Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Mikhail Klimov, Svetlana’s bodyguard, was always a few paces behind them. Kapler even enjoyed his company, offering him the occasional cigarette. Svetlana felt Klimov was kind and even pitied her “absurd life.”22 Perhaps they thought he wouldn’t betray them, but in fact Klimov was terrified by their growing liaison. He knew that Stalin had his daughter’s phone tapped and her correspondence opened, and that NKGB agents made daily reports to him on all her activities.

  After all, what were they doing? With her guard constantly on their heels, they could never be physical lovers, and this charged their relationship with a romantic desperation. She thought Kapler the “cleverest, kindest, most intelligent person on earth.”23 For him, she was a bright Lolita, a child longing to be taught about the world. She was so appallingly lonely, “surrounded and oppressed by an atmosphere worthy of a god.” “Sveta really needed me,” Kapler said.24

  The lovers blithely enjoyed their little deceptions. Kapler’s friends called him Lyusia (which sounds like a woman’s name). Svetlana would go over to her grandmother’s apartment in the Kremlin to phone Kapler. Grandma Olga always thought she was talking to a girlfriend.25

  Soon Kapler left on an assignment to cover the guerrilla war in Belarus, one of the most dangerous of the partisan fronts, and then he traveled to Stalingrad to cover the Battle of Stalingrad for Pravda. In the December 14 issue of Pravda, he published an article called “Letters from Lieutenant L from Stalingrad—Letter One,” by Special Correspondent A. Kapler. The letter purported to be a soldier’s description of Stalingrad to the woman he loves:

  My love, who knows whether this letter will reach you? A really difficult journey awaits it. I will nevertheless hope this letter will reach you, that it will carry, under the enemy’s fire across the Volga, across the prairies, through storms and blizzards towards our lovely Moscow, my tenderness towards you, my dear.

  Today it snowed. It is winter in Stalingrad. The sky descended and became low as the ceiling in an izba. This gray, cold weather is especially agonizing on a day like this. One thinks of their loved one. How are you doing now? Do you remember Zamoskvorech’e? Our rendezvous in the Tretyakov gallery? How, while it was closing, the guard was kicking us out by ringing his bell, and how we could not recall which painting we sat in front of all day, while looking into each others’ eyes. Until now, I know nothing about that painting except that it was wonderful to sit in front of it, and I thank the artist for that.26

  Kapler went on to describe the war to his lover. The article reads like a film script about the heroic purity of war, in which love, suffering, friendship, and death are focused a million times more intensely than in ordinary life. Caught up as they were in the frenzy of romantic obsession, it was as if the lovers, too, were living in a film. Kapler ended his letter on a note of longing:

  It is almost evening. It is also almost evening in Moscow. You can see the ragged Kremlin wall from your window and the sky above it—Moscow’s sky. Perhaps, it is also snowing there right now.

  Your,

  L.

  It is impossible to imagine Stalin’s outrage as he read this and recognized the reference to Svetlana. Kapler later claimed he hadn’t intended to send the article to Pravda. “Friends had played a trick on him.”27 But he had dared to write a love letter to the dictator’s daughter, an indiscretion that should have been unimaginable. Marfa Peshkova remembered Svetlana bringing the newspaper to school. Though Svetlana understood the danger of Kapler’s words, it was also clear she was deeply moved.28

  When Kapler returned to Moscow for the New Year’s celebrations, Svetlana told him they must not meet or even call each other. They managed silence until the end of January and then resumed their phone calls. They developed a code. He or she would call and blow air twice, to say, without words, “I’m here. I remember you,” and hang up.29

  One evening at the beginning of February, Kapler got a phone call. The gruff voice on the other end of the line was that of Colonel V. Rumyantsev, second in command of Stalin’s security detail. He told Kapler the security agents knew everything and suggested he leave Moscow immediately. Kapler replied, “Go to Hell.”30

  Through February, Kapler and Svetlana resumed their walks in the woods and their theater outings, with her bodyguard in tow. At the end of February, they arranged a last rendezvous. They found an apartment near the Kursk Station used by Vasili’s pilot friends for assignations. But the faithful Mikhail Klimov stayed with them. Svetlana persuaded him to sit in an adjoining room, though he insisted on keeping the door open. In silence the lovers kissed for the last time. They were ecstatic at touching, grief-stricken at parting; their leave-taking was devastating to Svetlana. It was February 28, her birthday. She had just turned seventeen.

