Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  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 sixteen-year-old girl when, according to the family and to her daughter, she fell madly, passionately in love with the thirty-nine-year-old Stalin, already Lenin’s loyal ally and a star in the Bolshevik firmament. Much to her parents’ annoyance, she ran off with him in 1918 to join the Revolution, becoming his secretary. Nadya was headstrong, stubborn, puritanical, and idealistic. To outsiders she appeared cold, but this exterior hid a passionate and volatile temperament.

  Nadya’s warmth, as well as her frustration, surfaces in a letter to the aunt of her stepson Yakov, Maria Svanidze, of whom she was clearly very fond. Maria and her husband, Alexander, were then living in Berlin, where he was working for the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade. Nadya wrote the letter just before the birth of Svetlana, who, despite her mother’s ambivalence about the pregnancy, obviously treasured the letter, translating it into English herself and saving it:

  JANUARY 11, 1926

  Dear Maroussya

  You write that you feel bored. You know, my dear, it’s the same thing everywhere. I have nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes that looks even strange: in so many years not to develop close friendships, but that depends on character. It is strange that I feel much closer to non–party members, I mean women. This public is much simpler to get along with.

  I regret that I have again took [sic] upon myself strong family bonds [here Svetlana added a footnote: “N. S. Allilueva was expecting her daughter Svetlana at that time”]. This is not so easy in our days, because there appeared to be so many new prejudices, like if you are not working you are a “baba,”* although perhaps one does not work only because one does not have due qualifications. And now when I am going to be with family business, it is impossible to think about one’s qualifications. I advise you, dear Maroussya, to obtain some skills for Russia, while you are abroad. I am serious. You simply cannot imagine how unpleasant it is to work simply for earnings, doing any work; one must have a specialty, specialization, which would liberate you from dependence on others. . . .

  Well, my dear Maroussya, do not feel lonely, do obtain necessary qualifications and come to us next time. We shall all be very happy to see you. Joseph is asking me to give you his love. He has very good feelings toward you (he says “she is a smart baba”). Do not get angry—that is his usual way to treat us, women. . . .

  I kiss you and goodbye,

  Nadya16

  Nadya was fed up with being a shadow in the Kremlin and was determined not to be a baba. As soon as Svetlana was born, Nadya, then twenty-five, searched for a nanny to care for her infant daughter so that she would be free to pursue her own education. After interviewing prospective candidates, she settled on Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova.

  Alexandra Andreevna knew about loyalty. She had been born in 1885 on an estate in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, and worked as maid, cook, nurse, and housekeeper until she joined the Saint Petersburg household of Nikolai Yevreinov, a theater director and critic, a member of the prerevolutionary liberal intelligentsia. The Yevreinov family taught the illiterate Alexandra Andreevna to read and write. When the outbreak of the Revolution forced them to flee to Paris, they invited her to accompany them, but she refused to leave the motherland. During the famines of the early 1920s, she fled, with her one remaining son (the other had died of starvation), to Moscow, where Nadya Stalina discovered and hired her. Svetlana’s adopted brother, Artyom Sergeev, would say that Alexandra Andreevna was “an absolutely wonderful nanny.” She reminded him of Pushkin’s faithful nanny, Arina Rodionova.17

  Alexandra Andreevna was a remarkable storyteller who threaded her conversation with Russian proverbs, filling the children’s ears with tales of her village and of her “theater” days in Saint Petersburg. Her greatest gift was her capacity to keep silent as she weathered all the vicissitudes over the years in the Stalin household. Svetlana would say of her, “For me, during my whole life, she was an example of calmness, hard work, warmth, some kind of epic tranquility, and an unending optimism.”18

  Nadya left Svetlana’s nanny strict instructions never to let her charge be idle. Svetlana remembered her nanny taking her to preschool for music lessons with twenty other children. Svetlana sang in a children’s chorus and was soon taught to read and transcribe music and play the piano. Alexandra Andreevna stayed with Svetlana for thirty years until her death in 1956, serving as nanny for Svetlana’s own children. If there was any ethical grounding for Svetlana in the morally ambiguous Stalin universe, it came from her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna. “If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person,” Svetlana later wrote, “I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”19

  In 1928, when Svetlana was two, Nadya enrolled at the Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibers, a new branch of chemistry. There were also endless Party meetings, and what free time Nadya had she spent with Stalin. She hired tutors to oversee her children’s education, while she was mostly absent.

  As Svetlana put it with some resentment, “It was not the thing at that time for a woman, especially a woman Party member, to spend much time with her children.”20 All the Kremlin wives had Party jobs. In their spare time, some took up tennis. There were tennis courts and croquet sets on those dacha lawns. It was an uncanny replication of the old tsarist aristocracy’s way of life.

  Nadya hired a German housekeeper from Latvia, Carolina Til, to run the Kremlin apartment and left everything to her German efficiency. She also hired a governess for Svetlana and a male tutor for Vasili, much as the tsars had done. Svetlana learned to read and write German and Russian by the time she was six.

