From the early days of the Revolution, Bolshevik ideology had built a tradition of identifying “enemies of the people” and “anti-Soviet elements.” Show trials and the fabrication of evidence had been almost commonplace since the Civil War.14 People were trained to believe in conspiracies against the great Soviet experiment. After the first two great show trials engineered by Stalin in August 1936 and January 1937, in which most of those targeted were from the Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party, Svetlana’s Aunt Maria Svanidze wrote in her secret diary:
March 17, 1937:
My soul is burning with anger, and hatred, their death does not satisfy me. They ought to be tortured, burned alive, for all their wicked deeds. Sellers of the motherland, parasites with the party. And so many of them! Ah, they wanted to ruin our society, they wanted to ruin all victories of revolution, to kill our husbands, our sons. . . .
Endless disappearance of persons with big names, who for years were our heroes, conducted big jobs, were trusted, and many times rewarded—they turned out to be our enemies, traitors of the people, bribed and bought ones. . . . How could we have missed all this?15
Maria Svanidze believed in their guilt until she herself was arrested.
On December 21, Maria and Alexander Svanidze were the first members of Svetlana’s family to be taken away by the NKVD.
According to Anastas Mikoyan, Alexander Svanidze was like a brother to Stalin. He was deputy chair of the board of the State Bank of the USSR in 1937 and had done sensitive work for Stalin in Germany over a number of years. In April, Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, the new head of the NKVD (the former head, Genrikh Yagoda, was awaiting execution), to begin the purge of the staff at the State Bank.
Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev were hosting a housewarming party in their apartment. It was a festive, elegant affair. Maria and Alexander had attended and then returned to their own residence. After midnight, the Svandizes’ son Johnik, named after John Reed, the famous American author of Ten Days That Shook the World, rang Pavel and Zhenya’s bell. “Mama and Papa have been arrested,” he cried. “She was taken away in her beautiful clothes.”16 Alexander’s sister Mariko was also arrested, along with Maria’s brother. Johnik, Svetlana’s longtime playmate at Zubalovo, soon disappeared too.
To Svetlana it was inconceivable that Uncle Alyosha and Aunt Maria were “enemies of the people.” She believed they were “victims of some frightful mix-up, which ‘even Father himself’ could not disentangle.”17 Everyone in the family was frightened and tried to send messages to Stalin through Svetlana. When she conveyed these, Stalin would say, “Why do you repeat everything like an empty drum?” He ordered her to stop “lawyering.”18
Alexander Alliluyev, the son of Pavel and Zhenya, tells the story of how Maria Svanidze managed to smuggle a letter to his mother from prison. The letter was written on a shirt: “Zhenya, you cannot imagine what is going on here. I am sure that Stalin does not know about this. I ask for a favor. Please let him know.” Without telling her husband, Zhenya typed out Maria’s letter and took it to Stalin. Stalin’s reply was cold and measured: “Zhenya, I ask you never to come to me with a letter like this again.”19
That summer of 1938, Uncle Pavel often visited the Kremlin apartment, hoping to plead for the Svanidzes. He would sit dejectedly in either Svetlana’s or Vasili’s room, sighing deeply as he waited for Stalin.20 Pavel’s own son Alexander explained the futility of this:
Stalin’s massive system of informants kept the channels of information flowing. He was systematically eliminating Old Bolsheviks and the higher military echelons as potential rivals. As terrifying as it sounds, people were divided into categories. You could not plead for those about whom Stalin had made personal arrangements.21
Soon a purge began in the army. Pavel was deputy head of the Armored Tank Division. On November 1, when Pavel returned from his vacation in Sochi and went to his office, he discovered that most of his colleagues in the Tank Division had been arrested. He had a heart attack on the spot.22
The NKVD phoned his wife, Zhenya, to ask what she had given her husband for breakfast. When Zhenya arrived at the hospital, Pavel was already dead. Everyone stood around terrified as Zhenya ripped off her husband’s clothes. She was looking for bullet holes. Her husband had told her, “If they come after me, I will shoot myself.”23
In fact, Pavel had had heart attacks before. This was a natural death, if it was natural for a man to succumb to the terrifying pressures of such brutal times. In his funeral procession, Pavel’s body was mounted on a gun carriage, and the mourners proceeded to Novodevichy Cemetery. Though Stalin did call Zhenya to offer his condolences, he did not attend, claiming it would be easy to organize his assassination at a funeral. In retrospect, Pavel’s son Alexander felt that “it was an easy excuse.”24
The Alliluyev-Redens family in 1937. Back row, left to right: Pavel Alliluyev (Svetlana’s maternal uncle); Tatyana Moskaleva (nanny); Stanislav Redens (Stalin’s brother-in-law) holding his son Vladimir; Stanislav’s wife, Anna Alliluyeva Redens. Foreground, left to right: Svetlana’s maternal cousins Sergei (son of Pavel Alliluyev) and Leonid (son of Stanislav Redens).
