Model School No. 25 was a Soviet lycée with very high scholastic standards. By 1937 the library, with its resplendent banner, WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE, THERE IS NO COMMUNISM, had twelve thousand volumes and subscribed to forty journals and newspapers. Beside the library was a quiet room where children played dominoes, table croquet, and chess.26
The school had clubs in theater, ballroom dancing, literature, photography, airplane and automobile modeling, radio and electrotechnology, parachute jumping, and chess. The boxing club and track club trained on the surrounding streets. There were sports competitions, a rifle team, and volleyball tournaments. A doctor and a dentist were in residence. The children went on excursions to Moscow’s famous Tretyakov Gallery and to Tolstoy’s estate, and they vacationed at sanatoriums on the Black Sea. Even as the train carried them through the famine-stricken Ukraine on their way to their Crimean summer camps in the early 1930s, and though the station platforms were crowded with hungry people devastated by collectivization, students remained under the spell of their school. Their teachers did not discuss the famine.
Model School No. 25 was treated as a “shopwindow on socialism,” and thousands, including foreigners, came to visit. Reporters and photographers would follow in their wake. The American singer Paul Robeson placed his son there in 1936, though under an assumed name. When the school needed money, a letter from the director to Stalin or Kaganovich would get a response. One American visitor, Joseph C. Lukes, wrote in the visitors’ book: “The standards of lighting, heating, ventilation and cleanliness are up to American standards.”27 Soon the school got more money to renovate and upgrade. Model School No. 25 was meant to be better than American schools.28
There were schools outside Moscow that the foreigners did not visit, schools where, by the early 1930s, students went without paper (they wrote notes in the margins of old books) and pens were rationed. Because of a shortage of desks, classes were taught in shifts. Schools closed for lack of firewood or of kerosene for lamps. Outside the capital, the devastation caused by forced collectivization and the attacks on the kulaks, which led to widespread famine, meant that often as many as 40 percent of the students dropped out. Many of them had died.29
In 1929, Andrei Bubnov, commissar of enlightenment and head of the Communist Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department (Agitprop), called upon all schools “to immerse themselves in a class war for the transformation of the Soviet economy and society.” Students and teachers at Model School No. 25 were meant to internalize the Stalinist credo: “a respect for obedience, hierarchy and institutionalized authority; a belief in reason, optimism and progress; recognition of a possible transformation of nature, society, and human beings; and an acceptance of the necessity of violence.”30 Like all Soviet schools, Model School No. 25 promoted indoctrination with banners hung in the hallways: DOWN WITH FASCIST INTERVENTION IN SPAIN or LIFE HAS BECOME BETTER, COMRADES, LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL (Stalin’s famous 1935 pronouncement).31
All Soviet children were trained in Communism. First they were Octobrists, then Pioneers, then Komsomols. One became an Octobrist in first grade on November 7 (October in the old, Julian calendar) to coincide with Revolution Day. Everyone got a red star with a white circle in which was the head of baby Lenin.
One became a Pioneer in third grade. Children received triangular red scarves that they were required to wear every day. They also got pioneer pins with the slogan ALWAYS READY! Svetlana proudly wore her Pioneer uniform and marched enthusiastically with the Model School No. 25 contingent in the annual May Day parades across Red Square. “Lenin was our icon, Marx and Engels our apostles—their every word Gospel truth,” she would say in retrospect.32 And it went without saying, her father was right in everything, “without exception.”
However, there was a paradox at the core of the Model School. When Svetlana started there in 1933, only 15 percent of the teachers and administrators belonged to the Communist Party. Many of them had questionable backgrounds as part of the prerevolutionary nobility, the White Army, religious organizations, or the merchant class. Model School No. 25 managed to be relatively democratic and fostered an ideologically unacceptable individualism.33 Some of its graduates became critical opponents of the Communist system, working as reformist editors, historians, attorneys, and human-rights activists.
