Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  It took a long time for the Soviet Procuracy to process the release of Gulag prisoners. The millions of prisoners, including those who had died, had to be issued “certificates of rehabilitation,” and there were endless and often deliberate procedural delays. No officials wanted to admit that a prisoner had been arrested on fabricated evidence or that they themselves were involved in the fabrication.

  According to Svetlana, Khrushchev helped search the jails for her aunts, each sentenced in 1948 to ten years in solitary confinement. It seemed nobody knew where they were being held. After the March amnesty, both Anna and Zhenya spent more than a year in prison before they were freed. Like other families, the Alliluyevs waited in anguish, with no guarantee that their relatives were still alive. Many people had been arrested “without right of correspondence”—a euphemism for execution.

  Anna returned home in the spring of 1954. Her son Vladimir recalled that the family received a phone call telling them that their mother would be coming home. Her niece Kyra, who had already been released, went to pick her up. Dressed like a vagrant in the ragged clothing all prisoners wore, Anna looked decades older and seemed totally disoriented. When Kyra brought her to the flat where Svetlana and the family were waiting, Anna did not recognize her youngest son. The young man who stood to embrace her bore no resemblance to the boy of twelve she had left behind. When Anna asked about her mother, she was told Olga had died in 1951, still stoical about the catastrophes that had devastated her family.

  Svetlana’s memory of Anna’s homecoming remained raw. “Aunt Anna was very sick when she emerged, she didn’t even recognize her children, or anyone else. She was just sitting there, and her eyes were not her eyes. They were fogged, misted.”8 Kyra recalled, “She had hallucinations, heard voices talking to her, and talked to herself a lot.”9

  Like many Gulag prisoners, Anna rarely spoke about her years in solitary confinement. Though she knew the people who had denounced her, including Zhenya and Kyra, she said she understood. “Stalin did arrest me according to your reports—but it was not your fault; it was mine.”10 What she meant by these words is unclear. “My aunt, Anna Sergeyevna, was forgiving of Stalin,” Zhenya’s son Sergei remarked, but only up to a point. She let the past go “for the sake of [Stalin’s] children, Svetlana and Vasili, whom she loved so very much.”11 But actually Anna was not unusual. Tragically, many, even in the Gulag, continued to insist that Stalin knew nothing. It was evil advisers who were responsible.

  Anna’s death ten years later was a tragedy. In 1964 she was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. As Svetlana recounted bitterly:

  After six years in prison she was afraid of locked doors. She had ended up in hospital, very disturbed, talking all the time. She would walk the corridors at night talking to herself. One night a stupid nurse decided that she should not walk in the corridor, so she locked her into her room, even though it was known that she couldn’t stand locked doors. In the morning they found her dead.12

  Zhenya Alliluyeva returned home in the summer of 1954. One day she showed up at the apartment in the House on the Embankment, where, according to her astonished son Alexander, her first words were “I knew it! I knew Stalin would release me!” In Alexander’s memory, his brother Sergei responded dryly, “He did not release you, he died.”13 Svetlana rushed over to comfort her aunt, who couldn’t stop crying.

  Her son Alexander recalled the first days of his mother’s freedom:

  My mother could not talk when she returned; all the muscles of her mouth had been idle for such a long time while she was in solitary with no one to talk with. But gradually the capacity returned to her.14

  Not long after her release, Zhenya asked Svetlana to take her to Stalin’s Kuntsevo dacha. “I want to see what remains,” Zhenya told her. Svetlana remembered that visit:

  The room was empty; they had wiped out all [my father’s] belongings and furniture, taken everything away and put back other things which were not his. There was a white death mask standing there. [Zhenya] was in her mid-fifties, and after prison she was quite weak. She stood there holding my hand, and she cried and cried and cried. She said: “Everything is hurting. Everything. The best days of our life have gone. We have such good memories. We will keep those, and everything else has to be forgiven.”15

  While her Aunt Anna and her mother had been sentenced to ten years in solitary confinement, Kyra Alliluyeva had been exiled for a five-year term to the town of Shuya, 180 miles northeast of Moscow. She always claimed that her exile had not been terrible:

