She herself had only a short time to live.
After Stalin’s return to Moscow, tension in the household reached such a terrible point that, as Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva (she took her mother’s maiden name) wrote, “Mama thought more and more frequently of leaving my father.” He was enjoying his new role as a lady-killer. It tickled his vanity. In retaliation, Nadya more and more frequently repeated at home the gossip about him that she heard at the academy, at the very time when the Ryutin documents were being passed around in the lecture rooms. He judged people by one criterion only: whether or not they were loyal to him, and he began to hate her. He was unfaithful more and more frequently, simply to hurt her. She would go mad and shout out to his face the insults which Orlov quotes in his book: “You’re a torturer, that’s what you are. You torture your own son, you torture your wife, you’ve tortured the whole people till they can take no more.” It was a vicious circle.
And on November 8 the tragedy occurred. A mysterious tragedy.
Sixty years after the event I found myself trying to elucidate what exactly had happened on that terrible night. To this end, I interviewed Kira Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya, and also resolved to meet Nadezhda Stalin, the other Nadezhda’s granddaughter and namesake.
She was the daughter of Stalin’s son Vasily and his wife, Galina Burdonskaya. (Her French ancestor Bourdonnais arrived in Russia with Napoleon, was taken prisoner, and settled permanently in his new homeland.) Her French ancestry showed in the exceptional elegance of Nadezhda Stalin the younger, an enchanting woman.
She was born in 1943 at the height of the war with Hitler, and studied in drama school. (Incidentally, her brother Alexander also became a theatrical producer. Is it too whimsical to suppose that the genes of that great actor Joseph Stalin manifested themselves in this way?)
The younger Nadezhda, however, soon exchanged her career as an actress for family life. She married the son of the famous Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev, onetime head of the Writers’ Union.
The younger Nadezhda allowed me to tape our conversation. I then combined it with my interview with Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya, with Molotov’s reminiscences as recorded by the poet F. Chuyev, the memoirs of Bukharin’s wife Anna Larina, the books by Svetlana, the daughter of Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and, last but not least, the documents which I read in the President’s Archive.
From all this material there gradually emerged the solution of the mysterious events of November 8, 1932.
Nadezhda had made particularly careful preparations for the anniversary party at the Voroshilovs’ on November 8, her granddaughter Nadezhda recounted. “Anna Sergeevna Alliluyeva, grandmother’s sister, used to tell us about the party. Nadya usually wore her hair in a severe bun. But on this occasion she chose a stylish hairdo.… Somebody had brought her a black dress with a rose pattern appliqué from Germany. It was November, but she ordered a tea rose to go with the dress, and she put it in her hair. She twirled around in front of Anna Sergeevna, showing off her dress, and asking what she thought of it.” She had dressed up as if she was going to a ball. And, according to Nadezhda, “Somebody was paying far too much attention to her at the party, and Grandfather said something rude to her.”
Molotov said that “the cause of Alliluyeva’s death was, of course, jealousy.… There was a large gathering in Voroshilov’s apartment.… Stalin rolled some bread into a ball and threw it at Yegorov’s wife with everyone watching.… I saw it, and this seems to have had something to do with what happened.”
These two contradictory versions can be reconciled. Nadya had gone to the party intending to show him how attractive she was. Obviously, when Yegorov’s wife, who was famous for her amours, began flirting with him and he responded, Nadya also began making up to somebody. And was rudely rebuked for it. According to Svetlana, “He said to her ‘Hey you’ and she said ‘My name isn’t hey,’ and left the table.” Molotov said, “She [Nadya] was by then a bit of a psychopath. She left the party with my wife. They walked round the Kremlin grounds a bit, and she complained to my wife, ‘He grumbles all the time … and why did he have to flirt like that?’ But there was nothing to it: he’d had a little drink and was playing the fool, but it upset her.”
Anna Larina, Bukharin’s wife, also described the occasion: “On November 8 Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin] saw her at a banquet in the Kremlin.… According to Nikolai Ivanovich, Stalin, half-drunk, threw cigarette ends and orange peel in Nadezhda Sergeevna’s face. She refused to put up with this rudeness, rose from the table, and left. They had been sitting opposite each other that evening, Stalin and Nadezhda. Nikolai Ivanovich was next to her. In the morning Nadezhda was found dead.”