It is compelling to compare the reputations of Stalin’s children at the school; they were polar opposites. Most of Vasili’s schoolmates remembered him as an amusing and rambunctious boy who was constantly in trouble. His closest friend was called Farm Boy (Kolkhoznik)—the boy’s family had recently migrated from the countryside; his mother scrubbed the school floors.34
Vasili was notorious for his pranks. A church had once stood beside Model School No. 25, and the mounds of graves in its abandoned graveyard were still visible. One of Vasili’s favorite escapades was to sneak into the graveyard with his buddies to dig up bones.35 And he was already known for his cursing. When reprimanded by schoolteachers, he would say he would do better, “remembering whose son I am.”
Still, his fellow students considered themselves his equals. When he broke a window and blamed someone else, they beat him up. When he harassed a boy who had poor eyesight, they voted to expel him from the Komsomol.36 There was an amusing moment when he deliberately interrupted a film being shown to visiting teachers and his instructor shouted, “Stalin, leave the room.” They all froze until they saw the diminutive Vasili storm out. Whenever he attempted to intimidate the administration and teachers with his name, reports were sent to Stalin, who had relayed firm instructions that his children were to be treated like everybody else.37
Vasili was clearly afraid of his father, but he was already presuming on the authority his name conferred. Aged twelve, he wrote to Stalin. He had taken to calling himself Vaska Krasny (Red Vaska), presumably to please him:
AUGUST 5, 1933
Hello Papa.
I got your letter. Thank you. You write me that we could leave for Moscow on the 12th. Papa, I asked the Commandant if he could personally arrange for the wellbeing of the teacher’s wife. But he refused. So the teacher arranged for her to work in the barracks of the workers. . . . Papa, I send you three rocks on which I have painted. We are alive and well and I am studying until we meet again soon.
Vaska Krasny38
In this instance Vasili’s intervention seems to have been benevolent, but having Stalin’s children in their charge made school officials very nervous. Vasili complained to his father:
SEPTEMBER 26 [NO YEAR]
Hello Papa,
I live well and go to school and life is fun. I play in my school’s first team of soccer, but each time I go to play there’s a lot of talk about the question that without my father’s permission I can’t play. Write to me whether or not I can play and it will be done as you say.
Vaska Krasny39
Only Svetlana seemed to have measured the cost to Vasili of his mother’s suicide when he was just eleven. She believed Nadya’s disappearance from their lives completely destroyed her brother. He began drinking at the age of thirteen and, when drunk, often turned his venom against his sister. When his foul language and crude sexual stories became too explicit, Yakov, her half brother, would step in to defend her. She later told several interviewers, “My brother provided me with an early sex education of the dirtiest sort.”40 She did not elaborate, but it is clear that she kept Vasili at a safe distance. She said she discovered she loved her brother only after he died.
However, she was grateful for one thing. Svetlana was often ill in childhood, but her father refused to send her to the hospital, presumably for security reasons. She remembered long lonely days exiled to her room in the care of nurses and her nanny.41 But that changed in her adolescence. Saying she was “fat and sickly,” Vasili pushed her into sports. Soon she joined the ski team and the volleyball team and developed the robust health that would characterize her for the rest of her life.
In 1937 Vasili was finally transferr
ed to Moscow’s Special School No. 2, where he continued to trade on his name, refusing to do his homework, throwing spitballs in class, whistling, singing, and walking out. But at his new school, the administrators tried to coat over his lapses and even allowed him to skip his final exams. The German teacher who tried to give him a failing grade was threatened with dismissal. Even as an exasperated Stalin ordered the keeping of a “secret daybook” on his conduct, higher officials protected him.42 There is also a much darker rumor attached to his name. Vasili may have “provoked the arrest of the parents of a boy who bested him in an athletic competition.”43
In 1938, the seventeen-year-old was sent to the Kachinsk Military Aviation School, where Stalin thought he might find the discipline he needed, but again he demanded and received special privileges. Vasili was learning the power of his father’s name, which would eventually prove his undoing.
Meanwhile, Svetlana dutifully brought home her daybook with a record of her academic work and conduct. Over dinner at the Yellow Palace, her father would examine and sign it, as vigilant parents were required to do. He was proud of her. She was a good little girl. Her indoctrination was clear in the words she recorded as a third grader in a testament celebrating the achievements of Nina Groza, the school administrator: “‘Under your leadership our school has advanced into the ranks of the best schools of the Soviet Union.’ Svetlana Stalina.”44 Svetlana had become one of the little “warriors for communism.”