  In exile, I worked for a local theater for the first three years, then I worked with retarded children—I love children! . . . On stage I always had a part with singing and dancing, in musical comedies and vaudeville. It was all very helpful—not heavy stuff. I was in my own creative atmosphere, although I was lonely without my family. But there were always good people who came my way . . . people who never rejected me as an “exile”—they had been warned about that, yet still they were good friends to me.16

  Kyra’s term expired in January 1953, shortly before Stalin’s death. When she returned to Moscow with a “tainted passport” (indicating she had a prison record), she found her brothers living in two rooms of their six-room apartment in the House on the Embankment. The other rooms had been handed over to MGB female clerks. Kyra thought it better to live elsewhere. Zhenya would spend years fighting to get their apartment back under her control.17

  In this family, it was better not to analyze the whys of fate but simply to accept stoically the hand life dealt. And the family shared one survival strategy. Zhenya’s son Alexander explained: “Even after our mothers returned from prison, nobody in the family could believe Stalin himself to be an initiator of those arrests. They always thought the evil initiative came from somewhere else and they could not therefore blame Stalin directly, or alone, for their misfortunes.” His brother Sergei added, “We see Beria’s influence on Stalin as being very evil, because this way it makes things better for us. It would be much simpler to explain things this way.” Beria was their “sworn enemy,” who had polluted the mind of Stalin against them.18

  Svetlana shared this response. She blamed her father for the family’s tragedy, but she blamed Beria more, and yet she always marveled: “It’s very strange that the family didn’t show any anger.”19 Perhaps she understood that in some ways they were protecting her.

  By the time of her aunts’ release, Beria was already dead. Khrushchev had taken only a few months after Stalin’s death to stage a leadership coup. In July 1953, Beria was arrested and accused of heading a group of conspirators who intended “to seize power and liquidate the Soviet worker-peasant system for the purpose of restoring capitalism and the domination of the bourgeoisie.”20 He was court-martialed, and shot in December, though the date of his execution is disputed.21 For the Alliluyev family, this was a huge relief. “It was a great holiday for us!” said Zhenya’s son Sergei.22 With Beria’s death, an epoch had ended.

  Svetlana’s brother Vasili never recovered from his father’s death. After Stalin’s funeral, he was summoned by the Ministry of Defense and offered a provincial command. When he insisted that he would command only in Moscow, the ministry refused. Vasili took off his insignia and resigned. He spent the following month, April, carousing in restaurants and bars, often falling into drunken rages during which he denounced government officials, who, he claimed, had murdered his father. The Ministry of Defense was not pleased. After a drinking bout with foreigners, he was arrested on April 28, 1953.

  Vasili was accused of dereliction of duty, of beating junior officers, and of being involved in illegal deals and high-level intrigues that had ended in some people’s being sent to prison and even to their deaths. His former flatterers denounced him, and a military collegium sentenced him to eight years in Vladimirskaya Prison, 110 miles northeast of Moscow. He could not understand how this could happen to Stalin’s son. From prison he sent begging letters and letters of outrage, which went unanswered.
Unlike his sister, Vasili didn’t understand that, his father dead, he was now nobody.

  In the winter of 1954, Khrushchev took pity on him and had him transferred to the Barvikha Sanatorium. Soon his old cronies showed up with vodka, and again he went on drunken binges. He was sent back to prison. His third and current wife, Kapitolina, and Svetlana visited; he’d beg them to intercede, but there was nothing they could do.23

  As she had sat keeping vigil over her dying father in early March 1953, Svetlana had believed that a “deliverance of some kind” was coming. In fact, there was no liberation. She continued to live with her two children in apartment 179 in the House on the Embankment. Looking out from her balcony, she could see below in the courtyard a small sixteenth-century church with beautiful onion domes and across the river, the Kremlin, where she had spent her childhood. As before, she continued to feel hemmed in by “the attention of some, the dislike of others and the curiosity of absolutely everyone.” Her father’s ghost haunted not just her but the country. She lamented, “He is gone, but his shadow still stands over us all. It still dictates to us and we, very often, obey.”24

