Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  40.Letter to Joan Kennan, Jan. 15, 1970, PC, J. Kennan.

  41.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 384–86.

  42.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 191; Only One Year, 384. For confirmation of Svetlana’s description of Stalin’s dinner parties, see Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 76–77.

  43.Rosamond Richardson interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, Saffron Walden, 1991, tape 4, PC, Richardson.

  44.Sergo Beria, Beria, My Father: Inside Stalin’s Kremlin, trans. Brian Pearce (London: Duckworth, 2001), 152.

  45.Ibid., 192.

  CHAPTER 8: THE ANTI-COSMOPOLITAN CAMPAIGN

  1.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 6.

  2.Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (New York: Holt, 2009), 61.

  3.It is now claimed that the Soviets would have made the scientific breakthrough on their own. It is estimated that the information gathered through espionage probably accelerated the Soviet nuclear program by two years. See Malcolm Gladwell, “Trust No One: Kim Philby and the Hazards of Mistrust,” New Yorker, July 28, 2014.

  4.Thompson, Hawk and the Dove, 83.

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

  6.Richardson, Long Shadow, 215.

  7.Ibid., 221–23.

  8.Ibid., 224.

  9.Ibid., 216.

  10.Ibid., 217.

  11.Ibid., 216.

  12.Ibid., 223.

  13.Ibid., 222.

  14.Ibid., 230.

  15.Ibid., 232.

  16.Alliluyev, Chronicle of One Family, 261–62. In his examination of the files, Vladimir Alliluyev noted that there was no proof of Anna’s guilt. Her arrest was built on unlawful testimony by her relatives arrested shortly before—E. A. Alliluyeva (Zhenya), her husband N. V. Molochnikov, and their daughter Kyra (Protocol no. 22 of Special Committee of Ministry of State Security of USSR).

  17.Richardson, Long Shadow, 231.

  18.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 196–97, and Only One Year, 155.

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

  20.Richardson, Long Shadow, 227.

  21.Supposedly Beria had carried out traitorous acts against the Bolsheviks during the Civil War of 1917–20 and had barely escaped execution. In fact, this was a common rumor; Beria claimed to have been working undercover for the Bolsheviks. However, Beria did seem to target Redens. Redens had been his boss in the Transcaucasian GPU (secret police) until Beria engineered his ouster.

  22.Richardson, Long Shadow, 242–43.

  23.Ibid., 245.

  24.The JAC was reviving an old suggestion of creating a Jewish republic in Crimea.

  25.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 153–54. Not everyone believed Svetlana could actually have witnessed this. Her cousin Leonid Alliluyev remained skeptical. Author’s interview with Leonid and Galina Alliluyev, Moscow, May 17, 2013.

  26.Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 2–3.

  27.Kuromiya, Stalin, 193.

  28.Yakov Rapoport, The Doctors’ Plot: A Survivor’s Memoir of Stalin’s Last Act of Terror Against Jews and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 33.

  29.Rubenstein and Naumov, Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, 39–40. The authors claim Mikhoels’s death was not an accident. He was “lured” from his hotel and driven to the country house of the head of the Belarus security forces, where he was murdered on Stalin’s direct orders. The executioners phoned Stalin for advice on how to camouflage the murder. “Well, it’s an automobile accident,” he said.

  30.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 196.

  31.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, Dec. 1, 1945, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 33, 49–50.

  32.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 373–74.

  33.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 56.

  34.Alliluyev Memoirs, xii.

  35.P. Fedoseyev, “Irresponsible Thinking,” Pravda 119, no. 10510 (May 14, 1947): 3.

  36.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 61.

  37.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 169.

  38.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 193.

  39.Ibid., 113.

  40.Michael Arlen, The Green Hat (New York: George H. Doran Co., 1924); mentioned in Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 113, 193.

  41.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 195.

  42.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 155.

  CHAPTER 9: EVERYTHING SILENT, AS BEFORE A STORM

  1.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 388.

  2.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 68–69.