  Kapler was preparing to leave for Tashkent to shoot a movie based on his screenplay In Defense of the Fatherland. As Kapler reported it, on March 2 he drove to a committee meeting for the film industry. As he got out of his car, a man approached, flashed an identity badge, and told him to get back in. The man got into the passenger seat, and when Kapler asked where they were going, he replied, “To Lubyanka.”

  Kapler responded, “Is there any reason for this? Have I been accused of anything? Is there a warrant against me?”31

  The man said nothing. Kapler could see there was a black Packard following them. In the passenger seat, he recognized General Nikolai Vlasik, chief of Stalin’s personal security, and knew he was doomed. They drove into Lubyanka Square, where the statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the founder of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, stared across at the dreaded prison. The heavy gates of the Lubyanka swung open. The massive neo-baroque building was synonymous with the terror of the NKVD. Under the tsars it had been an insurance firm, and it still retained its imposing marbled entrance and wooden parquet floors. Below, in its labyrinthine basement, were the cells and torture chambers that had seen much service in the late 1930s.

  The KGB’s infamous headquarters and prison on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square (informally known as “the Lubyanka”), where Beria had his office, still looks much as it did during Stalin’s time in power.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  Kapler understood that he was a top priority when Deputy Minister Bogdan Kabulov arrived. No mention was made of Svetlana. And Stalin’s name did not come up. Kapler was being accused of contact with foreigners—which was irrefutable; he knew all the foreign correspondents in Moscow—and of spying on England’s behalf.

  Kabulov intoned, “Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, on the basis of Article 58 of our law, you are under arrest for having made known in your speeches your anti-Soviet and Counter-revolutionary opinions.”32 No trial was needed. No defense could be mounted. However, instead of the usual ten years for this offense, Kapler was sentenced to only five years in a labor camp.

  Kapler’s belongings were confiscated and itemized for his signature. He was not allowed to communicate with his wife, Tatiana Zlatogorova, and certainly not with Svetlana. But Kapler was too famous to merely disappear. The war had released some tongues, especially in the military and at the front, and his arrest was a major scandal.33 Neither his epic films nor the appeals of his more courageous colleagues helped, however. Everyone knew that the cause of his arrest was his indiscreet affair with the daughter of the vozhd.

  In retrospect, Kapler would say he knew that the relationship with Svetlana would inevitably end, but he was strangely enthralled. Asked why he didn’t heed the general’s advice, Kapler replied, “Who knows? It was also a question of self-respect.”34 What drew him to Svetlana was what he called “the freedom within her,” her “bold judgements.” In his mind, it was an “innocent enchantment,” not a seduction. He recognized her desperation; he felt he understood her.

  Vasili’s son, the theater director Alexander Burdonsky, would later comment that Kapler was an intelligent and charming man:

  Yes, he was enamored of Svetlana—when a young girl is looking at you with infatuated eyes—but he did not antic
ipate the outcome of all this. He had a risk-taking personality. He was ordered not to return to Moscow. He came back. He got kicked in the neck. But, you understand, this was an affair of the century that surpassed the boundaries of accepted norms. Eisenstein dreamed of making a film about it. He even wrote a script—set in a different country. He saw how Kapler suffered and he mixed himself and Kapler because he too was in love with Svetlana. All this can really thrill a man of a particular nature. Even when threats like Stalin come up.35

  On March 3, Stalin arrived at the Kremlin apartment just as Svetlana was getting ready for school. Her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, was still in the room. Apoplectic with rage, he demanded that Svetlana hand over her “writer’s” letters. He spat out the word writer. He said he knew the whole story. He was carrying their taped phone conversations in his breast pocket. “Your Kapler is a British spy,” he seethed. “He’s under arrest.” Petrified, Svetlana gave up everything Kapler had given her: letters, photographs, notebooks, and even a draft movie script about the composer Shostakovich, protesting to her father that she loved Kapler.