Kira Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya wrote: “Mama told me later that when Nadya got home she must have thought it all out in advance because she bolted her door. And nobody heard the shot. It was a little revolver, a lady’s.… They say she left a letter, but nobody read it. The letter was for him, Stalin.… No doubt she poured her heart out in it.” Nadya Stalin said: “In the morning they knocked on her door—and found her dead.… The rose she’d worn in her hair was lying on the floor by the door. She’d dropped it as she ran into the room. That is why the sculptor put a marble rose on her gravestone.”
A Party member’s life often ended with a pistol shot. If he disagreed with the Party, or the Party rejected him, only a bullet could resolve the problem satisfactorily.
Stalin knew how his enemies would explain Nadya’s tragic end: they would say that she had chosen to die rather than remain married to him. He had lost not only his wife but his home. He was disgraced in the eyes of his comrades and of his enemies alike. He immediately made her suicide a state secret. Her obituary in Pravda stated, “A comrade dear to us, a person with a beautiful soul, is no more. A young woman still full of strength, a Bolshevik devoted to the Party and to the Revolution, has departed from us.” The official communiqué said, “The Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party with great sadness notifies comrades that on November 9, the death took place of an active and devoted member of the Party.”
Nowhere was there a single word about the cause of death. The funeral was a hurried affair. On November 9 the coffin had already been transferred from the Kremlin apartment to the Great Hall in the building of the Central Executive Committee (now occupied by GUM) on Red Square.
There is a well-known legend that when she was lying in her coffin he went up to the coffin to pay his last respects—and pushed the coffin aside in a rage. Molotov recalled, “I had never seen Stalin weeping before, but as he stood there by the coffin tears ran down his cheeks. She loved Stalin very much—that is a fact.… He did not push the coffin: he went up to it and said, ‘I didn’t take enough care of you.’ ” We can be sure that he didn’t push the coffin away. He never lost his self-control. Anna Larina, Bukharin’s wife, described how “Nikolai Ivanovich was standing by the coffin. And Stalin thought fit at a moment like that to come up to Nikolai Ivanovich and say that after the banquet he had left for his dacha, and had been rung up in the morning and told what had happened.” Kira Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya said, “She lay there looking very beautiful.… I remember that we walked to Novodevichi cemetery afterward … but Grandma [Nadya’s mother] had lost the use of her legs after all that had happened and was taken by car.”
Anna Larina, Bukharin’s wife, wrote that “at the funeral Stalin asked them not to close the coffin. He raised Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s head and began kissing it.”
Then came the burial. Horses slowly drew the magnificent bier, draped with a dark red pall, right across the city from the Kremlin to the Novodevichi cemetery. Next day all Moscow was talking about the crowds of thousands, and how he had walked beside the bier without a hat and with his greatcoat unbuttoned.
His daughter Svetlana asserted that he did not join in the funeral procession. The fact remains that many people saw him walking behind the coffin. He was no coward, but he was inordinately afraid of an attempt on hi
s life. His fear was that of an old terrorist, who knew how easy assassination is. Surely he would not have wanted to walk across Moscow?
As so often, he had outwitted everybody. He did, in fact, walk with the coffin, but only for the first ten minutes, as far as Manège Square—in other words, as far as the first inhabited buildings, where there might be some danger of a shot from a window. There he got into a car, while his first wife’s brother, Alyosha Svanidze, also a shortish man with a black mustache, and wearing the same sort of greatcoat, walked on behind the coffin and was taken by the crowd for Stalin.
She was buried in a coffin and in the ground. The usual funeral rite of the Bolsheviks was cremation. Why was the custom not followed? Had he, perhaps, excommunicated her from the Party because of her suicide? Or was this the beginning of a new era? The Imperial Era. She had been the wife of the new tsar. He had chosen the cemetery of an ancient monastery in which the wives of Muscovite tsars lay buried.