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Other family members tried to plead with Stalin to protect his relatives. Grandfather Sergei would wait for hours on the sofa in the Kremlin apartment until Stalin arrived in the small hours of the morning. Stalin dismissed his old protector by making fun of him. “So you came to see me. Exactly. Exactly,” repeated Stalin in a way of speaking that Grandfather Sergei always used.25
Grandmother Olga raged against her son-in-law: “Nothing happens that he does not know about.”26 Olga was right: Stalin knew everything. At his Kuntsevo dacha or in his garden in Sochi, he would spend hours on his terrace working over his papers, blue pen in hand. He had 383 “albums,” provided to him by the NKVD head, Yezhov, containing the names of 44,000 proposed victims. Stalin would cross out the names of the damned and tick off those to be spared. Despite what must have been an onerous workload for the vozhd, Stalin found time to do this task.27
The husband of Nadya’s sister Anna, Stanislav Redens, was arrested not long after Pavel’s death. On November 19, Redens returned from Kazakhstan, where he had been serving as people’s commissar for internal affairs. Svetlana knew the Uncle Stanislav who was ebullient, full of life, and kind to children. She did not know the public man. As head of the OGPU in the Ukraine, he had participated in the purges of the early 1930s, but now, as a high official in the NKVD, he himself was a target.28 Redens was arrested on November 22. Like hundreds of thousand of others, he was a victim of the violence in which he had once participated.29
Apparently Stalin himself arranged for Aunt Anna to visit her husband in Lefortovo Prison to offer his personal guarantee of freedom and safety for their children if only Redens would confess his counterrevolutionary crimes. Stanislav sent Anna away, telling her that any promise from Stalin could not be trusted. Stalin approved the execution of his brother-in-law on February 12, 1940.30
Nothing happened to Anna or her children. She was even allowed to keep her apartment in the government compound called the House on the Embankment; this was an unusual concession for the wives of disgraced officials. However, Anna and her children were forbidden to visit Svetlana and Vasili in the Kremlin, though they were permitted to see them at Zubalovo.
In 1939, the NKVD tried to get rid of Svetlana’s nanny, too. Agents reported to Stalin that Alexandra Andreevna had been married to a clerk in the tsarist police before the Revolution and was therefore “untrustworthy.” When she heard of “the plot” to get rid of her nanny, Svetlana became hysterical and begged her father to intervene. She was almost shocked when he got angry and called off the secret police. “My father couldn’t stand tears,” she said. She should have qualified this: it might possibly have been true that he couldn’t stand his daughter’s tears.31
One day at school in 1940, Svetlana noted that her girlf
riend Galya was crying. When she asked her what was the matter, Galya replied that her father had been arrested the previous night. Her mother had asked Galya to give Svetlana a letter to pass to Stalin. At dinner that night, Svetlana gave him the letter in the presence of his Politburo colleagues and begged him to do something. Stalin was angry and replied, “The NKVD never makes mistakes.” Svetlana began to cry and said, “But I love Galya.” Stalin replied curtly, “Sometimes you are forced to go even against those you love.”32
After discussing the case with his dinner companions, including Molotov, Stalin berated Svetlana for a long time, warning her never again to serve as “a post-box” for begging letters from friends at school. But her plea worked. Within a few days, Galya’s father was released from prison and returned home. Now, however, Svetlana understood something: “The life of a man depended entirely on a word from my father.”33
An atmosphere of fear pervaded Model School No. 25, where a propaganda campaign promoting “vigilance” was afoot. There were warnings about anti-Soviet spies and agitators writing in invisible ink, passing secret notes, and burning them.
