Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Articles began to appear in Pravda and Kultura i zhizn in 1948 accusing literary, music, and theater critics, most of whom were Jewish, of “ideological sabotage.” They were branded as “rootless cosmopolitans.” They were “persons without identity,” and “passportless wanderers.”28 Jews were disloyal by definition. Jews resisted the Soviet project of complete assimilation of national ethnicities. They identified themselves as Jews. In 1952, twelve members of the JAC would be executed.

  Unwittingly, Svetlana played a minor role in this intrigue. Knowing he was a target, Solomon Mikhoels had, months before his murder, sought information about Svetlana and Grigori Morozov, hoping that the Jewish Morozov might intercede with his father-in-law to cool the virulent anti-Semitic campaign that was emerging in Moscow. This unforgivable approach to his own family confirmed Stalin’s resolve to eliminate Mikhoels. The crime was specific: “Mikhoels conspired with American and Zionist intelligence circles to gather information about the leader of the Soviet government.”29

  In late 1948, Joseph Morozov, the father of Svetlana’s ex-husband, was arrested. When Svetlana discovered this and went to her father to appeal for the old man’s release, Stalin was furious. “That first husband of yours was thrown your way by the Zionists,” he again told her. “‘Papa,’ I tried to object, ‘the younger ones couldn’t care less about Zionism.’ ‘No! You don’t understand,’ was the sharp answer. ‘The entire older generation is contaminated with Zionism and now they’re teaching the young people too.’”30

  But when it came to her family, her father’s motives were personal.

  Trying to defend her aunt Zhenya, Svetlana wrote her father a strange letter on December 1, 1945:

  Papochka

  In regards to Zhenya and now that the conversation about her has started. It seems to me that these types of doubts came to you because she remarried very quickly and the reason for this she shared with me a little bit. I didn’t ask her myself. I will definitely tell you when you come. If you have doubts like this in another person it is undignified, terrifying, and awkward. In addition it [the problem] is probably not in Zhenya and in her family struggles, but the principal question is—remember that a considerable amount was said about me. And who were they? They can go to hell.

  Svetanka31

  We will never be privy to that conversation, but Svetlana seemed to believe that her father was still angry with Zhenya for her hasty remarriage after her husband Pavel’s death in 1938. Rumors circulated, of course, that Zhenya had quickly married to avoid Stalin’s unwanted attentions. She and Stalin had been close. More convincing, however, is the idea that Zhenya’s unseemly haste made her unreliable in Stalin’s eyes. Svetlana assured her father that all was gossip and she could explain.

  But it may have been more than this. Stalin was now carefully guarding his reputation, and the aunts “talked too much.” Looking back, Svetlana would conclude, “There is no doubt that [my father] remembered how close they [the aunts] had been to all that happened in our family, that they knew everything about Mamma’s suicide and the letter she had written before her death.”

  Svetlana also remembered Zhenya’s description of her father at the outbreak of war in 1941. “‘I had never seen Joseph so crushed and in such confusion,’ was the way she described it. . . . ‘I was even more frightened when I found he was almost in a panic himself.’” Svetlana was certain that her father recalled this. She added with rancor, “He didn’t want others to know about it. And so Yevgenia [Zhenya] Alliluyeva got ten years of solitary confinement.”32 Could the reason for Zhenya’s imprisonment be as simple as the fact that she had seen Stalin in a moment of weakness?

  It seems unlikely that Stalin’s imprisonment of Anna was an act of personal revenge, however. He called Anna “an unprincipled fool . . . this sort of goodness is worse than any wickedness.”33 During the final years of the war, Anna had helped her father, Sergei, to write his memoirs. His carefully self-censored book was published under the title Proydenny put’ (A Traveled Path) in 1946, the year after his death. Meanwhile, Anna had decided to write her own memoirs. When she submitted the manuscript of Reminiscences for official vetting, it was heavily edited by a journalist named Nina Bam and ended safely with the triumph of the Bolsheviks in 1917. It seemed a harmless, moving, personal memoir, but family members were terrified. They begged her not to publish the book. Anna only laughed and said she was working on volume two.

  When Reminiscences came out in 1946, it was praised,34 but the family had been right to warn her. In May 1947, a savage review appeared in Pravda, written by Pyotr Fedoseyev and titled “Irresponsible Thinking.” The attack was shocking. Fedoseyev dismissed “memoirs by small people about grand figures with whom they were somehow connected.” Gorky was quoted as lamenting Tolstoy’s experience: “How large, how clingy was the cloud of flies that surrounded the famous writer, and how annoying were some of these parasites who were feeding off his spirit.” Anna was a parasite feeding off Stalin and claiming family intimacy. Official hagiography and encomiums were mandatory, but it was forbidden to write intimately of Stalin. He did not want personal stories obscuring the icon.

  But the reviewer, Fedoseyev, had a larger point to make:

  It is especially intolerable when authors of such kind attempt to write a memoir about the development of the Bolshevik Party, about the life and the struggle of its outstanding participants. V. Lenin said that the Bolshevik Party was the intelligence, honor, and conscience of our epoch. The history of the Bolshevik Party and the biographies of its leaders embody the historical experience of the struggle for freedom of the proletariat against the capitalist enslavement, for the creation of the fairest, freest way of life on earth. The great achievement of the Bolsheviks and their leaders serves as a source of inspiration for millions of people in their struggle for the complete victory of communist society. During the lessons about the history of the party and its leaders, millions of working people learn how to live and struggle for the interests of society, for the free, joyful, truly human life.

  In order to protect the “free, joyful, truly human life” that Soviet society supposedly was, Anna was sentenced to ten years. It is hard to credit, but a large portion of the Soviet population, bombarded by propaganda and cut off from the rest of the world, believed this version of their lives.

  The real error of Anna’s memoir, however, was that she didn’t place Stalin at the center of the story. Her portrait of the Revolution was wrong:

  The decisive speech made by Comrade Stalin against Lenin’s appearance at the court tribunal against the counterrevolutionaries convinced Lenin to go underground and hide from the provisional government. The short biography of I. V. Stalin expressly states the significance of Stalin’s stance at this time. “Stalin saved Lenin’s precious life for the party, for the people, and for all humanity by decisively taking a stance against Lenin’s appearance at the tribunal and by resisting the suggestions made by the traitors Kamenev, Rukov, and Trotsky” (Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin: Short Biography p. 63). This is the real truth in regard to the question that A. Alliluyeva distorted and twisted in her pseudo-memoirs.35

  The reviewer concludes that Anna was “a narcissist,” “an opportunist,” “a self-advertiser” hoping to receive large royalties. Readers were advised to consult the “scientifically constructed” Short Biography of Stalin (written, of course, under Stalin’s supervision) for the truth. Svetlana could see her father’s stock phrases threading the review.36

  In retrospect, Svetlana would explain thus: “My father needed . . . to throw out of history, once and for all, those who had been in his way, those who had actually founded and created the Party and had brought about the Revolution.”37 What Anna did wrong was to speak of Stalin as a human being. In his mind, he was already a historical personage.

  No such review could have appeared without Stalin’s prior vetting. Anna’s arrest occurred almost a year after the review was published, but this was characteristic of Stali
n’s methods. In order to obscure his involvement, he waited patiently for revenge against enemies. The book was banned and Anna disappeared.

  Svetlana had seen little of her father during this torturous time, but in early November 1948, while he was on vacation in the south, he summoned her to visit him at his dacha. When she arrived, he seemed angry with her. He called her to the dinner table and “bawled me out,” as she put it, “and called me a ‘parasite’ in front of everyone. He told me ‘no good had come’ of me yet. Everyone was silent and embarrassed.”38 She, too, remained silent. Her father was terrifyingly changeable. The very next day “he suddenly started talking to me for the first time about my mother and the way she died.” It was in fact November 8, the anniversary of Nadya’s death. “I was at a loss,” she recalled. “I had no idea what to say—I was afraid of the subject.”

  Stalin was still looking for culprits. “What a miserable little pistol it was,” he remarked. “It was nothing but a toy. Pavlusha brought it to her. A fine thing to give anybody!” Then he remembered how close Nadya had been with Polina Molotov. Polina had been a “bad influence.” He started cursing the novel The Green Hat, which Nadya had been reading shortly before she died. He claimed on several occasions that this “vile book” had distorted her thinking.39

  The Green Hat, published in 1924, was a potboiler romance, probably acceptable in Bolshevik circles because it satirized the British upper class. Nadya had been in charge of Stalin’s library and of ordering his books. It is doubtful that Stalin read The Green Hat, but she must have discussed it with him. In the novel, the aristocratic high-minded heroine, betrayed by her lover, commits suicide as a gesture of her contempt for approval from her elite circle. A book did not kill Nadya, but Stalin believed it had an influence on her decision to commit suicide. This similarity paints a portrait of Nadya as a young woman with an icily unbendable pride and a strange sense of idealism.40 In cultural circles in the 1920s, multiple suicides, especially those of the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin, had made a kind of romanticized cult of suicide. Of course this was only among the intelligentsia. Ordinarily, suicide was looked on as treason against the collective.

  Svetlana found the whole conversation with her father utterly painful. She felt he was looking for anything but the real reason for her mother’s suicide—he refused to look at the things that made Nadya’s life with him so unbearable. And she was suddenly frightened. Her father seemed to be speaking to her as an adult for the first time, asking for her trust. “But I’d rather have fallen through the ground than have had that kind of trust.”

  That November Svetlana returned with her father to Moscow by train. When the train stopped at the various stations, they’d descend for a stroll. There were no other passengers on the train, and the platforms had been cleared. Stalin strolled to the front engine, chatted with the engineer and the few railway workers who had security clearance, and then got back on the train, seeming not to notice that the whole thing was a “sinister, sad, depressing sight,” as Svetlana saw it. Her father was a prisoner of his own isolation, an isolation he had constructed. Before the train pulled into the Moscow station, it was diverted to a siding, and the two passengers descended. General Vlasik and the bodyguards were there to greet them, puffing and fussing as Stalin cursed them.41

  Father and daughter parted, each dissatisfied with the other. It was impossible to be with her father. He had sacrificed everything human in him to the pursuit of power. After seeing him, she always needed days to recover her equilibrium. “I had no feeling left for my father, and after every meeting I was in a hurry to get away.”42 This, however, was not entirely true. Svetlana could never wholly repudiate her father. His black shadow always remained over her, impossible to exorcise. There was the father to be pitied and there was the dictator. She would always believe that in some part of him, the father loved her.

  Chapter 9

  Everything Silent, as Before a Storm

  Svetlana with her first two children, Joseph and Katya, in 1953.

  (Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

  By 1949, Svetlana was living in the otherwise empty Kremlin apartment again. As he had done for years, her father lived at his Kuntsevo dacha. Ivan Borodachev, a commandant of State Security, ran the Kremlin household with rigor. He kept a list of any books Svetlana took from her father’s library to the dining room table to read and crossed them off when she returned them to the shelves. After the war, Stalin had initiated a regimen of having all of his food tested. Special doctors chemically analyzed every scrap of food that came from the kitchen. All foodstuffs came with official seals: NO POISONOUS ELEMENTS FOUND. From time to time, “Dr. Dyakov would appear in our Kremlin apartment with his test tubes and take samples of the air in our rooms.” Svetlana commented drily, “Inasmuch as . . . the servants who cleaned the rooms remained alive, everything must have been in order.”1

  Svetlana was now a divorced woman with a four-year-old son. Her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, was taking care of Joseph at the Zubalovo dacha. That spring Stalin visited the dacha to meet his grandson for the first time. Svetlana was terrified at the prospect of her father’s visit. Because he had refused to meet Grigori Morozov, she was worried he would reject their child as well. “I’ll never forget how scared I was,” she said in retrospect. Joseph “was very appealing, a little Greek- or Georgian-looking, with huge, shiny Jewish eyes and long lashes. I was sure my father wouldn’t approve. I didn’t see how he possibly could.”2

  Yet Stalin responded warmly to the child, playing with him for half an hour in the woods. Her father even praised young Joseph: “He’s a good-looking boy—he’s got nice eyes”—affectionate words from a truculent man who offered little praise. Stalin would see his grandson only twice more. Ironically, Joseph would remember his grandfather with love; he always kept a photograph of Stalin on his desk.

  Svetlana graduated from Moscow University in June 1949 with a major in modern history. She immediately entered the masters program in Russian literature. This time her father was indifferent to her passion for “those Bohemians!”

  If Svetlana’s version of herself was that she was passive and vulnerable, this was not always how others saw her. Her cousin Vladimir called her character “harsh and unbalanced,” though she was “courageous and independent, with her own principles, in line with the traditions of Alliluyevs,” as he put it.3 Her friend Stepan Mikoyan felt her shyness was half camouflage. “Svetlana was very shy and quiet when everything was quiet; and when she was against something, she was very strong.”4

  Candide Charkviani, by now first secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia, who had first encountered Svetlana as a child, remembered meeting her again on Lake Ritsa, where Stalin was vacationing. Svetlana had come to visit. They had been cooped up in the dacha for days until the rain finally lifted, and they set out for a walk, led by Major General Alexander Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s trusted private secretary.

  Suddenly Svetlana veered off the paved road and headed toward the raging river. A large log formed a bridge to the other side and Svetlana was determined to cross. She told the others, “Don’t worry . . . nothing is going to happen to me.” “We found ourselves in an awkward position, a woman perched on stilt-like heels was clearly challenging us to cross the wildly gushing river.” Poskrebyshev stood his ground, but Charkviani followed, then was disgusted to discover that all Svetlana wanted was to pick a cluster of frozen flowers on the other bank. She skipped back across the log in her spike heels, while he crawled along the log, terrified of the river raging below. It clearly amused Svetlana to challenge her father’s comrades.5

  Charkviani’s version of Svetlana was that she was stubborn and could stand up to her father. A few evenings later at the dacha, in the presence of guests who included Molotov and Mikoyan, Svetlana told her father she wanted to leave for Moscow. Stalin didn’t want to let her go. Charkviani recalled the conversation. Apparently Stalin replied,

  “Why rush?
Stay for some ten more days. You are not in a stranger’s house, are you? Could it be so very boring here?”

  “Father, I have urgent business to look to, please let me go.”

  “Let’s stop discussing this, you will stay here, with me.”

  We all thought that was the final decision. Yet for Svetlana, Stalin’s words were not final. . . . Throughout the whole evening, as the ongoing conversation permitted, she would start repeating her request.

  Finally Stalin lost patience:

  “All right, if that’s what you want—go. I cannot make you stay by force,” he said to his capricious daughter and she happily went to her room, probably to pack her bags.

  When we left the dining room, Mikoyan noted: “She has taken after her father; whatever she puts into her heart, she definitely has to do it.”6

  But her rebellions were minor. In the fall of 1949, according to Svetlana, her father arranged for her to marry Yuri Zhdanov, son of the late Supreme Soviet chairman and his former second in command, Andrei Zhdanov, who had died the previous summer. She recalled: “My father . . . always hoped the two families might one day be linked in marriage,” as though it were a marriage of dynasties.7 Stepan Mikoyan concurred that the marriage was Stalin’s idea. He knew—he had been one of the candidates under consideration until he himself married.8