Читать книгу Children of Monsters - Jay Nordlinger - Страница 13
ОглавлениеBefore we get to Stalin, we should have a word about Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state. He had no children. But he did have a wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. She was his comrade in Communism and life alike. Krupskaya had a medical condition that apparently prevented her from having children. Lenin had a mistress as well: Inessa Armand. She had several children, both by her husband and by his brother. For a while, Lenin, Krupskaya, and Inessa lived at close quarters in a kind of ménage. It is said that Lenin liked children, taking a paternal interest in Inessa’s. There must have been limits to his liking, however: He sent children to concentration camps.
This is what Richard Pipes, the historian, pointed out when I raised with him the subject of Lenin and children. He cited an interesting source on the matter: Alexander Yakovlev, the Gorbachev-era Communist (about whom Pipes was completing a book).
Lenin’s successor, Stalin, was second to none in sending children to concentration camps. He had three of his own, from his two wives. He sired at least two other children as well. This was during his years of internal exile in the 1910s. One of his landladies, Maria Kuzakova, gave birth to a son in 1911. His name was Konstantin. A Stalin biographer, Robert Service, writes, “There was little doubt on the question of paternity. Those who saw Konstantin as an adult recorded how like Stalin he was in appearance and even in physical movement.” Stalin never had anything to do with him, but there are a few curious details.
Konstantin Kuzakov was admitted to Leningrad University. Stalin must have had a hand in this, according to another biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore. In 1932, the NKVD (a forerunner to the KGB) made Kuzakov sign a statement swearing that he would never discuss his “origin.” He worked in the Central Committee apparat under Andrei Zhdanov, a trusted deputy of Stalin’s. Zhdanov was also the father of the man who would become Stalin’s daughter’s second husband. (We will hear more about this later, of course.) Kuzakov went on to be a television official in the Ministry of Culture. He died in 1996, five years after the death of the Soviet Union.
He and his biological father never properly met, but there was an interesting encounter. Montefiore quotes Kuzakov himself: “Once, Stalin stopped and looked at me, and I felt he wanted to tell me something. I wanted to rush to him, but something stopped me. He waved his pipe and moved on.”
In 1914, Stalin met an adolescent girl named Lidia Pereprygina. She was 13, and he was 35. He got her pregnant. The baby died not long after being delivered. Stalin got Lidia pregnant again, and this second child lived. Born in 1917, he would bear the name of Alexander Davydov: adopted by the fisherman whom Lidia married. Unlike Konstantin, Alexander never had a glimpse of Stalin. Like Konstantin, he was made to sign a secrecy oath by the NKVD. He later ran a canteen in the mining town of Novokuznetsk—known from the 1930s until the 1960s as Stalinsk. He died in 1987.
Stalin had an adopted son, in addition to his two illegitimate sons and the two sons he had with his wives. This was Artyom Sergeyev, son of Fyodor Sergeyev, a top Bolshevik and ally of Stalin’s. The senior Sergeyev died in a notorious accident in 1921: An experimental high-speed train, the Aerowagon, derailed. Lenin himself assigned Stalin to look after Sergeyev’s widow and infant son. Artyom would call his adoptive father “Uncle Stalin.” He rose to be a major general in the Soviet army. He died in 2008—still devoted to the USSR, and to Stalin in particular. He regarded Gorbachev, the reformer who lost the Soviet Union, as a traitor.
An obituary in the Guardian, the British newspaper, told of his final moments: “As he lay on his deathbed, a group of war veterans brought him a medal in commemoration of Stalin.” The old general sat up slowly, and as the veterans pinned the medal on his pajamas, he said, proudly, “I serve the Soviet Union.” Those were his last words.
Stalin’s son Yakov served the Soviet Union, too. He was born of the dictator’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, in 1907. His mother died later in the year. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, was to write in one of her books that Yakov must have taken after his mother—“for there was nothing rough or abrasive or fanatical about him.” He was gentle, unassuming, and honest. After Yekaterina, or “Kato,” died, Stalin promptly forgot about Yakov. The boy was raised by his grandmother and other relatives. A biographer of Svetlana’s, Martin Ebon, writes that Yakov “was a relic of Stalin’s past. But he remained on the periphery of his father’s life, a goading reminder of Stalin’s early personal history, for more than three decades.”
One of the things that Stalin denied him was his name: Stalin, that is. The dictator’s two children with his second wife enjoyed the glory of the name. But Yakov was always a Dzhugashvili—that being his father’s original, Georgian name. Stalin discarded it for himself in about 1910. As Ebon notes, Yakov was “marked for emotional defeat early in life.”