Though it seems that none of Svetlana’s teachers or administrators was imprisoned or shot, the parents of some of her fellow students were not so lucky. However, as long as one parent avoided arrest, the children were allowed to stay at school. It was all terrifyingly confusing and impossible to penetrate. One pupil explained his father’s arrest by saying, “I believe in my father’s innocence, yet the security organs do not make mistakes. So, he must have been duped into becoming an instrument of our enemies.”34
But mostly no one spoke about what was happening. Svetlana recalled, “It was all just a kind of misfortune that dragged upon us.”35 The children got on with their schoolwork as best they could, although she always knew when an arrest had happened. The principal would be ordered to remove the child from her classroom as a potentially dangerous influence by “unreliable elements.”36
A young Svetlana sitting on the lap of Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s notorious chief of the NKVD, while her father works in the background, in a photograph taken in either 1935 or 1936.
(Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)
Of course, the fourteen-year-old Svetlana could make no more sense of these tragedies than anyone else. As an adult, she would explain thus: “Many years had to go by before everything that had taken place, not only in our family but all over the country, could range itself in my consciousness with my father’s name, before I could realize that all of it had been done by him.”37 Her words “range itself in my consciousness” are fraught with the terror of this recognition.
About her lost relatives, however, she could write with undiluted nostalgia. “They formed a circle that sprang up around my mother and vanished soon after she died, not so quickly at first, but finally and irrevocably.” She came to believe that if her mother had lived, Nadya would not have accepted what was happening. In her darkest moments, Svetlana believed that her mother, too, would inevitably have become one of her father’s victims.38
At this stage, Stalin probably was not especially targeting members of his family; he simply refused to save them. They had the misfortune to move in the circles of power that overlapped with those designated for liquidation. They had played the game of power and privilege and lost. And they gave Stalin an effective cover: he could deny that he was leading the purges. He could say, “It’s not me. It’s happening in my family too.”
One of the devices of all dictatorships is the pseudolegality of the judicial system under which the most grotesque crimes are committed. After the arrest of Maria and Alexander Svanidze in December 1937, an extensive “investigation” by the NKVD ensued, lasting three and a half years, before they were both executed:
Investigation [into the case of Alexander Svanidze] continued from December 1937 to December 1940. On December 4th 1940 Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of USSR had sentenced A. S. Svanidze to death, accusing him in alleged “active participation in nationalist group in Georgia,” and in alleged participation in an “anti-soviet organization of the right”; he has been accused in active participation in undermining works, and allegedly joined an anti-soviet group of Sokolnikov, promising him his support in all sorts of anti-soviet activities. In Svanidze’s case there was a statement about his alleged plotting on life of L. Beria. For more than a month A. S. Svanidze had been kept in a cell with the sentence of death; it was expected that he would ask for pardon, confess his alleged crimes and beg for life. He did none of that.
On January 23, 1941 the plenum of the Supreme Court of USSR replaced his death sentence for imprisonment for 15 years. But on August 20th, 1941, the Supreme Court changed its mind and left in power the previous sentence—execution through shooting. At the same day—on personal orders from Beria—A. S. Svanidze was shot.
