Stalin's Daughter

The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

Rosemary Sullivan

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780007491124
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2015

A painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators – her father, Josef Stalin.

PART ONE

The Kremlin Years

Chapter 1

That Place of Sunshine

Family group, c. 1930. Standing, from left: Mariko and Maria Svanidze, Stalin’s sisters-in-law from his first marriage. Seated in center, from left: Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova (Svetlana’s nanny), Nathalie Konstantinova (governess), and Svetlana’s maternal aunt Anna Redens. Front row, from left: Svetlana and her brother, Vasili, with Nikolai Bukharin’s daughter sitting on his knee. Standing on right: Sergei Alliluyev, Svetlana’s maternal grandfather.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Over her lifetime, Svetlana often would take out the photographs from her early childhood and muse over them, experiencing that lovely, brutal nostalgia of photos trapping time. Her mother had always been the one with the camera taking the pictures. Everyone at the family gatherings was so young and alive, so simple and ebullient, wearing a picnic face. The first six and a half years of her life, until her mother’s death in 1932, were, in Svetlana’s mind, the years of sun. She would speak of “that place of sunshine I call my childhood.”¹

Who can live without personal retrospect? We will always glance back to our childhood, for we are shaped deep in our core by the impress of our parents, and we will always wonder how that molding determined us. Svetlana willfully believed in her happy childhood, even as she gradually understood that it was secured by untold bloodshed. What was it about this strange childhood that she would always turn to it for solace?

Svetlana grew up in the Kremlin, the citadel of the tsars, a walled fortress on the edge of the Moskva River, almost a small autonomous village but with imposing towers, cathedrals, and palaces centered on Cathedral Square with massive gates opening onto Red Square and the city beyond. One might think this royal fortress was impossibly grand, but when she was born there in 1926, the second child of Joseph and Nadezhda (“Nadya”) Stalin, the Russian Revolution was only nine years old. The public would always see her as the princess in the Kremlin, but her father’s Bolshevik discipline dictated a relatively modest life.

The Stalins lived in the old Poteshny Palace, a three-story building erected in 1652. It was known as the Amusement Palace and served as a theater for comic performances until, in the nineteenth century, it housed the offices of the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. The Poteshny retained its elegant theatrical chandeliers and carpeted staircase, up which the Stalins climbed to their gloomy, high-ceilinged apartment on the second floor.

Svetlana remembered that apartment: “There was [a room] for the governess, and a dining room large enough to have a grand piano in it. . . . In addition there was a library, Nadya’s room, and Stalin’s tiny bedroom in which stood a table with telephones.”² There were two rooms for the children (she shared hers with her nanny), a kitchen, the housekeeper’s room, and two bathrooms. Wood-burning stoves heated all the rooms. As she described it, “it was homely, with bourgeois furniture.” Families of other Bolshevik leaders lived across the lane in the Horse Guards building and casually dropped by.

In keeping with the ideology of the Party, there was no private property. Everything belonged to the state, down to the wineglasses and silverware, which meant, in the end, that everything was up for grabs. In the early days, even Party members had ration cards for food, but their use was hypothetical. In a country where the populace was starving, there was always enough food for the intimate soirees when the Party magnates gathered in one another’s apartments. All the leaders were assigned one of the country dachas abandoned by the rich upper classes who had fled in the early days of the Revolution.

When Svetlana was born, on February 28, she entered an already crowded household. Her brother Vasili had been born five years earlier, on March 21, 1921. The story went around that Nadya, demonstrating Bolshevik austerity and an iron will, had walked to the hospital after dinner to deliver her son. Once the ordeal was over, she phoned home to congratulate Stalin.³ Svetlana’s half brother Yakov Djugashvili, the child of Stalin’s first marriage, had also joined the household in 1921. Yakov was nineteen years older than Svetlana and would become her champion until his brutal death in a Nazi POW camp.

Family life had a Chekhovian quality, with relatives wandering into and out of the Kremlin apartment. There were two branches of the family: the Alliluyevs and the Svanidzes. Nadya’s own family constantly visited. By now the large clan included Nadya’s parents, Olga and Sergei Alliluyev; her brothers, Fyodor and Pavel; Pavel’s wife, Eugenia (“Zhenya”); her sister, Anna; and Anna’s husband, Stanislav Redens. All the family members would come to play tragic parts in the Stalin narrative.

The Svanidze branch arrived from Georgia in 1921, shadows out of Stalin’s past. In 1906, when the Georgian-born Joseph Stalin was still just a local agitator fomenting revolution under the code name Soso, he married the sister of a school friend and fellow underground revolutionary, Alexander (“Alyosha”) Svanidze. In those prerevolutionary days, when the triumph of the Bolsheviks seemed impossibly distant, Svanidze’s three sisters ran an haute couture fashion house in Tiflis (Tbilisi), called Atelier Hervieu. The waiting room was always full of counts, generals, and police officers. While the sisters fitted the dress of a general’s wife in one room, the revolutionaries discussed their plans for sabotage next door and hid their secret documents inside the stylish mannequins.⁴

The youngest sister, the exquisitely lovely Ekaterina Svanidze, whom everyone called Kato, fell in love with the mysterious and witty Comrade Soso. By then he was head of the Bolshevik faction in Tiflis, and it was no surprise that the tsar’s secret police often came calling. Kato was pregnant within months of their marriage and gave birth to Yakov in March 1907. She contracted typhus shortly afterward. The family reported that Kato, just twenty-two, died in Soso’s arms on November 22, 1907. At the funeral, a distraught Soso threw himself into the grave with the coffin, and then he disappeared for two months.⁵

