Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  27.N. S. Alliluyeva to J. V. Stalin, Sept. 27, 1929, 6, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  28.Letter from N. S. Alliluyeva to J. V. Stalin, Sept. 19, 1930, 9, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  29.Letter from J. V. Stalin to N. S. Alliluyeva, Sept. 24, 1930, 9, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  30.Letter from N. S. Alliluyeva to J. V. Stalin, Oct. 6, 1930, 10, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  31.Letter from J. V. Stalin to N. S. Alliluyeva, Oct. 8, 1930, 11, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  32.Letter from N. S. Alliluyeva to J. V. Stalin, Sept. 12, 1930, 8, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  33.Gogua, Transcription of Oral Stories, MEM.

  34.“Myths,” Live with Mikhail Zelensky. Alexander Alliluyev remarks that he has never spoken of this before. Confirmed in author’s interview with Alexander Alliluyev, Moscow, May 25, 2013.

  35.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 106.

  36.Gogua, Transcription of Oral Stories, MEM.

  37.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 112.

  38.Vyacheslav Molotov, Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics—Conversations with Felix Chuev, ed. Albert Resis (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 174.

  39.Richardson, Long Shadow, 126.

  40.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 113. See Alliluyev Memoirs, xviii.

  41.Montefiore, Young Stalin, 315.

  42.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Artyom Sergeev.

  43.Ibid., comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  CHAPTER 3: THE HOSTESS AND THE PEASANT

  1.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 122.

  2.Ibid., 43.

  3.Merzhanov was arrested in 1942 and sentenced to ten years in a forced-labor camp.

  4.Yuri Druzhnikov, “Visiting Stalin’s, Uninvited,” trans. Thomas Moore, from Contemporary Russian Myths, www.druzhnikov.com/english/text/vizit1.html.

  5.Molotov, Molotov Remembers, 208.

  6.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 132.

  7.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Aug. 5, 1933, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 14, 19.

  8.Candide Charkviani, Napikri da naazrevi [My Life and Reflections], trans. Nestan Charkviani (Tbilisi: Merani Publishing House, 2004), 503. Charkviani was a Georgian writer and thinker who became first secretary of the Central Committee of Georgia in 1938. He was demoted in 1952, probably for failing to repress a nationalist counterrevolutionary “ring” in the Georgian Communist Party. Charkviani secretly wrote his memoirs in 1954.

  9.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 97.

  10.Ibid. Svetlana corrected Pamela Johnson McMillan’s translation of “Housekeeper” to “Hostess,” and her father’s pet name for her to “Svetanka.”

  11.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 151.

  12.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Sept. 15, 1933. RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 14, 20.

  13.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 150.

  14.Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbot (New York: Bantam, 1971), 310–11.

  15.James A. Hudson, Svetlana Alliluyeva: Flight to Freedom (New York: Tower Books, 1967), 30.

  16.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 144.

  17.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 389.

  18.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 143.

  19.Ibid., 121.

  20.Author’s interview with Alexander Alliluyev, Moscow, May 25, 2013.

  21.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 154.

  22.Larry E. Holmes, Stalin’s School: Model School No. 25, 1931–1937 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 71.

  23.Svanidze, “Diary of 1933–37,” 18, Secrest Collection, box 3, HIA.

  24.Rosamond Richardson interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, Saffron Walden, 1991, tape 1. PC, Richardson.

  25.Holmes, Stalin’s School, 22.

  26.Ibid., 37.

  27.Ibid., 36.

  28.The school’s mandate was equality among the classes. In 1932, the school accommodated 1,150 pupils, 61 percent of whom were children of workers, but ironically, this percentage steadily declined. Soon “the proletarian element dropped further to 34% in 1934.” “One former pupil, Lusia Davydova, recalled that her 1937 graduating class contained only one representative of the working class whom his classmates called ‘the working class stratum.’” Holmes, Stalin’s School, 32.

  29.Holmes, Stalin’s School, 39-41.

  30.Ibid., 10, 18.

  31.Ibid., 37.

  32.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 142.

  33.Author’s interview with Diana Kondrashina of School 175 (formerly Model School No. 25), Moscow, June 5, 2013.

  34.Holmes, Stalin’s School, 165–68.

  35.Author’s interview with Diana Kondrashina of School 175, Moscow, June 5, 2013.

  36.Holmes, Stalin’s School, 166. Joining the Komsomol happened at the age of fourteen, until, at the age of twenty-eight, one became eligible to apply for Communist Party membership. Along with a pin, as a member of the Komsomol, one got a membership book with dates when dues were paid.

  37.Svanidze, “Diary of 1933–37,” 22, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  38.Letter from Vasili Djugashvili to Stalin, 5 August 1933, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 3, 3.

  39.Letter from Vasili Djugashvili to Stalin, Sept. 26 (no year). RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 8, 10.

  40.Author’s interview with Chrese Evans, Portland, OR, July 19, 2012.

  41.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 1, tape 21, HIA.

  42.Holmes, Stalin’s School, 167–68.

  43.Ibid., 168.

  44.Ibid., 123.