  From left: Carolina Til, the housekeeper, and the nanny Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova.

  (Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

  The life of all the children in the numerous Kremlin apartments followed a similar routine, run by governesses and tutors. But it was not all discipline. Stepan Mikoyan, whose father was an Old Bolshevik and a Soviet statesman, one of the few who survived Stalin’s purges, lived in the Horse Guards building and used to play with Vasili and Svetlana. He remembered afternoons when all of the children of government officials, including the staff—there must have been thirty or forty children—raced through the gardens. Svetlana was a tomboy and fearlessly climbed the Tsar’s Cannon, the largest cannon in the world, just like everybody else.21

  There were rollicking children’s parties at which twenty or thirty children might read a fable by the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Andreyevich Krylov, imitating the animals and wearing actual bearskins. But they would also chant satirical couplets about “political double-dealers.” Their parents would be the audience, and even Stalin might be there, a passive w
itness, as was his habit, watching indulgently from the sidelines. “Once in a while,” his daughter would remark laconically, “he enjoyed the sounds of children playing.”22

  Svetlana remembered her sixth birthday. The Kremlin flat was full of children. They had prepared songs and dances, and she recited some German poetry. It had been a feast, complete with tea and small cakes in cups. Svetlana had to hold this memory in a sealed compartment since she recognized, years later, that much of the rest of Russia had been starving.

  Only once did Svetlana recall spending a full day with her mother. She remembered watching in amazement as Nadya furiously cleaned the underside of the claw-foot bathtub and then the rest of the apartment. She was too young to understand that the motive was probably less her mother’s obsession with cleanliness, though there was that, than a wife’s repressed anger, for there was much unhappiness in the Stalin family. Stalin and Nadya often fought. Years later Polina Molotov, Nadya’s close friend, told Svetlana, “Your father was rough with [your mother] and she had a hard life with him. Everyone knew that. But they’d spent a good many years together. They had a family, children, a home, and everyone loved Nadya.” Although it wasn’t a happy marriage, Polina asked, “What marriage is?”23

  Svetlana remembered her mother hitting her only once. A new tablecloth made of disk-shaped pieces of embroidery hung alluringly from the dining room table. When Svetlana took her scissors and cut out one of the disks—they were so beautiful—her enraged mother slapped her across the face.24 It was a terrible shock. When Stalin heard her cry, he came running to comfort her.

  Svetlana reciprocated this role of placater. When her mother and father were arguing, she would run to her father and wrap her small hands around his boot. Only then would he calm down. Nadya’s close friend Irina Gogua, witness to such domestic arguments, remarked, “The only creature who softened [Stalin] was Svetlana.”25

  If her mother was cool, Svetlana got the emotional response she craved from her father. She was Stalin’s favorite child. He called her his “little sparrow” or “little fly.” It was to his knees that she flew, and from him she got the kisses and caresses her mother withheld. She took his constant absences for granted; they made his appearances all the more dramatic and the child all the more needy.

  It was Nadya who embraced the Svanidze side of the family. She was particularly protective of Yakov, whom Stalin apparently treated with contempt. The adolescent boy spoke only Georgian when he joined the household. Svetlana thought this was one of the reasons her father seemed to dislike him. Stalin was reportedly self-conscious of his own Georgian-accented Russian. Svetlana would say that her father “knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form; . . . in Russian he could not be an eloquent orator or writer, lacking synonyms, nuances, depths.”26 Instead he often used silence to assert his authority, a much more effective tool to control others, who could never figure out quite what Stalin was thinking.

  As a child, Svetlana didn’t even know that her father’s roots were Georgian. Once her brother Vasili, who constantly teased her, told her that the family were Georgians. When Svetlana asked him what being Georgian meant, he said that “they went around in long Circassian cloaks and cut everybody up with daggers.”27 Svetlana claimed that Stalin, seeking to distance himself from his roots, banned visiting Georgian colleagues from bringing the usual gifts of Georgian wines and fruit, raging that such generosity came at public expense, and Nadya concurred.

  Looking back, Svetlana said the room she most loved in their Moscow apartment was her mother’s room. In her mother’s absence, she would retreat there whenever she could to sit on its thick, raspberry-colored Oriental rug or curl up on the old-fashioned Georgian takhta (divan) with its embroidered cushions. She loved to touch the books on Nadya’s desk and drawing table. Given the dangerous household in which she grew up, Svetlana needed this idealized image of the beloved mother for psychic survival, but the outsider sees only an absent mother and a desperate, emotionally needy child. Of course, the truth was that Nadya herself was barely surviving.

  Life at Zubalovo

  Buried in the minds of those of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives. Despite what her life would become, Svetlana had such a place.

  As a member of Lenin’s inner circle, Stalin was awarded a dacha called Zubalovo. It was not far from the village of Usovo, about twenty miles outside Moscow. The family lived there weekends and summers from 1919 to 1932, and the extended family continued to visit until 1949, long after Nadya’s death.