  He turned to her nanny with withering irony, “Oh, she loves him,” and then slapped his daughter across the face. It was the first time he had hit her. “Just look . . . how low she has sunk. . . . Such a war going on and she’s busy the whole time fucking.” Her nanny managed to stammer, “No. No. No. I know her.” Stalin turned to Svetlana. “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool! He’s got women all around him.”36 The irony that he himself had been thirty-nine and Nadya sixteen when he’d fallen in love with her was lost on Stalin.

  Svetlana was in such shock that it took her a moment to realize that her father had called Kapler a British spy. She was appalled. She knew what this meant. When she returned from school that night, Stalin was in the dining room reading and tearing up Kapler’s letters. “Writer!” she reported him saying. “He can’t write decent Russian! She couldn’t even find herself a Russian.” Svetlana believed that in her father’s mind, “the fact that Kapler was a Jew was what bothered him most of all.”37 She made no attempt to contact Kapler. She knew she couldn’t even speak to his friends without its being reported to Stalin, and Kapler’s fate would be worse. She now understood that her father “was the state.”38

  Kapler was held for a year in solitary confinement at Lubyanka prison before being transferred to Vorkuta in Siberia. For the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, he recalled the ride in the “black crow,” the prison truck in which he was accompanied by other “deviationists . . . terrorists, Trotskyites, ex–Social Democrats.” Vorkuta was the locus of a prison complex in the coal-mining center in Komi Autonomous Republic. The complex had a reputation for profound brutality and exploitation.

  But Kapler’s luck held. The camp director, Mikhail Mal’tsev, who’d been appointed the previous year to turn Vorkuta into a model city, selected him, as the most famous prisoner in the camp, to be the official photographer of the city and prison complex. Kapler was designated one of the zazonniki (prisoners without borders) with permission to live and work outside the prison zone.39 Kapler soon joined the Vorkuta Musical Drama Theater, a prisoners’ collective, where he met the actress Valentina Tokaraskaya, who became his lover. In the Soviet Gulag there were always surreal distinctions that dictated survival or death.

  When he’d completed his five-year sentence, Kapler was released and warned that under no circumstance was he to return to Moscow. He decided to go to Kiev, where his parents lived, but not before slipping into Moscow in the hope of seeing his wife. He stayed only two days and made no attempt to meet Svetlana. As he boarded the train for Kiev, plainclothes policemen surrounded him. They hustled him off the train at the next station. He was sentenced to another five years, this time to hard labor at a mine in Inta, also in the Pechora coal-mining basin, where conditions were brutal. Only visits by his lover, Tokaraskaya, with her food parcels kept him alive and sane.

  Svetlana’s cousin Vladimir Alliluyev remembered the turmoil at Zubalovo that immediately followed Kapler’s arrest. As he put it, “Everyone was kicked out of there. Everyone got hit on their brains quite harshly.” Stalin ordered Svetlana “banished” from the dacha for “moral depravity.” Vasili was sentenced to ten days in an army prison for degeneracy. Grandfather Sergei and Grandmother Olga were sent to a ministry sanatorium for failing to intervene. The housekeeper, Lieutenant Sasha Nikashidze, who had spied on the lovers and read Kapler’s letters, was fired. Zubalovo was closed.40

  When Kapler was shipped off to Siberia, Svetlana knew that her father had ordered it. “It was such obvious and senseless despotism, that for a long time I was unable to recover from the shock.”41 But Kapler’s imprisonment and the discovery of her mother’s suicide had finally “cut the soap-bubbles of illusions. My eyes were opened and I could not any more claim blindness.”42

  Chapter 7

  A Jewish Wedding

  The House on the Embankment, across the river from the Kremlin in Moscow’s Bersenevka neighborhood, was constructed to house the Soviet elite—and was the first home of the newlyweds Svetlana and Grigori Morozov.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  After five months of brutal urban warfare that left over one million dead, the Battle of Stalingrad ended in a Russian victory on January 31, 1943, when Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, commander of the German Sixth Army, and his staff surrendered.1 Stalin’s son Yakov Djugashvili, who had been languishing in a POW camp since his capture in 1941, was a valuable hostage. Count Folke Bernadotte of the Red Cross approached the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov, to offer a prisoner swap: a field marshal for Stalin’s son. Molotov conveyed the offer to Stalin. According to Molotov, Stalin adamantly refused. “All of them are my sons,” Stalin said.2