After the funeral the country was unofficially informed that she had died of acute appendicitis. The GPU busily disseminated its account. Kira Alliluyeva-Politkovskaya said, “When Mama and Papa [Nadya’s brother Pavel and his wife] arrived for the November celebrations they were overwhelmed with grief. They said that Nadezhda Alliluyeva had undergone an operation for appendicitis and died of heart failure in the course of it.”
Only after Stalin’s death did the Russian public discover that she had not died of natural causes. But at the time, other rumors soon circulated. He had too much blood on his hands. The intelligentsia immediately started saying that he had killed his wife.
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, said in her book that her nanny, shortly before she died, told her everything, saying she “wanted to confess.” According to her nanny “My father usually slept in his study or in a little room with a telephone next to the dining room. He slept there that night, arriving home late from the anniversary banquet which Mama had left earlier.… These rooms were a long way from the servants’ quarters—to get there you had to go along a little corridor past our bedrooms: Father’s room was on the left, Mother’s on the right. She was found dead in the morning by the housekeeper, Karolina Til, who had brought her her breakfast. She suddenly rushed into the nursery, trembling all over, and called nurse.… Mother was lying by the bed, covered with blood, with the little Walther pistol given to her by Pavlusha in her hand. They rushed to the telephone and called Avelya Enukidze, the chief bodyguard, and Molotov’s wife, Polina, who was Mama’s close friend.… Molotov and Voroshilov arrived.”
We may doubt whether Polina Molotov was indeed such a close friend. We need only recall Nadya’s letter, saying how incredibly lonely she felt among the Party wives. And Polina was just that—a haughty Party lady.
Molotov confirmed the nanny’s story: “Stalin was at home and asleep at the time of the shot. He did not hear it.… Stalin always slept in his own room. When he finally went into the dining room he was told ‘Joseph, Nadya is no longer with us.’ ” But, according to Nadya Stalin, who heard it from Anna Sergeevna Alliluyeva, “she came home and locked herself in … but Grandfather went off to the dacha.”
Stalin, then, was not at his Kremlin apartment? Anna Larina, Bukharin’s wife, as we know, said the same.
We see, then, that two witnesses, the nurse and Molotov, stated that he was in the house, while two others—at second hand—asserted that he was at the dacha. We also have the written testimony of another person, who saw Stalin in the Kremlin the morning after Nadya’s death. This was Anna Korchagina, who worked as a cleaner in Stalin’s apartment.
DID STALIN SHOOT HER?
I leaf through a document consisting of several sheets covered with a semiliterate handwriting. This is a petition “To the head of the state, Comrade Kalinin,” from Anna Gavrilovna Korchagina. She writes, in 1935, from a camp on the White Sea–Baltic Canal: “The charge against me was that in 1933 I was on vacation at the rest home of the Central Executive Committee. The workers from the CEC’s library, Sinelobova and Burkova, were also on vacation. Sinelobova learned that I had worked for Comrade Stalin and questioned me about the death of Nadezhda Sergeevna. I told her she died of heart trouble at the same time as acute appendicitis. That was all I ever said about it.”
But in 1935 when the repressions began, Sinelobova’s brother, who worked in the Kremlin commandant’s office, was shot, and Sinelobova herself was arrested. “Sinelobov was in Comrade Stalin’s apartment when Nadezhda Sergeevna died,” Korchagina writes. “He was authorized to act for the Kremlin commandant. When they were arrested, as I learned during the investigation, Sinelobova gave evidence against me, that I had told her the cause of Nadezhda Sergeevna’s death was Comrade Stalin, and that he had shot her. I could never have said it, it is impossible to think up such a vile lie about a man dear to me and all those for whom he has opened up a path to a bright life. I know very well that even you, Comrade Kalinin, know that Comrade Stalin was with Comrade Molotov out of town at his dacha that evening. I was not in Comrade Stalin’s apartment at that time. We were doing the rooms in the other block, but we were rung up from the dacha and asked ‘what has happened there?’ … They rang Comrade Stalin from the Kremlin telling him to come home, and he made haste and left quickly … quite early. When I got to work at 9:00 A.M. I saw everybody was upset but they didn’t tell us women workers anything until the coffin and flowers were brought, then they told us that Nadezhda Sergeevna was dead. They didn’t tell us before so we wouldn’t start howling and upsetting others. This is my faithful testimony to her natural death. On March 22, 1935, two comrades in army tunics came to see me. I thought it was to take me to work, but they took me to the Lubyanka [prison]. In the interrogation I told them everything as I’m telling you, but they shouted at me, ‘She’s lying, she’s got eyes like a thief.’ And they said a lot of insulting things.… I read the protocol, but I couldn’t sign it, because what was there wasn’t what I’d said, but when I started objecting they shouted at me ever so loud and one of the comrades came up to me and quietly laid his hand on my shoulder, then shouted, ‘You’d better sign if you know what’s good for you,’ and I was so frightened I signed it all.” After explaining what happened, Korchagina pleads for a pardon. Written on the petition are the words “referred to M.I. [Kalinin] personally,” followed by his decision—“Reject. 8.3.35 Kalinin.” So the hapless cleaner disappeared into the camps.