Until she was sixteen, like many of her fellow students, Svetlana remained an idealistic Communist, unreflectingly accepting Party ideology. In retrospect she would be appalled by how this ideology demanded the censorship of all private thought and led to the mass hypnosis of millions. She called this “the mentality of slaves.” Vasili learned cynically to manipulate the system, which, by its very nature, invited corruption. He understood early that the best way to get ahead was to betray somebody else.
Chapter 4
The Terror
Stalin’s December 21 birthday celebration at Blizhniaia dacha in 1934. Top row, from left: Anna Redens, Dora Khazan (wife of Politburo member Andrey Andreyev), Ekaterina Voroshilova (wife of Soviet military officer Kliment Voroshilov). Middle row, from left: Maria Svandize, Maria Kaganovich (wife of Lazar Kaganovich, the “Wolf of the Kremlin”), Sashiko Svanidze, Stalin, Polina Molotov (wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, a protégé of Stalin), Kliment Voroshilov (“Uncle Voroshilov” to Svetlana). Bottom row, from left: Anna Eliava (wife of George Eliava, a prominent Georgian scientist), Zhenya Alliluyeva (wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law), and Dmitry Manuilsky (a Soviet deputy) and his wife.
(Courtesy of RGASPI [Russian State Archive of Social and Political History], Fund 558, Inventory 11, Doc 1653, p. 23)
On December 6, 1934, two years after the death of her mother, eight-year-old Svetlana found herself at the Hall of Columns attending the lying-in-state of Sergei Kirov. He was one of her favorite “uncles” with whom she’d played the Hostess game. Just days before, the extended Stalin clan had attended a comedy called The Hangover After the Feast at the Maly Theater, and then her father had invited them all back for dinner at Kuntsevo. Uncle Sergei had sent them snetki (smelts) from Leningrad.1 Now Uncle Sergei was dead too. “I didn’t like this thing called Death. I was terrified. . . . I developed a fear of dark places, dark rooms, dark depths,” Svetlana later told a friend.2
On December 1, at 4:30 p.m., Sergei Kirov, secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, was assassinated in the corridor of his office at the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the local Communist Party. Kirov’s assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, had walked brazenly into the building and shot him. According to the initial reports of the NKVD, Nikolaev’s motive was revenge for Kirov’s adulterous relationship with his wife, but it was soon announced that Nikolaev was a member of a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization plotting to overthrow the government. At the end of December, Nikolaev, along with fourteen codefendants, was tried and executed.3
The Kirovs, the Stalins, the Alliluyevs, and the Svanidzes stood together in the austere Hall of Columns. In her private diary, later confiscated by the secret police, Maria Svanidze described the scene:
The Hall was brightly lit, decorated with heavy plush banners, reaching the ceiling. . . . The Hall was high, two stories. In the middle . . . was standing . . . a very simple red-cotton coffin with rushes. . . . [Kirov’s] face was yellow-green, with nose grown sharp, lips tightly closed, with deep lines on the forehead and on the cheeks, with corners of his lips curled down in suffering sadness. A large blue spot from falling could be seen from the left temple to the left cheekbone. Around the coffin were many wreaths with ribbons, inscribed by the organizations. . . . Lights for news-chronicles were around . . . security people and on the stage the orchestra of the Bolshoi was playing all the time. . . . Full lights notwithstanding, it was gloomily dark.
At eleven p.m., the leaders appeared, preceded by Stalin.
Joseph steps up the stage to the coffin, his face is twisted with grief, he kisses the forehead of dead Sergey Mironovitch. All this pierces our souls, we know how close they have been, and everyone in the Hall is sobbing. I can hear through my own sobs the sobbing of men around.4
Maria recorded that immediately after receiving news of Kirov’s death, Nadya’s brother Pavel visited Stalin at his dacha. Sitting with his head in his hands, Stalin cried, “I am quite orphaned now.” Pavel was so moved that he rushed at once to hug and kiss his brother-in-law.