  Since the arrest of Aleksei Kapler in early March, Svetlana had seen little of her father. One morning he called her into his office and told her curtly, “The Germans have proposed that we exchange one of their prisoners for Yasha. They want me to make a deal with them! I won’t do it. War is war.” Her father said nothing further about her brother, but shoved an English document from his correspondence with Roosevelt at her, barking, “Translate! Here you have been studying all this English. Can you translate anything?”3 Then the audience was over. It seems out of character for Stalin to involve his daughter in a state secret, but if her account of this moment is accurate, her father’s delivery of the news was brutal. In her mind, he was “washing his hands” of his son.4

  By the middle of April 1943, Yakov was dead. Looking back, Svetlana believed her father had been informed by his intelligence services of his son’s death but kept the knowledge secret.5

  In 1945, after the war ended, reports about Yakov began to filter out of Germany slowly. One came from SS Commander Gustav Wegner, head of the battalion guarding the POW camp near Lübeck where Yakov was held. He claimed to have witnessed Yakov’s death. When the prisoners were taking exercise, Yakov crossed the no-man’s-land toward the electrified fence. The sentry shouted, “Halt,” but Yakov kept walking. Just as he reached the fence, he was shot. He collapsed on the first two rows of electrified barbed wire, where his body hung for twenty-four hours, until it was removed to the crematorium.6

  Another report came from I. A. Serov, deputy to the minister of internal affairs of the Soviet administration in Germany, who in 1945 was assigned to discover the specifics of Yakov’s fate. Serov added another detail. When the sentry shouted, “Halt,” Yakov ripped open his shirt and yelled, “Shoot, you scum!”7

  Stalin failed to save his son, but even Yakov’s family believed he had little choice in rejecting a prisoner exchange. He could not be seen to be protecting his own son when millions of Russian sons were dying. In the first year of the war, two thirds of the three million Soviet POWs, taken largely in the June encirclement in 1941, were dead by the end of December. By the end of the war, at least three million of the five million Soviet POWs had died.8

  Svet
lana believed her beloved half brother died a “quiet hero. His heroism was as selfless, honorable and unassuming as his whole life had been.”9 And she did not forgive her father. Like many Russians, she felt Stalin had betrayed all his soldiers by the draconian Order 227, announced on July 28, 1942, and known colloquially as “Not a Step Back.” The order included the statement: “Panic-mongers and cowards are to be exterminated on sight.” Penal brigades of deserters were established and sent into the fiercest fighting.10 When Soviet POWs were released from German camps in 1945 and repatriated, many were sent on to Siberian camps with sentences of up to twenty-five years for surrendering to the enemy. “I think that Yakov understood that returning back to our country after the war’s end would not bode well for him,” Svetlana’s friend Stepan Mikoyan remarked pointedly.11

  That spring Svetlana graduated from Model School No. 25. Her father summoned her to his Kuntsevo dacha and asked what she intended to study in college. When she replied, “Literature,” he scoffed, “You want to be one of those Bohemians!” and insisted she reenroll in history at Moscow University.12 Sixty-two years later, she wrote to her friend Robert Rayle about this. None of her bitterness toward her father had abated.

  My own Father, a very possessive man, and a Dictator of all + everybody + everything . . . did not let me start, as 17 yr. old, my own life and profession . . . he wanted me to become an educated Marxist—to follow him, to be with him, to be a “valid member” of the CPSU (the party). That was his dictatorial love to me . . . everybody obeyed his wishes (during WWII, 1943!) and I began to study Modern History, although I loathed it with all my heart.13*

  Svetlana was secretly hoping to be a writer. Olga Rifkina understood her friend’s despair and decided to change her own program. Olga’s mother, then working as a senior reader of American reports at Pravda, suggested that the girls major in the modern history of the United States. Although they had missed the deadline for enrollment, when the head of the department learned that it was Stalin’s daughter who was applying late, he ordered that their applications be accepted.