  CHAPTER 4: THE TERROR

  1.Svanidze, “Diary of 1933–37,” 9, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  2.Rosamond Richardson interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, Saffron Walden, 1991, tape 1, PC, Richardson.

  3.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 162.

  4.Svanidze, “Diary of 1933–37,” 11–12, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  5.Matthew E. Lenoe, The Kirov Murder and Soviet History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 252.

  6.Lenoe claims that Stalin was probably not behind the murder.

  7.Stephen Cohen, The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 2.

  8.Kuromiya, Stalin, 134.

  9.What could motivate such a slaughter? Was this simply the psychotic murderousness of a brutal dictator, or was there a more complex and sinister rationale behind it? The historian Hiroaki Kuromiya suggests that Stalin was watching Hitler closely. The Great Terror was a “pre-emptive strike” to cleanse the country of all disloyal factions in the face of the world war between Fascism and Communism that he was certain was imminent. In the chaos of war, internal opponents of his rule would take advantage of the disaster and mount a rebellion from within, as the Bolsheviks had done during World War I. Fascist enemies inside the country were even more dangerous than those outside and had to be purged. Kuromiya, Stalin, 128.

  10.A large part of the terror consisted of various “national” operations, in which nationalities like Poles and Germans were targeted, which might explain Til’s dismissal.

  11.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 130–31.

  12.Ibid., 133.

  13.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 5.

  14.Service, Stalin, 339.

  15.Svanidze, “Diary of 1933–37,” 27–28, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  16.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 269.

  17.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 148.

  18.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 148.

  19.Author’s interview with Alexander Alliluyev, Moscow, May 25, 2013.

  20.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 55.

  21.Author’s interview with Alexander Alliluyev, Moscow, May 27, 2013.

  22.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 55.

  23.Author’s interview with Alexander Alliluyev, Moscow, May 27, 2013.

  24.Ibid.

  25.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 269.

  26.Ibid.

  27.Service, Stalin, 352�
��53.

  28.After November 1938, Stalin slowed down the Terror, though he did not end it. He blamed the Terror on “mistakes” committed by NKVD men under the sway of Nikolai Yezhov. Yezhov, head of the NKVD, was executed in 1940.

  29.Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Picador, 2008), 283–84.

  30.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 325.

  31.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 124.

  32.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 70.

  33.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 151.

  34.Holmes, Stalin’s School, 98—recalled by student Yuliia Kapusto.

  35.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 2, tape 1, HIA.

  36.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 151.

  37.Ibid., 148.

  38.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 141.

  39.Svanidze, “Diary of 1933–37,” 2–3, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  40.Ibid.

  CHAPTER 5: THE CIRCLE OF SECRETS AND LIES

  1.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 140.

  2.Rosamond Richardson interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, Saffron Walden, 1991, tape 2, PC, Richardson.

  3.Author’s interview with Leonid and Galina Alliluyev, Moscow, May 17, 2013.

  4.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Aug. 5, 1940, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 29, 40.

  5.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Aug. 22, 1940, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 30, 41.

  6.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 381.

  7.Letter to Mary Burkett, Sept. 2, 1995, PC, Burkett.

  8.Kuromiya, Stalin, 150. This number is taken from Nikita Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [Secret Speech], annot. Boris I. Nicolaevsky (New York: New Leader, 1962), 37.

  9.Mikoyan, Memoirs of Military Test-Flying, 102.

  10.Kuromiya, Stalin, 151. There are several versions of Stalin’s expletive.

  11.Richard Overy, Russia’s War: A History of the Soviet War Effort, 1941–1945 (New York: Penguin, 1998), 78.

  12.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 375.

  13.Ibid., 378.

  14.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 392.

  15.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 372.

  16.Sergeev quoted in Molotov, Molotov Remembers, 211.

  17.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  18.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 160.

  19.Letter from J. Stalin to Nadya Alliluyeva, Apr. 9, 1928, 2, Secrest Collection, HIA.

  20.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 101.

  21.Ibid., 159.

  22.Ibid.

  23.Author’s interview with Leonid and Galina Alliluyev, Moscow, May 17, 2013.

  24.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 161.

  25.Overy, Russia’s War, 80–81.

  26.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 47–48. Biagi’s interview with Yulia’s daughter Gulia.

  27.Radzinsky, Stalin, 476. See also Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 378–79.

  28.Radzinsky, Stalin, 474. Yakov’s capture is briefly dramatized in the film Europa Europa.

  29.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Sept. 19, 1941, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 30, 43–44.

  30.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 168. A thorough search of the magazines Alliluyeva indicated she was reading turned up no such article. Leon Trotsky wrote about rumors of Nadya’s suicide in his article “Joseph Stalin: Hitler’s New Friend Is Sized Up by an Old Foe,” Life, Oct. 2, 1939, 72, which suggests that this was a common rumor, but it is unlikely this article was Svetlana’s source. An article by Trotsky would never have been left lying around. Its discovery would have meant someone’s death.

  31.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  32.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 169.

  CHAPTER 6: LOVE STORY

  1.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 171.

  2.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova. See also Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 155.

