The Women of Stalin's Gulag

Lenin suffered a series of strokes beginning in May 1922 that eventually left him mute and bedridden. Until then, the Old Man had handled details like medical care, leaves abroad, and housing—for example, Lenin gave Stalin a bigger Kremlin apartment. After the Old Man’s incapacitation, the Master made sure he decided such things. The others could not be bothered. Only Stalin realized the power it gave him.

As the Old Man’s health deteriorated, Stalin chose his doctors and nurses and procured his medications. The Master’s own wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, served at Lenin’s sickbed in the Kremlin.

The most nerve-racking part of the power struggle was waiting for the Old Man to die. Lenin’s crone of a wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, kept issuing optimistic reports from the sanatorium outside Moscow. He’ll return to work any day, she insisted. The Master knew that his political career would be over if Lenin regained his health. In his political testament, the Old Man had advised the party to fire Stalin. As general secretary, Stalin had accumulated too much power and had the audacity to insult the Old Man’s wife. Fortunately, the vain Lenin was an even-handed critic with ample insults for the others. Only Lenin could do the job right, it seems.

The Old Man did not return. The Master shrugged off rumors that he poisoned Lenin, but he kept the idea to use against his rivals.

As soon as the Old Man had drawn his last breath on January 21, 1924, the Master sprang into action. He assumed control of the funeral arrangements. The others jockeyed to be at the front of the bier. The Master inauspiciously brought up the rear—an almost invisible pallbearer.

It helped that Stalin’s colleagues underestimated him. As far as they were concerned, he sat at his desk and pushed papers. While they made speeches and argued, he quietly placed his people in key positions. His fellow Bolsheviks scarcely noticed that they turned to him for cars, amenities, and even envelopes of extra household cash. The Master supervised—and eavesdropped on—the special Kremlin phone lines.

Stalin dealt easily with his rivals for power. The posturing peacock Leon Trotsky waited in vain to be anointed as a reward for his civil-war heroics. The Master joined the naïve Nikolai Bukharin to get rid of Trotsky. Together they charged Trotsky with “splitting the party” in order to drive Trotsky and his allies into exile in Kazakhstan in 1928. Trotsky was expelled from the country in 1929 but kept up his polemics from abroad until his assassination in Mexico in 1940.

Editor’s note: The essay above is an excerpt of the book, forthcoming from Hoover Press, titled “Women of the Gulag.”