprising in October 1956 that truly tested the extent of the Soviet Union’s resolve. Following the relative success in Poland, students and workers took to the streets, tearing down a huge statue of Stalin and demanding greater freedom, the right to worship, and protesting against the excesses of the AVO, the Hungarian secret police. Khrushchev ordered in Soviet troops but replaced the unpopular Hungarian leader with the reformist Imre Nagy. With Nagy in place, Khrushchev withdrew his troops to the Hungarian border.

But within days, Khrushchev ordered the tanks back in. This time, with brutal efficiency, Nagy was removed and the uprising was crushed.

Khrushchev may have denounced Stalin as a tyrant, but when need be, he could be equally as ruthless.

The Dead Stalin

In 1924, Lenin’s corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum where people would queue for hours to pay their respects to the founder of the Soviet state. (He is still there today although the queues are considerably shorter). In 1953, Lenin was joined by Stalin, and the two ‘great men’ lay side by side. But in 1961, Khrushchev decided that Lenin’s sanctuary had to be freed from Stalin’s contamination: ‘The further retention in the mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the bier of J. V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violations by Stalin of Lenin’s precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honourable Soviet people and other activities… make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.’

In the dark hours of 31 October 1961, the dead dictator was removed from the Lenin-Stalin Mausoleum. There was no solemnity, no ceremony, no speeches, just a few workmen doing a matter-of-fact task – by moonlight. The not-so Great Man was reburied behind the Kremlin Wall. A few weeks later, a granite stone marked the grave with the inscription, ‘J. V. STALIN 1879-1953′.

For the full text of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, all 23,000 words of it, click here.

Rupert Colley

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Spoilt boy

At the age of 17, Vasily joined an aviation school, despite only obtaining poor grades. His father’s aides had to ensure his entry. Stalin once described Vasily as a ‘spoilt boy of average abilities, a little savage… and not always truthful,’ and advised his son’s teachers to be stricter with him.

Once enrolled in the school, Vasily used his name to obtain privileges usually reserved for the most senior members. Stalin, on hearing of his son’s abuses, ordered an immediate end to his special treatment.

As a young man, Vasily continually used his name to further his career, to obtain perks and seduce women. It was a trait that his father deplored. Vasily drank to excess and, again exploiting the family name, denounced anyone he disliked or barred his way. Amazingly, he managed to graduate as a pilot. Continually drunk, he would commandeer planes and fly them while inebriated. Vasily was married twice but never managed to curtail his womanising.

Corrupted

Promoted to the rank of colonel at the beginning of the war, Vasily was elevated numerous times, becoming a Major-General in 1946, a rank far beyond his ability, and ultimately commander of the Soviet air force within Moscow. His sister, Svetlana, in her book Twenty Letters to a Friend, wrote, ‘He was pushed higher and higher. Those responsible couldn’t have cared less about his strengths and weaknesses… Their one thought was to curry favour with my father.’ Hardly surprising given the environment they had to work under. Even high-ranking men such as Lavrenty Beria ‘spoiled and corrupted Vasily, just as long as they needed him’.

His drinking, loutish behaviour and intolerable temper made him both unpopular and a liability. He had no sense of responsibility and Stalin once had to intervene by sacking his son for ‘hard-drinking, debauchery and corrupting the regiment’. Seven months later, however, he was re-instated.

Vasily was frightened of no one but his father, in front of whom he was often reduced to a stammering wreck. He lived in fear of what would become of him after his father’s death believing that Stalin’s successor, whoever it may be, would ‘tear me apart’.

Abandoned

Sure enough, following Stalin’s death, Vasily was ‘terrified’ and those that had once fawned around him ‘didn’t need him any more and they abandoned and forgot him’.

The Defence Ministry ordered him to take up a post outside of Moscow. Vasily refused, insisting he remain in Moscow. On refusing to accept an order, he was dismissed from the air force and arrested for ‘misappropriation of state property’ – using air force funds to finance his lavish lifestyle. It seemed everyone he’d ever caused offence, threatened, denounced and abused lined up to offer their evidence. Meanwhile, no one spoke in his defence.

He served seven years in prison. On appealing to Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, with a barrage of letters promising to reform his ways, he was released in 1960. But his promises mounted to nothing – he started drinking and causing havoc and, within a year, was back in prison, this time for causing a traffic accident.