  As her children grew up, although both her ex-husbands visited, Svetlana was essentially on her own. She learned to be domestic, cooking a bit, sewing, using the gas stove—all things servants had done before. Her nanny was now living with her own son in a Moscow apartment. Svetlana was awarded a government pension of two hundred rubles a month (about fifty dollars in 1950s currency), and the children each received one hundred rubles.25

  Looking back, Svetlana’s son, Joseph, would say their life was very quiet. His mother didn’t like going out much, seldom invited guests, and received only friends who sat with her in the kitchen, as was the Soviet custom. There they ate their lunches and had their evening tea. For dinner, they mostly picked up precooked meals from the House on the Embankment kitchen. Svetlana took the children to symphony concerts at the conservatory, and they went to exhibitions at the Tretyakov Gallery. As with all Communist children, much of their life was organized by the state. Katya and Joseph became Octobrists, then Pioneers, and finally joined the Komsomol.

  Svetlana had a small car called a Pobeda (Victory). When the Management Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party demanded that she exchange it for a Volga, a more appropriate car for the daughter of Stalin, according to a friend, she “refused on principle.”26 She’d also been assigned a sumptuous dacha, but her adopted brother Artyom Sergeev said she asked to be given a smaller dacha instead. She told him, “I don’t want to be in a large Sovnarkom [Council of People’s Commissars] dacha.”27 As a Soviet, she had no problem with the state controlling all property; she simply wanted to be treated as ordinary. Of course, compared with the vast majority of Soviets, she still had a very privileged lifestyle.

  The modest dacha she found was in Zhukovka, just outside Moscow, where she and her children spent summers and weekends. When she was short of money, knowing she would be recognized at the shops, she would ask her cousin Leonid’s wife, Galina, to sell some of her coats or jewelry for her.28 It would have provoked a scandal if Stalin’s daughter were caught selling her clothes. In Zhukovka she tried to re-create the pleasures of her own childhood. The children played in the woods, rode their bikes at breakneck speed through the village lanes, swam in the streams, and camped in tents under the stars.

  Relatives visited. Her nephew Alexander Burdonsky, her brother Vasili’s son, remembered the dacha fondly:

  Zhukovka was not even a village. It was just scattered dachas in a forest that belonged to the Soviet Ministry. . . . On this giant territory that stands on the Rublevsky highway, Svetlana had a small property surrounded by a small fence. There was a house and a garden of flowers, not a vegetable garden. It was a small two-story house. Downstairs there was a hallway, next to it the dining room and then two rooms and a glassed terrace. To the right, there was a kitchen. And upstairs there were three bedrooms—Joseph’s room, Katya’s room, and Svetlana’s. It was not a large dacha. . . . There was already some furniture there—real dacha furniture made of wicker. It was quite sweet. All the knickknacks—different vases, etc.—were hers. I really loved that dacha.29

  Anna’s son Leonid and his new wife, Galina, also visited. Galina remembered Svetlana as adventurous at that time. She loved pranks. The route to Zhukovka was guarded at intervals by sentry boxes in which stood vigilant policemen whose job it was to keep outsiders off the highway. Nearby were the dachas of the rich Party officials and also the special compound for scientists.

  One day Galina saw the gates of Svetlana’s dacha suddenly open and her car come flying through. Two police cars roared after her and pulled her over, and the officers jumped out. There was a moment of shock when they recognized the woman they were following; then they beat a hasty retreat. As Svetlana had come to the sentry post where she was meant to stop, she stepped on the gas. “She was terribly delighted with herself,” Galina recalled. She loved to thumb her nose at the bureaucrats.30

  In 1954 Svetlana completed and defended her dissertation, “Development of Russian Realist Traditions in the Soviet Novel,” and was awarded her graduate degree.31 The books on the bookshelves in her apartment ranged from Chekhov and Dostoyevsky to Jack London and Maupassant. She also had the Russian moderns—Akhmatova, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Konstantin Simonov—and read many foreign authors as soon as their writings were translated, occasionally working as a translator herself. On the living room wall was a small silver-framed photograph of her father in his marshal’s uniform, one of her mother with her as an infant in her arms, and photographs of Joseph and Katya.