  3.Olga Rifkina, Puti neispovedimye [Inscrutable Paths] (Moscow: Progress-Traditsia, 2003), 72; henceforth, Rifkina, Inscrutable Paths.

  4.Ibid., 71–72.

  5.“Myths,” Live with Mikhail Zelensky, comments of Olga Rifkina.

  6.Rifkina, Inscrutable Paths, 74.

  7.Ibid., 87.

  8.Ibid., 88.

  9.Ibid., 90.

  10.Ibid., 72–73.

  11.Ibid., 74.

  12.Author’s interview with Stepan Mikoyan, Moscow, May 24, 2013.

  13.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 19.

  14.Mikoyan, Memoirs of Military Test-Flying, 84.

  15.Kreml’9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  16.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 20–21.

  17.In an interview with Meryle Secrest, Alliluyeva made it clear that before she met Kapler she already knew that her mother had committed suicide. Secrest Collection, Mar. 1994, audio recording, group 2, tape 2, HIA.

  18.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 22.

  19.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 174.

  20.Ibid., 176.

  21.Ibid., 175–76.

  22.Ibid., 175.

  23.Ibid., 176.

  24.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 21, 26.

  25.Vladimir Alliluyev, Khronika odnoi sem’i: Alliluyevy—Stalin. [Chronicle of One Family: Alliluyevs—Stalin] (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1995, 2002), 177.

  26.A. Kapler, “Letter of Lieutenant L. from Stalingrad,” trans. Anastassia Kostrioukova, Pravda, Dec. 14, 1942.

  27.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 177.

  28.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  29.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 2, tape 3, HIA.

  30.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 178. This is Svetlana Alliluyeva’s account. The conversation is dramatized in Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family. The document quoted, Top Secret, Copy no. 1, is difficult to authenticate.

  31.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 27.

  32.Ibid.

  33.Gribanov, “And Memory as Snow Keeps Drifting,” 159.

  34.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 25.

  35.Author’s interview with Alexander Burdonsky, Moscow, June 1, 2013.

  36.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 180–81.

  37.Ibid., 181.

  38.Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, Apr. 21, 1981, Malcolm Muggeridge Papers (SC-4), WCSC.

  39.Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town: Forced Labor and Its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 70.

  40.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Vladimir Alliluev. See also Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 185.

  41.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 150.

  42.Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, Apr. 21, 1981, WCSC.

  CHAPTER 7: A JEWISH WEDDING

  1.Kuromiya, Stalin, 158.

  2.Molotov, Molotov Remembers, 209.

  3.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 163.

  4.Author’s interview with Leonid and Galina Alliluyev, Moscow, May 17, 2013. Svetlana’s cousin, Leonid Alliluyev, claimed that if either Vasili or Svetlana knew of the proposed exchange, neither told anyone else in the family, and it was not publicly known: “If such an attempt had taken place, no ‘Public Communications’ could have been possible. In our country, it was out of the question.”

  5.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 2, tape 3. HIA.

  6.Radzinsky, Stalin, 478–89. See also Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 445–46.

  7.Letter to author from Stepan Mikoyan, Aug. 10, 2013.

  8.Letter to the author from Professor Lynne Viola, July 20, 2014.

  9.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 162.

  10.Overy, Russ
ia’s War, 158–60.

  11.Letter to author from Stepan Mikoyan, Aug. 10, 2013.

  12.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 184.

  13.Letter no. 2 to Robert Rayle, Aug. 23, 2005, PC, Rayle.

  14.Rifkina, Inscrutable Paths, 92–93.

  15.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 150.

  16.Ibid., 410.

  17.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 134.

  18.Rifkina, Inscrutable Paths, 93–94.

  19.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 116.

  20.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 2, tape 6, HIA.

  21.Ibid.

  22.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 152.

  23.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 187.

  24.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 2, tape 6, HIA.

  25.Radzinsky, Stalin, 317.

  26.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  27.John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2011), 194.

  28.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 2, tape 6. HIA.

  29.Overy, Russia’s War, 287–89. See also Harrison Salisbury, “Fifty Years That Shook the World,” in The Soviet Union: The Fifty Years, ed. Harrison E. Salisbury (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World), 1967), 25.

  30.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, London, audio recording, group 2, tape 6. HIA.

  31.Author’s interview with Leonid and Galina Alliluyev, Moscow, May 17, 2013.

  32.Svetlana Alliluyeva, The Faraway Music (New Delhi: Lancer International, 1984), 78.

  33.Author’s interview with Chrese Evans, Portland, OR, Feb. 25, 2013.

  34.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Dec. 1, 1945, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 33, 50.

  35.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Marfa Peshkova.

  36.Alliluyev, Chronicle of One Family, 189.

  37.Svetlana, television documentary, dir. Irina Gedrovich, Fabryka Kino (distributor), 2008, comment by Svetlana Alliluyeva. See also Rosamond Richardson interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, Saffron Walden, 1991, tape 4, PC, Richardson.

  38.The 1936 decree was called “On the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy.” Catriona Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890–1991 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 103.

  39.Letter to Rosa Shand, May 22, 1978, PC, Shand.