That spring in Kuibyshev, Svetlana made a devastating discovery that she claimed shattered her life. Her father had instructed her to keep up with her English language skills now that Britain and the United States were Russia’s allies, and so she had taken to reading any English or American magazine she could lay her hands on. She read Life, Fortune, Time, and the Illustrated London News. One day that spring (she had just turned sixteen), she came across an article about her father. It mentioned, “not as news but as a fact well known to everyone,” that his wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, had killed herself on the night of November 8, 1932.”30
The shock of this revelation was heart-stopping. Svetlana rushed to her grandmother, article in hand, and demanded to know if her mother had committed suicide and why this had been hidden from her. Olga replied that, yes, it was true. Nadya had had a small gun. It had been a gift from Pavel. Olga kept repeating, “Who would have thought it?”
Marfa Peshkova remembered Svetlana showing her the magazine with the article. “I remember this very well. She showed me this photograph. It was a photograph of her mother lying in the coffin. She had never seen this. And somewhere . . . she did not know for sure about the death of her mother. It was rumored then that she died from appendicitis, from a failed operation or something like that. For her it was a shock.”31
When Svetlana had read the article, she hadn’t wanted to believe it, but her grandmother had confirmed it. Her mother had killed herself. Only she, her daughter, seemed not to know. Her anger at her mother’s betrayal of her must have been profound. And she turned that anger on her father. She knew how he could be. She had seen him become mean, even brutal. She was certain it was his cruelty that had caused her mother to commit suicide. Now she began to switch her allegiance to the memory of her mother, but like all orphans of suicides, she would need decades to forgive Nadya for abandoning her.
Things that had been mysterious before suddenly became clear. When her father had said to her over the phone, “Don’t say anything to Yulia for the time being,” it hadn’t been solicitude he was expressing. It was suspicion. The idea of Yulia and Yakov betraying their country was inconceivable. Svetlana began the slow process of realizing that her father was capable of condemning innocent people to prison and even to death.
She would look back and say, “The whole thing nearly drove me out of my mind. Something in me was destroyed. I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father and defer to his opinions without question.”32 This is the voice of an adult, but certainly Svetlana’s adolescent confusion must have been overwhelming. Which was more devastating: her belief that her father was responsible for her mother’s death or her discovery that her mother had not loved her enough not to kill herself?
Everywhere—at home, at school—her father was called the wise, truthful leader. Stalin’s name was linked to winning the war. He was the great Stalin. Only he could save Russia. To doubt him was an act of blasphemy. But Svetlana had begun to doubt.
Chapter 6
Love Story
Svetlana, age sixteen.
(Meryle Secrest Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Courtesy of Chrese Evans)
By January 1942, the Red Army had driven the Wehrmacht from Moscow’s gates. The skeletal remains of German tanks lay like burned husks outside the city. Hitler had drastically miscalculated both Russian wiliness in tactical defense and the brutality of the Russian winter. It is estimated that one million Russians, both military and civilian, died, but Stalin won the battle for Moscow. In June Svetlana and her retinue were given permission to return to Moscow. The previous autumn, a fire had almost destroyed the Zubalovo dacha; the family moved into the surviving wing. By October an ugly new house, painted camouflage green, was built in the shell.
Svetlana did not see her father until August, when she was summoned to his Kuntsevo dacha to attend a dinner for Churchill. The British prime minister had flown to Moscow for a consultation about Allied strategy. The news Churchill was bringing was not good. There would be no Allied second front to distract Hitler from his assault on the USSR for a good while yet.