Tragic

The cycle started anew – again having promised to mend his ways. Khrushchev secured his release, gave him a Moscow apartment, a dacha, a car and restored his rank of general. Again, it didn’t last long and he was soon back in prison – his third spell.

Ill health secured his release within a year, but he was exiled to Kazan where he cut a forlorn and rejected figure. His years of hard-drinking caught up with him and after another bender, he died on 19 March 1962, two days short of his 41st birthday.

‘His life was tragic in a way,’ wrote his sister.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Yakov Stalin joined the Red Army at the outbreak of war in the East in June 1941, serving as a lieutenant in the artillery. On the first day of the war, his father told him to ‘Go and fight’.

Peace-loving and gentle

His half-sister, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin, and his second wife, Nadezhda, claimed in her book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, that Yakov never ‘took any advantage [as a soldier]; never made even the slightest attempt to avoid danger… Since my father, moreover, hadn’t any use for him and everybody knew it, no one in the higher echelons of the army gave him special treatment.’ Yakov, according to Svetlana, was ‘peace-loving, gentle and extremely quiet.’ But he wasn’t fond of his half-brother Vasily (Svetlana’s brother) and disliked his ‘penchant for profanity’, and once turned on Vasily with his fists ‘like a lion’.

On 16 July, within a month of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Yakov was captured and taken prisoner. Stalin considered all prisoners as traitors to the motherland and those that surrendered he demonized as ‘malicious deserters’. ‘There are no prisoners of war,’ he once said, ‘only traitors to their homeland’.

Certainly, Yakov, by all accounts, felt that he had failed his father. Under interrogation, he admitted that he had tried to shoot himself. His father probably would have preferred it if he had.

Stick your bayonets in the earth

Families of PoWs, or deserters, faced the harshest consequences for the failings of their sons or husbands – arrested and exiled. Yakov may have been Stalin’s son but his family was not to be spared. He was married to a Jewish girl, Julia. Stalin had managed to overcome his innate anti-Semitism and grew to be quite fond of his daughter-in-law. Nonetheless, following Yakov’s capture, Julia was arrested, separated from her three-year-old daughter, and sent to the gulag. After two years, Stalin sanctioned her release but she remained forever traumatised by the experience.

The Germans attempted to win over Yakov, offering to introduce him to Hermann Goring – but he remained steadfast and refused to co-operate. But although the Germans were unable to recruit Stalin’s son they still made propaganda capital out of him, dropping leaflets in the Soviet Union that claimed that the Great Leader’s son had surrendered and was feeling ‘alive and well’. ‘Follow the example of Stalin’s son’, the Germans urged Soviet soldiers, ‘stick your bayonets in the earth’.

Yakov was placed in a more spacious hut than others within the camp and shared a bedroom with the nephew of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. In the adjoining bedroom were four British POWs, and the atmosphere between them all was strained. Yakov taunted the Brits for standing to attention when spoken to by the German officers, implying that they were cowards, and calling the British people as a whole ‘Hitler’s puppets’. One of the British prisoners was an Irishman, Red Cushing, who described his time as a POW with Yakov Stalin in an interview with the Sunday Times in 1980.

A Marshal for a Lieutenant

In 1943, Stalin was offered the chance to have his son back. The Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and their Field Marshal, Friedrich Paulus, was taken prisoner by the Soviets, their highest-ranking capture of the war. The Germans offered a swap – Paulus for Yakov. Stalin refused, saying, ‘I will not trade a marshal for a lieutenant’. As harsh it may seem, Stalin’s reasoning did contain a logic – why should his son be freed when the sons of other Soviet families suffered – ‘what would other fathers say?’ asked Stalin.

Death

On 14 April 1943, the 36-year-old Yakov Stalin died. The Germans maintained they shot him while he was trying to escape. They released a photograph showing his bullet-riddled body caught in barbed wire.

But it is more likely that Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself onto the electric fence. After two years of incarceration and deprivation, the news of the Katyn massacre, and his father’s responsibility for it, weighed heavily on Yakov’s conscience. Stalin had ordered the murder of 15,000 Polish officers in the woods of Katyn in May 1940.  The discovery of the mass grave in March 1943 was heavily publicised by the Germans. Yakov, who had befriended Polish inmates, was distraught by the news. ‘Look what you bastards did to these men. What kind of people are you?’ said a German officer to him.

But it was an argument over toilets, according to Red Cushing, that was the final straw. Insults and fists were thrown. Then, said Cushing, ‘I saw Yakov running about as if he were insane. He just ran straight onto the wire. There was a huge flash and all the searchlights suddenly went on. I knew that was the end of him.’

Rupert Colley

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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“I don’t even trust myself.”

In his latter years, Stalin’s health had deteriorated and towards the end of 1952 he suffered several blackouts and losses of memory. His sense of paranoia had reached absurd proportions. “I’m finished”, he said in his final days, “I don’t even trust myself.”

Stalin was almost nocturnal, often going to bed in the early hours, obliging his Politburo colleagues to do likewise, and rising around noon. But on 1 March 1953, there was no sign of life all day at the great man’s dacha. His personal staff although increasingly concerned were too fearful to check up on him. Finally, at 11 p.m. they did.

They found Stalin lying on the floor, unconscious and his pyjama bottoms soaked in urine. They rang Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s Chief of Police, who arrived and bellowed at the staff, “Can’t you see Comrade Stalin is deeply asleep. Get out of here and don’t wake him up.”

But Stalin had suffered a severe stroke. Finally, next morning, on Beria’s orders, a team of doctors arrived, but by then Stalin had been left unattended for twelve hours since the stroke.

“Extremely serious.”

Stalin had become distrusting of doctors and had had most of his personal physicians arrested. So the doctors now on the scene examined their patient in extreme nervousness. They asked Beria’s permission before proceeding with each part of the examination, even asking authorization to unbutton Stalin’s shirt. They wrote a detailed report, summarising, “The patient’s condition is extremely serious.”

Cold compresses were applied, leeches placed behind the ears, various injections made, and medical staff placed on constant watch. Stalin’s colleagues also stayed: Beria, Khrushchev, Molotov and others, pacing the anterooms worried whether their boss would ever wake up and probably more worried that he should wake up and their actions would have to be accounted for.

Stalin’s son, Vasily, appeared briefly, screaming at Beria and the others, “You bastards, you’re killing my father.”

By 5 March, Stalin’s condition had worsened. His breathing had become erratic, his pulse and heartbeat weak, his complexion extremely pale.

The last moments

Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, described in almost religious terms, the last moments: “He suddenly opened his eyes and looked at everyone in the room. It was a terrible gaze, mad or maybe furious and full of fear of death… Then something incomprehensible and frightening happened. … He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. … The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.”

Despite injections of adrenalin and the application of artificial respiration, at 21.50 Stalin was declared dead.

Everyone present knelt down and kissed the old man’s hand.

The beaming Chief of Secret Police

Beria could not hide his glee and, having made sure the old man was really dead, spat on the body and bounced out of the dacha “beaming”, according to Khrushchev. Stalin had not named or recommended a successor and Beria felt this was his moment. The fight to succeed Stalin had begun.

Russian composer, Sergei Prokofiev, died on the same day. Any other day, his death would have merited front-page news in the Soviet Union but on this particular day Prokofiev’s death barely made it as a footnote.

See also article on the birth of Joseph Stalin.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Peters’ arrival in the US in 1967 (pictured) gave the West a huge propaganda coup – the defection of Stalin’s own daughter was the ultimate proof of how terrible life was behind the Iron Curtain. She had even been prepared to leave behind her two adult children, aged 22 and 17, in the Soviet Union.

‘I have come here to seek self-expression’

In her first US press conference, in 1967, she acknowledged the father’s monstrous rule but insisted that the blame for the murder of millions of Soviet citizens could not be laid purely on one man – it was the regime and its ideology. ‘I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia,’ she said. Shortly afterwards, she wrote Twenty Letters To A Friend, which went on to become a bestseller. A follow-up autobiography, Only One Year, sold equally well. With time she became more critical of her past – she publicly burnt her Soviet passport and accused her father of being a ‘moral and spiritual monster’.

In 1970, she married Wes Peters. Peters’ first wife had died in a car crash. She was also called Svetlana and her mother, the widow of the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, saw in Alliluyeva a divine substitution for her deceased daughter. Under her urging, her new Svetlana and Peters married. They had one child, Olga, and although fond of each other, Svetlana Peters felt too suffocated by her husband’s former mother-in-law’s domineering presence and the marriage ended within three years.

Back in the USSR

In 1982, Peters and her daughter moved to Cambridge, England. Two years later, to the delight of the Soviets, she moved back to the USSR, wanting to be reunited with the children she had left behind 17 years before. Her life in the West, she told reporters, had not afforded her ‘one single day’ of freedom. Having had her Soviet citizenship restored, she lived in Tbilisi in Georgia. Stalin had been a Georgian but had felt little affinity for his homeland, spending his whole life as dictator cooped-up in the Kremlin. Peters had never been to Georgia and perhaps she felt the need to connect to her ancestral home. But life didn’t work out, she feuded with her family and after just two years, she requested to be allowed to leave again.