  Svetlana’s solution to keeping herself and her children safe was to disavow politics. She called this abstention “my weird and preposterous double life.”32 Outwardly she lived on the fringes of the government elite, enjoying its material comforts. Inwardly she felt total alienation from the elite. She longed to be anonymous, but most people continued to see her as the princess in the Kremlin. The GUM department store still sold the perfume called Breath of Svetlana. The government had made it clear that she must not speak out publicly about her father. Anything connected to Stalin was state property, and this, she understood, made her state property too. In any case, she didn’t believe that anything Stalin’s daughter could say would be helpful. It would inevitably be filtered through people’s responses to her father and distorted. Few were neutral about Stalin: people either worshipped or reviled him.

  On one occasion, however, she did speak out publicly. She had joined the Communist Party in 1951 when her father had insisted that it was “unseemly” for the daughter of Stalin not to be a member. Mostly she sat silently through hours of mandatory, boring Party meetings, knowing her absence would have been noted. When the journalist Ilya Ehrenburg published his novel The Thaw in 1954, the Party was outraged and wanted him censured. Courageously Svetlana came to his defense. She deeply admired him.

  The winter after Stalin died, Ehrenburg rushed to complete his new novel. It was an immediate sensation, and its title entered the Russian lexicon—the post-Stalin era was called the Thaw, at first with optimism and later with cynicism. The novel’s main character was a brutally indifferent factory manager who forced his workers to live in wretched conditions in order to fill industrial quotas. Through one of its minor characters, a Jewish doctor, it was also the first novel ever to convey the dread created by the Doctors’ Plot. The treatment of its central love story advanced the idea that the state surveillance apparatus had no right to enter private lives.

  The regime came down hard on Ehrenburg. Konstantin Simonov, then editor of Novy Mir, attacked the novel as “too dark.” He said it falsely portrayed Soviet life “as a great deal of misery and too little happiness” and that “it imitated Western patterns.”33

  Svetlana stood up at a Party meeting and defended Ehrenburg, saying that she “could not understand in what way Ehrenburg was to blame, when our own Party’s press admitted the mistakes of the past,
and innocent people, wrongly condemned, were returning from prisons.” She was bluntly told that her statement was “irresponsible and politically immature.”34 She later wrote Ehrenburg a fan letter. “I am truly grateful for your rare ability to find words of truth, to say them out loud, without the duplicity which, for many of us members of the modern Soviet intelligentsia, became second nature.”35

  She may have had in mind Ehrenburg’s project The Black Book. In 1944, before the war was over, he organized a team of two dozen writers, including Vasily Grossman, to compile and edit testimonies of survivors of German atrocities against Soviet Jews. One and a half million Jews had been killed by execution units that followed the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory. Ehrenburg left the project in disgust when the role of Soviet collaborationists in the betrayal of Jews was edited out. The Black Book went unpublished for decades.36

  In her private life, however, Svetlana continued to feel isolated. A friend at the time, Olga Kulikowsky, described her as “one of the loneliest women I have ever known.”37 Another friend, Tatiana Tess, said, “Her search for happiness was boundless.”38 A die-hard romantic, she longed to meet someone who wouldn’t think of her as Stalin’s daughter. In 1954, at a Congress of Soviet Writers in the Kremlin, she thought maybe she had found that person.

  As she walked through the dazzling gold glitter of Saint George’s Hall, unexpectedly and to her shock, she ran into Aleksei Kapler. For a second she was frightened that he might ignore her, but he was his usual ebullient self. He simply stepped out of the entourage of film people surrounding him and said, “Hello.” Then he took her hand and laughed. Everyone watching the encounter knew the resonance of his gesture.

  Kapler had been released from the Inta Labor Camp in 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, and had returned to Moscow with his new wife, the actress Valentina Tokaraskaya, whom he’d married three months after his liberation. Her visits and food parcels had kept him from dying, and furthermore, marriage gave them the legal right to a large flat in Moscow.