Svetlana had no idea why she was summoned to this dinner. Her father forbade any interaction with foreigners, and she was never included in diplomatic circles. When he introduced her to Churchill and said she was a redhead, Churchill remarked that he too had been a redhead but, waving his cigar over his bald pate, said, “Look at me now.” She was too shy to respond. Very soon, her father kissed her and told her to run along. Reflecting on this strange moment much later, she concluded that her father had been performing for Churchill, demonstrating what a charming domestic life he had.1
Svetlana was still a schoolgirl in the tenth grade. She was reading Schiller, Goethe, Gorky, Chekhov, and the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin. She loved Dostoyevsky, even though her father had banned his books. Slowly she was growing into an independent-minded young woman. But according to her friend Marfa Peshkova, Stalin was becoming more and more disapproving of his teenage daughter. If she wore a skirt above her knees, wore shorts, or wore socks instead of stockings, he would rage: “What’s this! Are you going around naked?” He ordered her to wear sharovary (baggy pants tight at the ankles) and had a dress made for her that covered her legs.2 His reprimands often brought Svetlana to tears, but she was stubborn and staged her rebellion shrewdly. She heightened the hem of her dress slowly until it was back above her knees. She knew her father was too busy to notice.
In the autumn of 1942, a new student, Olga Rifkina, entered Model School No. 25. Olga had an unusual background for this elite school. She was from a poor Jewish family living in a one-bedroom communal apartment shared with two other families. Her mother kept them all going by working as a journalist for Pravda. The year 1941 had been terrible. That June the government had issued a directive for the evacuation from Moscow of all children under the age of three. Olga and her mother, grandmother, and baby brother Grisha left for Penz. When they returned to Moscow in May 1942, Olga had missed a year of school.3 Model School No. 25 had special placement for such children. She was enrolled and sent to live with her grandmother.
Olga’s memories of the school were mostly unhappy. While the teachers never singled out students who were poor, the other children made her aware of her inferiority. She would look back and say, “Only one person, who seemingly had the most reason to preen, . . . was a true ‘personality’ not tied to her position. This was Svetlana Stalina.”4 Olga remarked in an interview:
I really did like Svetlana very much right away. . . . She was a particularly humble person. And even shy. And she had a lot of charm and femininity. She attracted my attention. I always looked admiringly at her. And our friendship survived all our lives. Until the last day.5
Soon the two girls became deskmates. After school they would take long walks along the Moskva River, though these walks were often interrupted when Svetlana would suddenly say, “I can’t be late. My Papa is coming. I haven’t seen him in two weeks.” Olga had the impression that, like most people, Svetlana thought of her father as the “great, big Stalin, but not exactly a father.”6
Because of the food shortages caused by the war, most people, including Olga’s family, often went hungry. Olga recalled that, after coming home from school, she would eat a bowl of soup and then, with a glass of kakavella (a drink made from boiled cocoa pods), do her homework. When there was no food for the evening, her grandmother would tell her to go to bed while she still wasn’t hungry; otherwise she’d never be able to sleep. Olga remarked, “Svetlana, of course, could not imagine any of this. At the time she was artificially isolated from regular life. . . . She never had to buy anything, she could barely tell the denominations of money apart.”7
At school, Svetlana did not parade as Stalin’s daughter. She often complained that the other students looked on her as if she were an “insider” and had access to secret information. But she assured Olga, “I don’t know anything, nor do I really care.�
�� She hated the teacher who made her write out lists of all the things that carried her father’s name: the mountain in Perm, Stalingrad on the Volga, the ZiS car (Zavod imeni Stalina, Factory in the Name of Stalin). Olga recalled: “Poor Svetlana. She wanted so much to be equal with everyone else. I remember once she stepped on a young man’s foot and he called her a ‘ginger cow’—she even beamed with joy.”8
One indication of her status, however, was that Svetlana had her bodyguard, Mikhail Klimov, who had accompanied her in the evacuation to Kuibyshev. Most of the elite children had bodyguards—the Molotov children had three. The bodyguards had their own separate room beside the school cloakroom, where they spent their day. Both Olga and Svetlana played piano, and they often went to the conservatory together to hear music by their favorite composers: Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, or Prokofiev. Klimov would buy the tickets. If there was violin music on the program, he would complain: “We are going to saw the wood again” and sit behind them, shuddering.9 Svetlana claimed to have grown fond of Klimov, but it was disconcerting to have someone always shadowing her.