By 1984 she was back in the US and was never again to step on Russian soil.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva

Svetlana was born 28 February 1926, the second child to Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Her brother, Vasily, was almost five years older. She also had a half-brother, Yakov, born 1907, a product of Stalin’s first marriage.

Being brought up in the stifling atmosphere of the Kremlin must have been difficult for a young girl. Her parents’ marriage was often strained and her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, a manic depressive and prone to violent mood swings, never showed her any affection. In November 1932, when Svetlana was only six, her mother committed suicide. Nadezhda had had a public row with Stalin during a dinner party. In a foul mood, she retired to bed early and was found the following morning dead with a revolver at her side. History has always implied that Stalin was responsible for his wife’s death but eyewitnesses report his genuine grief and guilt – what had he done, he asked aloud, to have been so punished?

But Peters was never told that her mother had taken her own life, being fed the official line that Nadezhda had died from appendicitis. She only found out ten years later.

(Pictured – Stalin works while Svetlana sits on the knee of Lavrenti Beria)

Stalin died in 1953. Peters gave a graphic description of his final moments: ‘He suddenly opened his eyes and looked at everyone in the room. It was a terrible gaze, mad or maybe furious and full of fear of death… Then something incomprehensible and frightening happened. … He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. … The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.’

Following her father’s death, she took her mother’s name and became Svetlana Alliluyeva.

In 1963, Peters met Brijesh Singh, an Indian Communist visiting the Soviet Union. The two fell in love and although in a later interview she referred to him as her husband, they were never allowed to marry. Singh died in 1966 and Alliluyeva was at least permitted to take his ashes back to India. It was in India she embraced Indian mysticism and made the decision that she did not want to return to Moscow and a life of forced atheism. ‘It was impossible to exist without God in one’s heart,’ she said afterwards. She walked into the US embassy in New Delhi and requested asylum.

‘A very simple man’

Of her father, Alliluyeva described Stalin in a 2010 interview as a ‘very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel. There was nothing in him that was complicated. He was very simple with us. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him and become an educated Marxist.’

But like many a possessive father, that love was mixed with jealousy and paranoia as would be expected from the Twentieth Century’s most paranoid despot. She may have been his ‘little sparrow’ but as a young woman, Peters often fell in love with older and unsuitable men. One infamous case, in 1942, was that of Alexei Kapler. A dashing and confident 39-year-old, Kapler had made his name as a filmmaker and screenwriter and the previous year had won the much-coveted Stalin Prize.

Kapler was, in Peters’ words, ‘the cleverest, kindest, most wonderful person on earth’. He lent her risqué literature, novels and poetry full of love and yearning, and took her out to the cinema and galleries. Kapler was certainly brave – it takes a sort of perverse courage for a womanising, married man to seduce a 16-year-old girl, and to boast about it, when her domineering father is never too far away, especially when that father is Joseph Stalin. Sure enough, the inevitable happened. Stalin had had their telephone conversations taped and armed with the evidence he flew into a rage. It was bad enough that Kapler was married and old enough to know better, but what really irked was that Kapler was a Jew.

‘But I love him,’ protested Alliluyeva meekly. ‘Love?’ Stalin bellowed, slapping her twice across the face. Their relationship died that day. Kapler was arrested as a British spy and sentenced to five years, released, then promptly sentenced to another five.

‘My father’s name’

In the late forties, Peters married twice. Stalin disproved of her first husband, refusing to meet him, but he did allow the marriage to go ahead. It wasn’t to last. Nor would a second marriage to the son of Andrey Zhdanov, one of Stalin’s closest aides. Both marriages produced one child.

‘You can’t regret your fate,’ Ms. Peters once said, ‘although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.’

She never truly found peace and never managed to escape her father’s shadow, ‘Wherever I go,’ she said, ‘I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name’.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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‘A sensitive child’

Ekaterina Dzhugashvili, known as Keke, dictated her memories in 1935, two years before her death. The transcript was stored by the Georgian archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and was only released in 2007 at the specific request of British author, Simon Sebag Montefiore, who, at the time, was writing his second biography of Stalin, Young Stalin.