Stalin’s first wife, Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze, who died in 1907.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Looking back, Stalin would tell his daughter, Svetlana, that Kato “was very sweet and beautiful: she melted my heart”⁶—but not quite enough, it seemed, for him to assume responsibility for their infant son. He abandoned Yakov to the care of his mother-in-law and the Svanidze sisters. One of the few contacts that the family had with Stalin was a letter from Siberia during one of his pre-Revolution exiles, asking them to send him wine and jam.⁷

On a visit to Georgia in 1921, the Svanidze family encouraged Stalin to bring his fourteen-year-old son back with him to Moscow. Stalin’s brother-in-law, Alyosha Svanidze, who’d been so close to Stalin in his early revolutionary days, also came, bringing along his sisters, Mariko and Sashiko, thus joining the Kremlin elite. A Europeanized Georgian, Alyosha had studied in Germany and was something of a dandy. His beautiful, flamboyant wife, Maria, from a wealthy Jewish family, who had sung in the Tiflis opera before her marriage, came with him. It would have been much safer for them had they all stayed in Georgia.

Artyom Sergeev, Nadya and Stalin’s adopted son, occasionally visited. His father had been killed in 1921 while testing a new high-speed train powered by an airplane engine. Though Artyom’s mother was still alive, Stalin adopted the boy, in keeping with the Bolshevik custom of assuming the care of orphans of Party members. Artyom became the bosom buddy of Svetlana’s brother Vasili.⁸

The only person who was always absent from these family gatherings was Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina, affectionately known as Keke. Nadya would write her mother-in-law encouraging letters: “Things here seem to be all right, we’re very well. The children are growing up. . . . Altogether we have terribly little free time, Joseph and I. . . . Still, I’m not complaining and so far, I’m coping with it all quite successfully.”⁹

Though she had visited the Kremlin once to meet Nadya, Stalin’s widowed mother refused to abandon her beloved Georgia. She lived in the old Viceroy’s Palace in Tiflis, where she chose to occupy a room on the ground floor next to the servants’ quarters, while the top floors were reserved for social functions.

To Svetlana, who seems to have met her only once in Georgia, her paternal grandmother, Keke, was a stranger and therefore rarely a part of her family mythology. Svetlana knew the stories: that her grandfather Vissarion “Beso” Djugashvili had been a cobbler who, in his drunken rages, had beaten his son brutally until Keke finally kicked him out. Keke had scraped together the money to send Joseph to the Gori Church School and then on to the Tiflis Seminary, intending him to become a priest. Svetlana always said that the notorious brutality of the Orthodox priests, who punished their students with solitary confinement for days in dungeonlike cells, had shaped her father’s penchant for cruelty.

Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina “Keke” Djugashvili, who refused to leave her native Georgia to visit Moscow.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

As an adult, Svetlana would only sparingly comment on her father to friends, but one of the things she did say was that the only person her father ever feared was his mother.¹⁰ But such was the mystification in which her father cloaked himself that even his daughter did not know his real birth date. Stalin was actually born on December 6, 1878, a year earlier than he claimed.¹¹ In keeping with his habit of inventing much of his own biography, Stalin chose December 21, 1879, as his official birthday. The family always celebrated on this day.

This, then, was Svetlana’s intimate family. She maintained that at the center of it all was her mother, Nadya, who died when Svetlana was six and a half. What does a child remember of her mother at such an age? By her sudden disappearance, Nadya became a key to understanding Svetlana’s emotional life. The photograph Svetlana most loved was the one of her mother holding her when she was an infant. It was proof that her mother loved her.

Svetlana couldn’t remember her mother’s face, but she could remember the smell of her Chanel perfume, which Nadya wore despite Stalin’s disapproval. Her mother would come into her room to say good night, would touch her, then touch her pillow, and she would fall asleep engulfed in perfume.¹² But she could barely remember her mother kissing her or stroking her hair. Her mother was a strict disciplinarian. Hearing from Vasili, her tattletale older brother, that she’d been naughty, Nadya wrote to her daughter from her vacation in Sochi:

Hello, Svetlanochka!

I had a letter from Vasya [Vasili] saying that my little girl is carrying on and being terribly naughty. I hate getting letters like that. . . . When Mama went away, her little girl made a great many promises, but now it turns out she isn’t keeping them. Please write and let me know whether you’ve decided to be good or not. You decide. You’re a big girl and are able to think for yourself. Are you reading anything in Russian? I’m waiting to hear from you.

Your Mama¹³

This letter, written when Svetlana was four or five, was the only letter she ever received from her frequently absent mother.

Svetlana, age six, with her eleven-year-old brother, Vasili, in a photo from 1932 taken before their mother committed suicide on November 9.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Svetlana felt she was a quiet, obedient child. Three decades later, she could write: “[Mother] expected a good deal of me,” still hurt that there were few memories of tenderness in her mother’s treatment of her.¹⁴ But there was one thing in particular that she did recall. It was the memory of her mother drawing a little square over her heart with her finger and telling her, “That is where you must bury your secrets.”¹⁵ In the backbiting political world of the Kremlin, Nadya kept her feelings and her secrets hidden, something her daughter, who would become notorious for her emotional outbursts, did not emulate.

As a child, of course Svetlana thought her mother was beautiful. In retrospect, she believed her mother showed her love through her dedication to her children’s education, which she took in hand from their earliest childhood and which, for Svetlana, made her the model of the dedicated mother.

Nadya is an elusive figure in the Stalin universe. She was a ...