Both girls were readers. Svetlana had a copy of the 1925 Anthology of Russian Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Together they would read the subversive work of Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Sergei Yesenin. While still in grade ten, Olga gave Svetlana a notebook full of her poems. She felt Svetlana was a kindred spirit: she, too, had had her happy childhood shattered by misery; she, too, was deeply attached to her absent mother. In response, Svetlana wrote a poem to Olga:
Through poetry, as if through clear tears, looking
Into her soul, again and again
How can I not understand her, if I too am
Waiting in vain for my dear mother? . . .
To the lovely girl with the eyes of spring
I find I am unable to speak
About myself and about how close and clear
Are her thoughts, her dreams, and her grief.10
Though addressed to Olga, the poem was really an elegy for Nadya, now dead ten years. It spoke to Svetlana’s terrible isolation. Nothing of the pain of loss had healed. Olga slowly came to realize that Svetlana was “essentially an orphan.”11
After her return to Moscow, Svetlana spent much of her time at the Zubalovo dacha while her father, preoccupied with the war, was mostly in his bunker hunkered down with his Politburo. Her brother Vasili also lived at Zubalovo with his wife, Galina. Now twenty-one, Vasili had graduated from the Lipetsk Aviation Institute. In October 1941 he became a captain. By February 1942, he had been promoted to colonel. His friend Stepan Mikoyan, wounded and in the hospital, recalled his surprise when Vasili visited him in Kuibyshev in his colonel’s uniform. According to Mikoyan, Vasili later explained that his father had taken him aside and told him he didn’t want him to fly. Too many sons of the elite had already been lost: Mikoyan’s brother, Khrushchev’s son, the war hero Timur Frunze. Vasili was appointed chief of the Air Force Inspection Command to keep him grounded. He flew only one or, at most, two combat missions. Though Stalin was often strict and rude with Vasili, Stepan Mikoyan believed he actually loved his son. Vasili soon had a grand office in Moscow on Pirogov Street.12
Stalin’s younger son, Vasili, was a colonel of the Red Army Air Force by the time this photo was taken in 1943.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Vasili surrounded himself with fellow pilots and treated them like courtiers. He liked to fete them at Aragvi, his favorite Georgian restaurant, where the food was lavish even when the war was raging and Moscow was still being bombed. An orchestra played the latest dances, and the Russian elite sang into their vodka.13
That fall Vasili turned Zubalovo into a party house; he particularly liked pilots, actors, directors, cameramen, ballet dancers, writers, and famous athletes. Stepan Mikoyan thought he gave these late-night drinking parties in subconscious imitation of his father, who used to summon select members of his Politburo to Kuntsevo and keep them up drinking until four or five a.m.14 Most who came were somehow involved in the war—the pilots were flying bombing missions; the filmmakers were shooting footage at the front, often from inside the trenches or with cameras mounted on tanks; the writers were working as journalists covering the war. The evenings had a Hemingwayesque flamboyance. Everyone came to watch films in the small private cinema at the dacha and to listen to the American jazz tunes that were constantly churning on the record player. There would be long drunken nights with people dancing the fox-trot. For many the hard edge of death framed the moment with an intensity unknown in peacetime.