  The dacha took its name from the former owner, Zubalov, an Armenian oil magnate from Baku. The whole area around Usovo had once served as a vacation retreat for the wealthy in prerevolutionary Moscow. After the owners fled during the Revolution, the dachas were divided among the Party elite. Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan got Zubalovo. There was more than a small amount of revenge in this. Both men had directed strikes protesting the long working hours and miserable conditions at Zubalov’s oil refineries in Baku, Azerbaijan; and Batumi, Georgia.

  On the expansive grounds of Zubalovo, there were three separate houses called the big house, the small house, and the service block, all surrounded by a redbrick wall. The larger one was taken over by Mikoyan and other Old Bolshevik families. Nadya’s siblings, the Alliluyevs, and some of the Svanidzes used the service block, while Stalin and Nadya had the smaller dacha. It was always filled with visitors.28

  Stalin immediately had the dacha remodeled, removing the gables and old furnishings. He had a balcony built on the second floor—“father’s balcony”—and a terrace covering the back of the house. Stalin and Nadya occupied the upstairs, while the children and visiting relatives and friends lived downstairs. Purple lilac bushes framed the front of the house, and a grove of white birch stood at a slight distance. There was a duck pond, an apiary, a fenced-in run for chickens and pheasants, an orchard, and a clearing where buckwheat was planted to attract the bees. This Bolshevik estate served much the same role as it had when owned by the industrial elite, “a small estate with a country routine of its own” as Svetlana described it.29

  As a child, Svetlana knew the landscape like her own skin. She knew where the best mushroom patches could be found; she fished every stream and pond with her grandfather and brother and discovered where the trout rested in the slipstreams. She knew where to pick the berries among the brambles, which left her arms and legs covered in scratches. She brought home buckets of berries for the cook and, happy and exhausted, waited for praise. Svetlana had her own garden plot to tend and her own rabbits to raise. The smell of the larch trees, the white skin of the peeling birches, the flamboyant green of the new leaves, the smell of Russian soil—all this imprinted itself on her mind.

  During the summer many children of the ruling elite came to stay. She’d lead them to the poultry yard to collect the eggs of the guinea fowl and pheasants or take them out on expeditions to pick mushrooms. On the estate they had a tree house to climb into and swings and a seesaw to ride. The children went camping in the woods, sleeping in a lean-to overnight and fishing in the local river. They would cook their catches over the fire, and bake pheasant eggs in the hot cinders.

  Stalin, who had learned to love Russian baths in Siberia, eventually had a banya built at Zubalovo. It was a roofed hut with birch branches in the eaves sending their fragrance over the bathers. When her father was absent, Svetlana used to read her children’s books there, spread out on a rug on the floor.

  Relatives floated into and out of Zubalovo: her grandparents Olga and Sergei Alliluyev; her Aunt Anna and Uncle Stanislav; and Uncle Pavel and Aunt Zhenya. Uncle Pavel told stories of the time after the Civil War when Lenin sent him on an expedition to the far north to prospect for iron ore and coal. They’d lived in tents, ridden reindeer, and made their clothes from reindeer pelts.30 The Svanidzes also came to the dacha, particularly Unc
le Alyosha and his dramatic wife, Maria. Stalin was often there but preoccupied. He could be found sitting at his table working on the terrace.

  Svetlana’s grandparents, Olga and Sergei, were the dominant presences at the dacha. It was Sergei who brought Stalin into the Alliluyev household. The Russian-born son of a freed serf, he had trained himself as a mechanic and was working at the Tiflis rail yards when he joined the Mesame Dasi (Third Group), the Georgian socialist party formed in the early 1890s. He first met Stalin in 1900, when his future son-in-law was already famous locally for his brilliant organization and political exhortations at the clandestine May Day workers’ demonstrations. In those days, Sergei was mostly in charge of printing Marxist propaganda posters and leaflets, for which he was arrested and jailed seven times. Whether he participated in revolutionary violence is unclear, though he seemed to have had no objections when his nine-year-old daughter, Anna, was used by the revolutionaries as a mule to carry explosive cartridges sewn into her undervest on the train from Tiflis to Baku.31 Sergei offered the family’s apartment as a refuge for Stalin when he was hiding out from the tsar’s secret police.

  Olga was a more complex figure. In 1893, she’d run off with Sergei, who was the family’s lodger, to escape her tyrannical father. She was sixteen; he was twenty-seven. She seemed a willing ally in Sergei’s revolutionary politics. Her life and the lives of her four children had been a narrative of constant moving from city to city, police searches, fear, keeping secrets, visiting Sergei in prison, and watching friends disappear. She distributed Marxist tracts, as did her young daughters, a dangerous practice that could bring them a jail term as it did their father. It was she who suggested their Saint Petersburg apartment on Rozhdestvenskaya Street as a hiding place for Lenin in the summer of 1917, when he stayed for several days before fleeing to Finland when the Revolution seemed to be dissolving, only to return to organize the Bolshevik triumph that October. And she also welcomed Stalin’s visits. Stalin was effusive in his gratitude to Olga, writing to her from his Siberian exile: