Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  When a team of doctors, led by Professor P. E. Lukomsky, arrived, “they were all trembling like us,” observed the bodyguard Lozgachev. The hands of the dentist who removed Stalin’s false teeth were shaking so hard that he dropped the teeth on the floor. A neuropathologist, therapist, and nurse stood vigil. Oxygen cylinders were wheeled in.9

  When Svetlana’s car arrived, Khrushchev and Bulganin greeted her in tears. She thought her father was dead. But then they told her to enter; Beria and Malenkov would inform her of the situation.

  The usually silent dacha was in chaos. A crowd of doctors surrounded her father “applying leeches to his neck and the back of his head, making cardiograms and taking X-rays of his lungs. A nurse kept giving him injections and a doctor jotted it all down in a notebook.”10 In her initial recounting of the incident after the fact, Svetlana claimed to be satisfied with the treatment—“everything was being done as it should be.” The one oddity was that she was told her father had been found on the floor at three a.m. In fact he had been discovered at least five hours earlier. Given Stalin’s condition, were the leaders hiding the delay?

  Svetlana knew that a special session of the Academy of Medical Sciences was even then meeting to discuss her father’s case. She thought this was ridiculous. “Everyone was rushing around trying to save a life that could no longer be saved.” Fear flooded the room and the hunt for experts to save him began.

  On the evening of March 2, Dr. Yakov Rapoport was in his cell in Lefortovo Prison awaiting another torture session. He had been told that the hours for a “voluntary admission” of his guilt were running out. Stalin himself was following the course of his investigation, and was “displeased.” When his interrogator entered his cell, Rapoport was taken aback. He expected this was his end, but his torturer told him he needed his expert opinion. Would the doctor tell him what “Cheyne-Stokes respiration” was? Presumably Stalin’s doctors had ventured this as their diagnosis.

  Rapoport replied that it was “spasmodic, interrupted breathing,” found in infants and adults suffering “lesions of the respiratory centers in the brain . . . as in brain tumours, cerebral haemorrhages, uremia, or severe arteriosclerosis.” Could someone with such a condition recover? his interrogator asked. “In the majority of cases, death is inevitable,” Rapoport replied.11 He was asked to recommend a Moscow specialist to attend such a patient. He named eight specialists but said that, unfortunately, they were all in prison. Rapoport assumed that the MGB was cooking up a case against one of the doctors. He had no idea until after his release from prison that the patient his interrogator had been inquiring about was Stalin himself.

  To Svetlana the scene of Stalin’s dying was a black comedy. She watched in disgust as an artificial respirator was brought in. None of the attending doctors knew how to work it. They stood around speaking in whispers or tiptoeing past the body on the divan. When Professor Lukomsky approached the unconscious Stalin, he must have been thinking of the fate of his colleagues in their various prison cells, for he was shaking with such trepidation that Beria shouted, “You’re a doctor, aren’t you? Go ahead and take hold of his hand properly.”12

  Vasili soon arrived, completely drunk, screaming that the doctors had killed his father. They had poisoned him. He then raced out of the dacha. Each time he returned, he shouted the same accusations. Svetlana felt her brother was acting “like the crown prince who’s just inherited the throne.”13

  Svetlana was the only member of Stalin’s immediate family to attend the long vigil of his dying. Her cousins who could have been there had been banned from the dacha. Her aunts were in jail. For comfort she occasionally sat with the servants in the kitchen.

  She was shocked by the complexity of her own emotions, alternately love and relief:

  It’s a strange thing, but during those days of illness when he was nothing but a body out of which the soul had flown and later, during the days of leave-taking in the Hall of Columns, I loved my father more tenderly than I ever had before. . . . During those days, when he found peace at last on his deathbed and his face became beautiful and serene, I felt my heart breaking from grief and love. Neither before nor since have I felt such a powerful welling up of strong, contradictory emotions.14

  Perhaps she saw the face of the man he might have been had he not, as she felt, subsumed all his humanity to an idea—the idea of Stalin, the symbol of Soviet power. And strangely, she felt guilt—she had not been a good daughter. “I’d been more like a stranger than a daughter, and had never been a help to this lonely spirit, this sick old man, when he was left all alone on his Olympus.”15

  Grief distorts reality. Svetlana had little real influence over her father. Her fantasy that she might have saved him required an enemy who had corrupted him. She watched Beria scuttling around Stalin’s bed, leaning in obsequiously to assure the leader of his loyalty when Stalin opened his eyes and they thought he might regain consciousness, then assuming the dominant role of paramount leader and ordering the others around when he was sure Stalin would die. She decided Lavrenty Beria was that enemy. He was the “artful courtier” who had succeeded in deceiving her father, his Iago, who had “used his cunning to trick” her father into many of his crimes.16 This was absurd, a willful blindness that many in the family colluded in rather than face the evil that Stalin, a man whom they had loved and who had professed love for them, had perpetrated against them. They wanted to believe that Beria had fed Stalin’s vindictiveness until it became paranoia.

  This might have been partially true. All the Politburo members and their apparatus could be accused of stoking Stalin’s plots. All were perpetrators, but everyone knew that Stalin was in charge, and each had much to fear, none more so than Beria. Beria had begun to suspect that Stalin was setting him up for a fall. Beria was a Mingrelian from Western Georgia. In 1951, a Paris-based Mingrelian nationalist group was denounced as running an espionage network in Georgia, a conspiracy that became known as the Mingrelian affair, and a number of prominent Mingrelians were soon arrested. The leader of the group was identified as the uncle of Beria’s wife.17 This was coming very close. Beria knew Stalin’s methods. He must have prayed for Stalin’s death.

  Stalin’s death throes were agonizing. For several days he lay unconscious, choking on his own fluids as the cerebral hemorrhage spread throughout his brain. His face gradually darkened, his lips turned black. He was being slowly strangled. In his death agony, he opened his eyes and lifted his hand in what seemed a final gesture. It was probably a last gasp for oxygen, but Svetlana’s confusion over the gesture was telling:

  At what seemed like the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of the fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.18

  Khrushchev, too, noted the gesture. He thought it simply the final reflex of a dying organism.

  Stalin’s Kuntsevo dacha, with its forbidding rooms, would return in Svetlana’s nightmares throughout her life, always cold, dark, and suffocating. Running down its endlessly gloomy, labyrinthine halls, she would awake in terror. Her father had loved the dacha. She believed his soul was trapped there. After his body was removed, she visited the dacha again only once.

  Stalin died at 9:50 p.m. on March 5, 1953. Svetlana remembered how they all stood in frozen silence around Stalin’s bed. Many of them, she believed, shed genuine tears. Khrushchev recalled, “Each of us took Stalin’s death in his own way. I took his death very hard. To be honest, I took it hard not so much because I was attached
to Stalin—although I was attached to him. . . . More than by his death itself, I was disturbed by the composition of the Presidium which Stalin left behind and particularly by the place Beria was fixing for himself.”19 The corpse was still warm when Beria shouted for his car and driver. The plotting had begun.

  As the leaders rushed for the door, Svetlana found herself alone, fighting contradictory emotions of sorrow and relief. She had lost a father and experienced pain and terror, but she also felt that a “deliverance of some kind” was coming. A burden was being lifted from the hearts and minds of everyone, and this “liberation” would be for her, too.

  She watched as the servants filed in for a final leave-taking. Stalin’s housekeeper, Valechka, laid her head on his body and wailed at the top of her voice in the tradition of village mourning. Svetlana was amazed and almost jealous. She found that she herself remained frozen. She could not cry.

  At dawn the next morning, the body was placed on a stretcher and taken for an autopsy. Svetlana waited with the servants in their dining room for the official notice on the 6:00 a.m. news. The announcer intoned, “The heart of Lenin’s comrade in arms, of the enlightened inheritor of Lenin’s struggles, of the wise master, of the Head of the People’s Party, has ceased to beat.”20 Stalin was reported to have died in the Kremlin—a lie, of course, but suddenly, to Svetlana, her father’s death was real. She finally wept, surrounded by Stalin’s servants. She felt she was not alone. “All of them knew me, too. They knew that I had been a bad daughter and that my father had been a bad father, but that he had loved me all the same, as I loved him.”21

  This was the one fact she had to hold on to, as if, were she to let go of this belief, she would disappear. Once she said, “It was as though my father were at the center of a black circle and anyone who ventured inside vanished or was destroyed in one way or another.”22 She needed to believe, as an act of survival, that he had loved her.

  Immediately after her father’s body was taken away, the MGB arrived with trucks to remove every piece of furniture, including the telephones, from his rooms.23 Molotov claimed that Stalin was so frugal that he had no clothes in which to be buried and an old military suit had to be cleaned and repaired.24 The body lay in state in the Hall of Columns for four days of mourning from March 6 to 9. Svetlana and Vasili, with their children, were among the official mourners, but the rest of the family—Uncle Fyodor, Anna’s and Zhenya’s children—were pariahs and were allowed to view the coffin only from the restricted area opposite the mausoleum reserved for people whose function at the funeral was to represent ordinary citizens.25

  The country came to a standstill: theaters and cinemas were closed, and school classes were suspended. The crowds converging on Red Square and moving down to the Hall of Columns to view Stalin’s coffin were so large that the militia could not control them. On nearby streets, over a hundred people, including children, were trampled to death in the crush. To those who had suffered, like Dr. Rapoport, it was as if “even his corpse thirsts for new victims.”26

  The author Konstantin Simonov, who had thought he might be next on the list for repression, was informed by the funeral commission that he was to report to the Hall of Columns on March 7 to join the writers’ delegation. It took him two hours to force his way through the silent turmoil. He had to crawl under and through the trucks that blocked off Neglinnaya Street, where the crush was so great that he couldn’t even reach into his pocket for his Central Committee identity card until he found a way to slip around the back of the Maly Theater. While stationed in the Hall as part of the writers’ guard of honor, Simonov noted Stalin’s daughter emerge from the family group. Svetlana quietly climbed the few steps up to the platform on which her father’s coffin was resting and stood there for a long time gazing at his face. And then she turned her back and walked down the steps. No tears, no farewell kiss.27

  On March 9, the coffin was placed on a gun carriage and moved to the Mausoleum to take its place beside the sarcophagus containing Lenin’s embalmed corpse. The dignitaries lined up and climbed the steps. The upper part of Stalin’s body had been covered with a semicircular or concave glass window. As his turn came to view the body, Simonov, used to the “long waxy face of Lenin,” was shocked at how “horrendously,” “terrifyingly alive” Stalin still looked. It was as if a living person lay there covered under glass. He was reminded of the “sensation of fear and of danger” he had recently had about the future, a fear that still gripped him, as he had no idea what turn events would take.28

  Millions of Russians lined up to pass the corpse and pour out their grief. For many, this was not hypocritical. A young Oleg Kalugin, who would become a general in the KGB, remembered his adolescent hero worship of Stalin:

  It is difficult for most people to imagine how a nation worshipped such a monster, but the truth is that most of us—those who had not felt the lash of his repression—did. We saw him as a man who led the country through the war, turned a backward nation into a superpower, built up our economy so that there was employment and housing and enough food for all. His propaganda machine was all-powerful. . . . I revered Stalin.29

  Stalin, the Man of Steel who had ruled for a quarter of a century, was dead. Even those who hated him had to mask their relief at his death. It was not safe to express anything but enduring devotion to the leader. Who knew what regime would succeed him?

  PART TWO

  The Soviet Reality

  Chapter 11

  The Ghosts Return

  This 1932 photograph shows prisoners at work in a forced-labor camp, one of many run by the “Gulag”—the government agency that operated throughout the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1960.

  (Public domain)

  After Stalin’s death, people began to emerge from the Gulag. Like everyone, Svetlana was shocked at the numbers. “Many people have come back, thousands and thousands who managed somehow to survive. . . . The scale on which the dead have come back to life is difficult to imagine.”1

  On March 27, 1953, the new collective leadership, which had been appointed by the Central Committee the night Stalin lay dying, declared an amnesty for nonpolitical prisoners. According to the historian Stephen Cohen, “Nearly one million camp inmates, mainly criminals serving short terms,” were immediately released.2 It was Lavrenty Beria who took the initiative to release prisoners. Ironically, the Gulag had become an enormous strain on the public purse, not to mention its increasing instability. The Gulag population of the 1930s had been relatively docile, but now the camps housed a huge number of formerly armed men, including Soviet and German POWs.

  The initial amnesty was for actual criminals serving terms of five years or less, as well as for those about to be convicted and expected to serve terms of five years or less. Of course it was difficult to determine who was a criminal, to be released, and who was a political prisoner. The freeing of prisoners classified as “‘politicals’ unfolded slowly over the next three years, agonizingly for those still there.”3

  The amnesty was a highly risky move for the new government. Would innocent people wrongly imprisoned be thirsting for revenge? Nikita Khrushchev recalled, “We were scared. We were afraid that the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which would drown us all.” Mikoyan warned that they must proceed slowly: if all the “enemies of the people” were declared innocent, it would be clear “that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters.”4

  On April 4, one month less a day after Stalin’s death, the 6:00 a.m. news was interrupted by an official announcement from the USSR Ministry of the Interior. The doctors accused of being involved in the Doctors’ Plot were declared innocent.

  The USSR Ministry of the Interior has carefully examined all materials of the investigation and related data concerning a group of doctors accused of sabotage, espionage, and other subversive activities aimed at doing harm to certain Soviet leaders. It has been established that the arrests of the doctors allegedly inv
olved in the plot [fifteen doctors were named] by the former Ministry of State Security, were illegal and completely unjustified.

  It has been established that the accusations against the above persons are false and the documentary materials non-authentic. All evidence given by the accused, who allegedly pleaded guilty, was forced from them by the investigators of the former Ministry of State with methods strictly forbidden by Soviet law.5

  This was unprecedented. Not only were the doctors being exonerated, but it was also being officially acknowledged that the charges against them were trumped up and their confessions coerced.

  On April 3, the day before the announcement, Dr. Rapoport had been taken from his cell and was invited to sign his own release papers. He waited in a cubicle as his confiscated belongings were itemized with bureaucratic slowness and returned to him. The same officers who had arrested him then chauffeured him home. It was three in the morning when he arrived at his apartment complex on Novopeshchanaya Street. Of that journey, Rapoport wrote:

  It is difficult to describe what I felt during that ride across nocturnal Moscow, which for decades had been wreathed in blood-curdling legends, as I made my way back from the netherworld, a world full of horrible mysteries. . . . I was blissfully conscious of the fact that I was going—not being transported—home, that I could stop the car and get out.6

  In the apartment three floors up, Rapoport’s dog, Topsy, recognizing her master as soon as he entered the vestibule, started to bark. As he put it wryly, “My dog was the first to announce to the world the end of the Doctors’ Plot.”7 When he entered his apartment and embraced his astonished wife, she asked him if he knew Stalin was dead. He had not been told. Only then did he understand why he had been released.