His wife Maria Onissimovna Svanidze was sentenced on 29 December 1939 to eight years of imprisonment for “hiding the anti-Soviet activities of her husband, for anti-soviet gossip, for criticizing soviet regime and for speaking openly against one of the leaders of CPSU and Soviet Government/Beria.”
On March 3rd, 1942, without any new evidence the Special Commission at NKVD USSR decided to replace imprisonment of Maria Svanidze by execution, which was done the same day. . . .
The sister of A. S. Svanidze, Mariko Svanidze, was sentenced for ten years of imprisonment, but on March 3, 1942, she was shot . . . due to a new decision of the Special Group at NKVD, USSR.39
In 1955, after Stalin’s death, A. I. Mikoyan ordered this special report on the case of Maria and Alexander Svanidze. On January 6, 1956, the military procurator, V. Zhabin, informed Mikoyan that “after protestations from [the] investigating magistrate the case of A. S. Svanidze and M. O. Svanidze was abandoned due to absence of any crime.”40 The phrasing is convoluted. What it meant was that the case against the Svanidzes as traitors continued long after they were executed. But now they could be posthumously “rehabilitated” because they had committed no crime.
Chapter 5
The Circle of Secrets and Lies
Svetlana, age eleven, in the uniform scarf of the Soviet youth group Young Pioneers.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
For Svetlana, these were “years of the steady annihilation of everything my mother had created, of systematic elimination of her very spirit.”1 The people whom Svetlana had loved and who had made her childhood secure had been taken away, and she didn’t know why. A wall of silence surrounded things too dangerous to speak of. When Svetlana asked her grandmother what happened to their relatives, Olga said, “It was just something that happened. It was fate.” Her nanny counseled her, “Don’t ask.”2
The family found ways to paper over the horror and carry on—either through denial or by retreating into consoling myths. Though Stalin had personally told Anna Redens that her husband, Stanislav, had been executed, she always insisted that he’d escaped to Siberia. The family continued to spend weekends at Zubalovo. The young people skied or hiked through the forest, a bodyguard always in tow. Anna’s son Leonid recalled a walk that took place when he was eleven years old with his mother, Svetlana, and her nanny and bodyguard. It was early spring. Svetlana, who was three years older, “carefully, bit by bit, slipped away” from the group, taking Leonid with her. They walked for miles beside a small river. At a particularly precipitous point, he lost his footing and fell in. She pulled him out, then removed her jacket and gave it to him. He remembered her kindness. He also thought of this as the first time he realized that she “wanted to jump out of this trap.” When they got home, she was roundly reprimanded for running away from her bodyguard.3
At fourteen, Svetlana was anxious to assert her independence. She wrote to her father suggesting that she was no longer a child: “Hello my dear Father, I will not wait for any more orders from you. I am not little in order to be amused by this.”4 A few weeks later, she wrote again. Oddly, it was as if she�
�d assumed her mother Nadya’s demanding, coquettish voice. Perhaps this was the only way to get Stalin’s attention.
AUGUST 22, 1940
My dear, dear Papochka,
How do you live? How is your health? Do you miss me and Vasya [Vasili]? No. Paposchka, I miss you terribly. I keep waiting for you and you keep on not coming. I feel with “my liver” that you are trying to trick me again—I refer to a lack of joy—and there’s no directive and you will not come. Ay, yai, yai . . .
Now with Geography, it’s a mess again. Because 5 more republics have been added, there’s more territory, more population, and there’s an increased number of industrial spaces but our textbook is taken from 1938, and especially because we have the economic geography of the USSR, there’s lots of stuff missing from the textbook. . . . There’s a lot of crap in it. . . . Scenes of Sochi, Matsesta, different resorts, and, in general, these images are not needed by anyone. . . .
Papochka, please write me right away because you will forget after, or you will be busy. And by that time, I myself will come. OK. I kiss you deeply my dear Papochka. Until we see each other again.
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