But Stalin was not at his dacha. The scene of Pavel’s tenderness probably occurred several days later. Instead, Stalin was in his Kremlin office. As soon as news of the assassination reached him at five p.m., a much less maudlin Stalin called in his Politburo and Genrikh Yagoda, NKVD chief, to arrange an overnight train to Leningrad. Probably that night he drafted the Law of December 1, “instructing the police and courts to try cases of terrorism without delay, reject appeals, and carry out death sentences immediately upon conviction.”5 The rules of investigation thus simplified, over the next three years, what had begun as the expulsion of counterrevolutionaries from the Party would turn into mass repression.
Some believed Stalin ordered Kirov’s assassination. Kirov was too popular and was in favor of slowing down Stalin’s policy of rapid industrialization. There is little evidence to support this theory, but certainly Kirov’s assassination provided a necessary and important beginning to the subsequent Great Terror, in which hundreds of thousands were swept away in “mass operations.”6
As a consequence of collectivization and dekulakization,* the OGPU (secret police, renamed NKVD in 1934) had already spread its tentacles through every level of society as it hunted for class enemies. Wiretapping, surveillance, pressure on informants, imprisonment in solitary confinement, confessions exacted under torture—all became the norm. Compromising information mutated like a virus, implicating hundreds of thousands.
In 1935 and 1936, as the mass arrests were under way, a collective hysteria took over. At the height of the Great Terror, during “seventeen months in 1937 and 1938 alone, 1.7 million people were arrested, more than 700,000 of them shot, and another 300,000 to 400,000 sent into punishing exile in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other far-away places.”7
In 1937, on the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, Stalin was reported to have told his close associates at a private banquet:
We will destroy each and every enemy even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state.8
By 1938, as a result of the repression carried out by the NKVD, the Gulag prison population had swelled to two million.9
As an eleven-year-old, Svetlana could understand nothing of this, but she personally began to feel the impact of this new climate of terror when she returned from her vacation in Sochi at the end of the summer of 1937. Carolina Til, the German housekeeper who’d been with the fam
ily for ten years, had been dismissed as unreliable.10 Lieutenant Alexandra Nakashidze appeared in her place. Nakashidze had totally reorganized Svetlana’s room, removing all the furniture that once belonged to her mother and emptying the cupboard of her childhood mementos, her album of drawings, her clay figurines, and her presents from the aunts. The few cherished things that tied her to her mother—an enameled box with dragons, a tiny glass, and some cups—had vanished.11 When Svetlana asked her nanny to complain about the loss, her nanny replied that there was nothing to do—everything belonged to the state.
Nakashidze worked for the NKVD State Security Forces. A young woman under thirty, she was unskilled as a housekeeper, but housekeeping was not her function. She was meant to get close to Svetlana and her brother Vasili in order to scrutinize their friends and acquaintances.
Starting that fall of 1937, Svetlana was assigned a bodyguard named Ivan Krivenko, a sour, jaundiced-looking man whom she immediately disliked. He followed her everywhere—to school, to the theater, to music lessons. One day she discovered him digging through her schoolbag and reading her diary.12
At school she found herself under a new regimen. She was forbidden to use the common cloakroom and had to hang her coat in a small room next to the school’s office. She was no longer allowed to eat with the other students. Now she ate a lunch, brought from home, in a small screened-off corner of the lunchroom under the scrutiny of an NKVD officer, which left her blushing with embarrassment.
Then there was trouble with Misha, one of her closest friends. Red-haired and freckled like Svetlana, Misha was a passionate reader whom she’d known since she was eight. They both loved to raid their parents’ extensive libraries and discuss the books they found. As eleven-year-olds, they shared a passion for Maupassant and were madly engrossed by Jules Verne and the Indian tales of the American author James Fenimore Cooper. At school they passed each other little love notes on blotting paper, and they phoned back and forth almost every day. Then Misha’s parents, who worked for state publishers, were arrested. Svetlana’s governess took her little love notes to the school principal and insisted that Misha be transferred to another class. Clearly Misha was a dangerous influence, with his “unreliable” parents, and the friendship was terminated. It would be nineteen years before they met again.13
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