She called her son ‘Soso’, Georgian for ‘Little Joey’: “My Soso was a very sensitive child,” she wrote.

Seeing her son’s survival as a gift from God, Keke was determined to see Soso enter church school to train to become a priest, fighting off, often physically, her husband’s insistence that he become a cobbler. “Mummy,” said the young Soso, “what if, when we arrive in the city, Father finds me and forces me to become a shoemaker? I want to study. I’d rather kill myself than become a cobbler.” “I kissed him,” wrote his mother, “and wiped away his tears. Nobody will stop you from studying, nobody is going to take you away from me.”

Having freed herself from her violent husband, Ekaterina Dzhugashvili moved from one accommodation to another picking up work where she could.

Like a tsar

In later life, Stalin arranged for his mother to move into a large mansion in Tiflis, capital of Georgia (now Tbilisi), but a woman of humble needs, she felt uncomfortable with such luxury and confined herself to one small room.

She turned down his 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. When he asked her why she had beaten him so much as a child, she shrugged and said, ‘it’s why you’ve turned out so well.’

She wrote a short book about her ‘dear son’, still available today.

Ekaterina Dzhugashvili died on 4 June 1937, aged 79. Stalin upset Georgian tradition and sensibilities by not attending her funeral, sending Laventry Beria, at the time Stalin’s man in Georgia, in his stead.

Rupert Colley

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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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.

Joseph Stalin suffered many complexes about himself. As a child he endured a bout of smallpox which left his face permanently pockmarked; a childhood accident caused his left arm to be four inches shorter than the right; his second and third toes of his left foot were joined; he had bad teeth from his many years in exile (‘black, irregular and turned inward’ by one description); and, most damning for such a towering figure, he was only five feet, three inches tall. Specially-made shoes gave him an extra inch or two but his height, or lack of it, remained a constant source of irritation.

Stalin was brought up in an atmosphere of violence. The town of Gori was a rough town, in which its male inhabitants enjoyed organized street brawling, lasting for hours at a time. On 13 February 1892, Stalin, alongside his schoolmates, witnessed the public hanging of two criminals. The executions were botched and Stalin, traumatised, came away with a new-found hatred of the tsarist regime.

Education

Stalin’s mother, determined that he should have a respectable position in life and to repay God’s benevolence for his survival, sent him to a church school. Young Soso did well. He sang in the church choir and impressed his teachers with his intelligence and, in memorising large tracts of the bible, his excellent memory. Earning top marks, he graduated two years ahead of schedule in 1894.

At the age of fifteen, Stalin was awarded a scholarship to the theology seminary in Tiflis. But the teenage Stalin was more taken with the writings of Marx and Engels than the bible and, declaring himself a Marxist and an atheist, joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), forerunner to the Bolshevik and Menshevik parties, extolling his fellow students to do likewise.

In 1899, Stalin was expelled from the seminary, supposedly for his Marxist leanings. Having adopted the revolutionary name of Koba, the name of a Georgian Robin Hood-styled folk hero, Stalin embarked on the revolutionary path, organising strikes and creating disturbances in various Georgian towns.

In his attempts to avoid the Okhrana, Tsar Nicholas II’s secret police, Stalin adopted several different aliases and was constantly on the move. Yet, between 1902 and 1913, he was arrested six times, each time managing to escape and return west, often travelling on forged documents. The comparative ease of escape, merely hopping onto a westbound train, led to speculation that Stalin was in the employ of the Okhrana as a double agent. He was arrested for the final time in February 1913 and spent four years in various parts of Siberia.

The ‘Wonderful Georgian’

Stalin first met Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, on 7 January 1906 at a party conference in Tampere, Finland.

Lenin was impressed with Stalin, calling him the ‘wonderful Georgian’. In 1912, with Lenin’s prompting, Stalin, who was serving a jail sentence, was appointed, in absentia, to the Bolshevik Central Committee. It was about this time that Stalin dropped his Georgian alias, Koba. His birth name, Dzhugashvili, was too much a Georgian giveaway and, for his Russian colleagues, too difficult to pronounce. In a letter to a Bolshevik colleague, Lenin once wrote,‘Do me a big favour – find out from someone “Koba’s” last name… (Joseph Dzh…? We’ve forgotten. Very important!)’

(Although later, Lenin criticised Stalin in his ‘Testament‘, written in December 1922).

Koba was gone; replaced by ‘Man of Steel’. Stalin had arrived.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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