Vasili insisted that his sister come to the parties. Svetlana mostly watched the bacchanal from the sidelines. Friends who attended, like Marfa Peshkova, noted that she had suddenly turned into an attractive young woman, though she still seemed closed off in her own private torment. Sometimes the parties got out of hand. On one occasion, when Vasili was very drunk, he insisted that his pregnant wife tell a joke. When she refused, he hit her, though luckily she fell back onto a couch. Enraged, Svetlana threw her brother out of the house along with his drunken buddies. Yet the parties continued.15
Svetlana with her friend Stepan Mikoyan, the son of the long-standing Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan, in 1942.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Svetlana assumed that no one noticed her, but she had caught the attention of Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler. The Jewish Kapler, then thirty-eight, was one of the most famous screenwriters in the USSR. He was the author of the epic films Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918, and in 1941 he had been awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize. Kapler was supposedly working with Vasili on a film about air force pilots, though evenings were spent mostly drinking, and the film was never made. Kapler was within the inner sanctum of the head of state—best friends with the dictator’s son, who was wild and outrageous. It was heady stuff. He was obviously a man who loved risk. Though he was married, he and his wife were separated, much to his distress, and he was on his own.
One night the Zubalovo group was invited to a film preview on Gnezdnikovsky Street, and Svetlana found herself talking with Kapler about movies. All those years of watching films in the Kremlin with her father paid off. Kapler was intrigued. Describing his impression of her to a journalist years later, Kapler said that he had been surprised. Svetlana was not like the other girls in Vasili’s retinue. She was not what he expected. He was taken with “her grace and intelligence . . . the way in which she would talk to those around her, and the criticisms she made on various aspects of Soviet life—what I really mean is the freedom within her.”16 Her “judgments” were “bold and her manner unpretentious.” She was not decked out like the other women in their gorgeous outfits, preening for attention. She wore “practical, well-made clothes.”
An undated photograph of a young Aleksei Kapler, probably one of the two hundred photographs stolen from Svetlana’s desk by the KGB agent Victor Louis.
(Public domain)
On November 8, a party was organized at Zubalovo to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. The guests included the famous, like the writer Konstantin Simonov, whom Svetlana admired, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Much to her surprise, Kapler asked her to dance. She felt awkward and clumsy. She was so young. He asked her why she seemed sad and asked about the lovely brooch she was wearing, a decorative touch to her austere outfit. Was it a gift, he wondered? Svetlana explained that it had belonged to her mother and this day was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death, though no one else seemed to remember or care.17 As he held her, she poured out her life. She spoke of her childhood, of the losses she had endured, though she didn’t talk much about her father. Kapler understood that “something seemed to separate them.”18
Charming, daring, knowledgeable, experienced, Kapler was irresistible to an idealistic girl of sixteen. And he seemed to be equally drawn to her. The first film they saw together was Queen Christina (1933), starring
Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, a biopic of the seventeenth-century queen of Sweden, which distorted and absurdly romanticized her life. It is not hard to imagine the film’s impact on the impressionable young Svetlana as war raged in Moscow.19
“Spoils, glory . . . what is behind those big words? Death and destruction. I want people to cultivate the arts of peace,” says Garbo’s Queen Christina. The film is about “great love, perfect love, the golden dream.” The queen falls in love with Antonio, envoy from the king of Spain. “I have grown up in a great man’s shadow,” Garbo cries. “I long to escape my destiny.” “There is a freedom which is mine and which the state cannot take away.” Kapler recalled how they both identified with the film. She was the rebellious “royal daughter” demanding her own life; he was poor Don Antonio, the lover aspiring above his station.
Kapler brought Svetlana books that were forbidden, including Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. He’d gotten hold of a Russian translation that was circulating privately among friends.20 The novel had been officially banned; Hemingway’s portrait of the murderous Communist commissar who directed the purges of Trotskyites in the Spanish Civil War was too revealing.
The couple looked for pretexts to be together. Of course the meetings had to be kept secret from her father. Kapler would wait for Svetlana outside her Model School, lurking, embarrassed, down the lane. They would walk in the woods, he holding her hand in his pocket, or amble along the Moscow streets under blackout, or go to the unheated Tretyakov Gallery and wander the halls for hours. They went to private film showings at the Cinema Artists’ Club and at the Ministry of Cinematography on Gnezdnikovsky Street. They saw musicals starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, as well as Young Mister Lincoln and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They met at the Bolshoi and were most happy when they got the chance to stroll through the foyer during the performance.21
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