But let us remember these words: “Even you, Comrade Kalinin, know that Comrade Stalin was with Comrade Molotov out of town at his dacha that evening.” That was the official version. The version given to the servants, which they were required to repeat. And which Stalin himself had “thought fit” to pass on to Bukharin as they stood beside the coffin. But what was the reality? Molotov and the nurse are of course right. They were both in the house and saw it all for themselves: the Boss was at home that night, but for some reason did not want anybody to know. Why? To understand it we must go back to Nadya’s last evening.
She arrives for the party in a funereal dress with a rose on it. She is insulted. She flees from the party. Why was she so overwrought? Was it only jealousy? Was this a unique occasion? No, she had become “a bit of a psychopath,” as Molotov put it.
Why? The answer turned out to be as horrifying as it was simple.
In the President’s Archive I came across the “case history of Alliluyeva N.S.,” compiled in the Kremlin Polyclinic. The Boss had kept it in his personal archive. I leafed through it. “Alliluyeva, Nadezhda Sergeevna, native of Baku, member of the Party from the age of 18.”
At the end of the “case history” I was taken aback by an entry dated August 1932, which reads: “Acute pains in the abdominal region—return for further examination in 2–3 weeks’ time.” This was followed by one final alarming entry: “31.8.32. Examination to consider operation in 3–4 weeks.” There are no further entries. So she committed suicide when she was due to have an operation. I had seen no previous mention of this in my re
ading!
There had evidently been a good reason for her journey to Karlsbad. She had been experiencing “acute pains in the abdominal region” for some time. Nothing concrete was said about the causes of her pains. But she was undergoing examinations and was being prepared for an operation of some sort. Yet a decision was taken not to record details of her illness. Which means that it must have been something very serious. Perhaps she had begun to suspect something when she was undergoing treatment in Karlsbad. Was that the reason for her heightened excitability all this time? And was that how the revolver, her brother Pavel’s strange present, came into her possession? Did she ask him for it? A revolver was a Party member’s loyal aid when life became unbearable. And the insult at the anniversary party could have been the last straw.
So she ran away from the party. Polina, Molotov’s wife, caught up with her. They talked. Afterward, Polina herself would describe to Svetlana how they had walked around the Kremlin grounds and how she had calmed Nadya down. But Nadya had still insisted on going home. So the question arises, had Polina really succeeded in calming her down? Or had she even tried?
That was a terrible time full of terrible people. Polina Molotov was typical of the revolutionary women in that period. In 1949, when she was arrested on the Boss’s orders, she told her life story under interrogation: “My name is Perl Semyonovna. Zhemchuzina was my Party pseudonym.” “Did you work underground?” “Yes, in the Ukraine when Denikin’s army was there.… While attending an international women’s congress I met Molotov … and at the end of 1921 I became his wife.” Polina, the underground revolutionary, Party activist, Commissar of the Food Industry, People’s Commissar of the Fishing Industry. A victim of Stalin, this staunch revolutionary continued to deify him even after her release. Could she possibly have loved that “baba” Nadya, with her undisguised sympathy for Bukharin, who despised and hated Polina’s husband? At a time when there was a fierce struggle for power and the presence of “that baba” at the Boss’s side was so dangerous?
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