  3.Alliluyev, Chronicle of One Family, 68.

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

  5.Charkviani, My Life and Reflections, 503.

  6.Ibid., 505.

  7.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 192–93.

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

  9.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 137.

  10.Meryle Secrest Interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recordings, group 2, tape 8. HIA.

  11.Service, Stalin, 307. See also Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953 (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 71–77; and Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov with Jerrold L. Schecter and Leona P. Schecter, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness (New York: Little, Brown, 1995), 317–18.

  12.Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, 78.

  13.For the full text of the letter, see Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, 81.

  14.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 380.

  15.Beria, Beria, My Father, 152–53.

  16.Kreml’-9 writers, Svetlana Stalina: Escape from the Family, comments of Stepan Mikoyan.

  17.Kyra Golovko, “Svetlana Alliluyeva: odinochestvo i nasledstvo” [“Svetlana Alliluyeva: Solitude and Inheritance”], Izvestia, no. 95 (Oct. 17, 2008): 10.

  18.Ibid.

  19.Ibid.

  20.Figes, Whisperers, 487–92

  21.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 391.

  22.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 197–98.

  23.Kelly, Children’s World: Growing Up in Russia, 645, n. 203.

  24.Letter to S. Alliluyeva from Stalin, May 10, 1950, Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 199.

  25.Ibid., 198.

  26.Author’s interview with Chrese Evans, Portland, OR, July 16, 2012.

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

  28.Golovko, “Svetlana Alliluyeva: Solitude and Inheritance,” 10.

  29.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558, opis 11, D 1552, doc. 37, 55–56.

  30.Charkviani, My Life and Reflections, 507.

  31.Meryle Secrest Interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 1, tape 9, HIA.

  32.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 135.

  33.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 211.

  34.Ibid., 209.

  35.Svetlana About Svetlana, film, directed by Lana Parshina, 2008.

  36.Letter from S. Alliluyeva to Stalin, RGASPI, KPSS fond 558 opis 11, D 1552, doc. 36, 54.

  37.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 71.

  38.Konstantin Simonov, “Through the Eyes of My Generation: Meditations on Stalin,” Soviet Literature, Moscow, no. 5 (494) (1989): 79.

  39.Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 321; also Taubman, Khrushchev, 214.

  40.Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 309–10. Khrushchev suggests that it was New Year’s Day. Alliluyeva says the last time she saw her father was his birthday.

  41.Rapoport, Doctors’ Plot, 74–75.

  42.Ibid., 71.

  43.Ibid., 221.

  44.Konstantin Simonov, “Through the Eyes of My Generation,” 87–88.

  45.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 155.

  46.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 197.

  47.Rapoport, Doctors�
�� Plot, 243.

  48.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 207. There is some evidence, however, that Stalin had begun to “phase down his propaganda campaign around the Doctors’ Plot.” His health was too seriously impaired for him to carry out another Great Terror. Gennadi Kostyrchenko, “The Genesis of Establishment Anti-Semitism in the USSR: The Black Years, 1948–53,” in Revolution, Repression, and Revival: The Soviet Jewish Experience, ed. Zvi Gitelman and Yaacov Ro’i (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 189–90.

  49.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 155.

  50.Ibid., 155.

  CHAPTER 10: THE DEATH OF THE VOZHD

  1.Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recording, group 1, tape 17, HIA.

  2.Ibid. See also Richardson, Long Shadow, 250.

  3.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 636–37.

  4.Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 340.

  5.Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 176–78. See also Service, Stalin, 582–86; and Radzinsky, Stalin, 571–72. Radzinsky claimed to have interviewed Lozgachev.

  6.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 639.

  7.Taubman, Khrushchev, 237.

  8.Brent and Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime, 212. Vinogradov had treated Zhdanov.

  9.Montefiore, Court of the Red Tsar, 643.

  10.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 6–7.

  11.Rapoport, Doctors’ Plot, 151–52.

  12.Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 342.

  13.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 215.

  14.Ibid., 9.

  15.Ibid.

  16.Ibid., 8.

  17.Service, Stalin, 576.

  18.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 10.

  19.Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 347.

  20.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 86.

  21.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 14

  22.Ibid., 222.

  23.Decades later she would develop a conspiracy theory. According to Stalin’s maid, he had been found on the floor between the table with the telephone and his couch. He had obviously taken a phone call. Her father had very high blood pressure, which was why he refused to fly on planes. Svetlana became suspicious of the details surrounding his death—the delay in calling the doctors, the emptying of his dacha. Once in the United States, she consulted an American specialist, who told her that a very strong impulse or sound could be sent through the telephone to the unprotected ear and cause a stroke. It was an efficient way to kill someone with high blood pressure, and her father’s was 200/80. Why did “Beria’s people” empty the furniture at his dacha the day after his death, if not to conceal something? Beria was a technological wizard. Meryle Secrest interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, London, March 1994, Secrest Collection, audio recordings, group 1, tape 9, HIA.

  24.Molotov, Molotov Remembers, 210.

  25.Richardson, Long Shadow, 254.

  26.Rapoport, Doctors’ Plot, 20.

  27.Simonov, “Through the Eyes of My Generation,” 96.

  28.Ibid., 96–97.

  29.Oleg Kalugin, Spymaster: My Thirty-Two Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the West (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 10–11.

  CHAPTER 11: THE GHOSTS RETURN

  1.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 222.

  2.Cohen, Victims Return, 33–35.

  3.Ibid.

  4.Figes, Whisperers, 538; also Adam Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin (London: Penguin, 1994), 223.

  5.Rapoport, Doctors’ Plot, 187–88.

  6.Ibid., 182–83.

  7.Ibid., 184–85.

  8.Richardson, Long Shadow, 232.

  9.Ibid. Leonid Alliluyev believed his mother was suffering from the “schizophrenia” that plagued her family. The family believed it had destroyed Anna’s brother Fyodor. But when, in 1993, Leonid searched down Anna’s rehabilitation files, Case P-212 (many families of prisoners made such searches in the glasnost years), the files did “not contain any hints that Anna was mentally ill.” What they did make clear was that, on December 27, 1952, the sentence of Prisoner no. 23, now in Vladimirskaia prison, was prolonged for five more years by S. A. Golidze, an associate of Beria. Only Stalin’s death saved her. On April 2, 1954, Anna was moved to Moscow, rehabilitated, and released to her family. Alliluyev, Chronicle of One Family, 271–72.

  10.Richardson, Long Shadow, 233.

  11.Ibid., 244.

  12.Ibid., 234.

  13.Ibid., 223.

  14.Ibid.

  15.Ibid., 225.

  16.Ibid., 239.

  17.See Eugenia Aleksandrovna (Zhenya) Alliluyeva Correspondence, GARF, fond 9542, opis 1, no. 85, 9–20

  18.Richardson, Long Shadow, 241–42.

  19.Ibid., 234.

  20.Pravda, Dec. 17, 1953.

  21.Many, including Svetlana, claimed that Beria was executed a few days after his arrest in July. Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 375–76. His trial, which was announced on December 17 and lasted from December 18 to 23, may have been staged long after his death. Knight, Beria, 220-22.

  22.Richardson, Long Shadow, 256.

  23.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 218–19.

  24.Ibid., 16.

  25.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 139 (interview with Joseph Alliluyev).

  26.Gribanov, “And Memory as Snow Keeps Drifting,” 161.

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

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

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

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

  31.A degree that is midway between a Western master’s degree and a PhD.

  32.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 17.

  33.Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Tucaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 281. When members of the editorial board of Znamya got the book, they balked at the title. “It gives the impression that everything has been a mistake until now: Let it be called Nov (Renewal) or Novaya Stupen (A New Stage).”

  34.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 177.

  35.Alliluyeva, “Letter to Ehrenburg,” 607.

  36.Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 212–17, 307.

  37.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 33.

  38.Ibid., 33.

  39.Svetlana (film), 2008, interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva.

  40.Alliluyeva, “Letter to Ehrenburg,” 607.

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

  42.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 34–35.

  43.Ibid., 35.

  44.Leningrad would revert to its traditional name, Saint Petersburg, in 1991.

  45.Author’s visit to Alliluyev Apartment Museum, Saint Petersburg, May 20, 2013.

  46.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 89.

  47.Ibid., 223.

  CHAPTER 12: THE GENERALISSIMO’S DAUGHTER

  1.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 161.

  2.Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era, 3–67.

  3.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 162, 166.

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

  5.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 95.

  6.Simonov, “Through the Eyes of My Generation,” 43.

  7.Ibid., 48.

  8.Biagi, Svetlana: The Inside Story, 36.

  9.Golovko, “Svetlana Alliluyeva: Solitude and Inheritance,” 10.

  10.Author’s interview with Alexander Ushakov, Gorky Institute, Moscow, June 4, 2013.

  11.Ibid.

  12.Ironically, the source of this anecdote is the FBI. “Anecdote about Svetlana and Synyavsky at Gorky Inst. In bio of Sinyavsky by Alfreda Aucouturier,” FBI file 105-163639-A.

  13.Meryle Secrest Interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva, audio recordng, group 1, tape 13. HIA.

  14.Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Spy in the Archives: A Mem
oir of Cold War Russia (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 39–40.

  15.Galina Belaya,“Ia rodom iz shestidesiatykh” [“I Am from the Sixties”], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 70 (June 2004): 216.

  16.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 166.

  17.Boris Runin, “Moie okruzhenie,” Zapiski sluchaino utselevshego [“My Milieu,” Notes by the One Who Accidentally Survived] (Moscow: Vozvrashchenie, 2010), 224–25. See also Miklós Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003), 417.

  18.Gribanov, “And Memory as Snow Keeps Drifting,” 161.

  19.Alliluyev, Chronicle of One Family, 68–69.

  20.Richardson, Long Shadow, 259.

  21.Mikoyan, Memoirs of Military Test-Flying, 146.

  22.Gribanov, “And Memory as Snow Keeps Drifting,” 157.

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

  24.Gribanov, “And Memory as Snow Keeps Drifting,” 157–58.

  25.Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2009), 327.

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

  27.Ibid., 160.

  28.Ibid., 161.

  29.Ibid., 158.

  30.David Samoilov, Podennye zapisi (Daily Notes), 2 vols. (Moscow: Vremia, 2002), vol. 1, 300, entry for Nov. 17, 1960.

  31.Ibid., vol. 2, p. 30, entry for Mar. 24, 1967.

  CHAPTER 13: POST-THAW

  1.Ronald Hingley, Pasternak: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1983), 237, 241.

  2.Alliluyeva, Only One Year, 293.

  3.Ibid., 295.

  4.Author’s interview with Alexander Ushakov, Moscow, June 4, 2013.

  5.Maria Rozanova, “Vdova znamenitogo pisatelia i dissidenta Sinyavskogo Mariia Rozanova: ‘Alliluyeva mne skazala, “Masha, vy uveli Andreiia u zheny, a seichas ia uvozhu ego ot vas”’” (“The Widow of the Famous Writer and Dissident Andrei Sinyavsky, Maria Rozanova: ‘Alliluyeva told me, “Masha, you took Andrei from his wife. Now I take him away from you.”’”), Bul’var Gordona, no. 40 (232) (Oct. 6, 2009): 12–14. This story became common currency at the Gorky Institute. Interview with Alexander Ushakov, Moscow, June 4, 2013.

  6.Interview with Chrese Evans, Portland, OR, Feb. 27, 2013.

  7.Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge, Mar. 9, 1970, Muggeridge Papers, Special Collections, Wheaton College, Illinois WCSC.

  8.Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters, 219–21.

  9.Ibid., 80. See also Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, 416–17.