He moved from Georgia to Moscow in 1921, when he was 13 or 14. He lived with Stalin and his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (“Nadya”). He had a hard time of it. To begin with, he had to learn Russian, which was difficult for him. Unfortunately, many things were difficult for him. He was a bit slow, or clumsy, or earnest. Stalin thought him a despicable country bumpkin. He scorned and bullied him. “In his eyes,” Svetlana writes, “Yakov could do nothing right.” Stalin “had no use for him and everybody knew it.”
Yakov married a priest’s daughter, Zoya. His father disapproved. In despair, Yakov went into the Stalins’ kitchen and shot himself, although failing in suicide. The bullet either grazed his chest or pierced a lung (accounts vary). His father snorted, “He can’t even shoot straight.” According to Svetlana, her father treated her brother even worse thereafter.
Stalin’s first son, Yakov Dzhugashvili
The young man worked at menial, or at least humble, jobs. He and Zoya had a baby, who died at less than a year. They soon divorced. In the mid-1930s, Yakov got married again, to Yulia, who was Jewish. Stalin once more disapproved. Svetlana writes, “He never liked Jews, though he wasn’t as blatant about expressing his hatred for them in those days as he was after the war.” Yakov and Yulia had a daughter, Galina, called “Gulia.”
It seems that Yakov had another child too, in between his marriages. A Stalin biographer, Miklós Kun, says that Yakov had a son named Yevgeny with Olga Golisheva, an accountant. Today, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili is proud to be Yakov’s son—or, more to the point, proud to be Stalin’s grandson. Gulia always refused to accept that he was related. (She died in 2007.) Yevgeny once told the press, “She suggested we do a DNA analysis. I accepted her offer on the condition that she pay for it. Then she disappeared.”
Yevgeny became a colonel in the Red Army. He has long lived in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. In 2006, a journalist, Steven Knipp, visited him at his apartment and found “several huge photos of Stalin staring down from the walls.” Yevgeny is a super-dedicated Stalinist. He helped form a political coalition, the Stalinist Bloc. He has sued individuals and institutions for defaming Stalin—i.e., for telling the truth about his crimes. He even sued the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, for acknowledging that Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre (the wholesale execution of Polish officers).
Gulia, incidentally, was no less faithful a Stalinist, even if a less litigious one.
Svetlana Stalina loved her brother Yakov. In a memoir, she says she saw him angry just twice. In both instances, their brother, Vasily, had spoken crudely in front of Svetlana and other girls and women. “Yakov couldn’t stand it,” she writes. “He turned on Vasily like a lion.” But mainly he was gentle, which irritated his ungentle father. They were “too unlike each other ever to be compatible,” writes Svetlana, in an understatement. Yakov once said to her, “Father speaks to me in ready-made formulas.”
Hitler and the Nazis had a pact with Stalin, which they broke in June 1941. They invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin barked at Yakov, “Go and fight!” He did. In less than a month, he was captured. The Germans discovered they had a plum. Stalin denied to them and everyone else that he had a son named Yakov. He further denied that there was really such a thing as a Russian POW: “In Hitler’s camps, there are no Russian prisoners of war, only Russian traitors, and we will do away with them when the war is over.” Stalin had his daughter-in-law, Yulia, arrested as the wife of a traitor. She was imprisoned for a year and a half, and was never the same again.
In February 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, leading the German army at Stalingrad, surrendered. The Germans proposed a swap: Paulus for Yakov Dzhugashvili. Acting as mediator was Count Bernadotte, the famed Swedish diplomat. Hitler and Stalin were of the same mind (as so often): One was furious at his commander for choosing surrender over suicide; the other was furious at his son for the same reason. But they differed on a swap—which Stalin refused. He is reported to have said, “I will not exchange a soldier for a field marshal.” He is also reported to have said, “They are all my sons,” meaning that all the boys of the Red Army were dear to him.
The details of Yakov’s captivity are murky—like the details of his life in general—but we know two things: He was brutally treated, and he refused to crack. He did not go over to the other side, which would have given the Germans a propaganda victory. The details of his death are, of course, murky. But he seems to have committed suicide by throwing himself on an electric fence, in April 1943.
Svetlana says that her father “abandoned Yakov to his fate.” And “it was very like my father to wash his hands of the members of his own family, to wipe them out of his mind and act as if they didn’t exist.” That is no doubt true. But there are reports that Stalin ordered secret rescue attempts. And the biographer Montefiore adds a wrinkle or two. Those wrinkles are as follows: Stalin was somewhat haunted by Yakov in later years. He was also somewhat proud of him, for his behavior at the end. “A real man,” he called him.
With his wife Nadya, Stalin had Vasily and Svetlana. The second son was very, very different from Yakov. Vasily was a classic type of dictator’s son: the little tyrant of a tyrant, the little monster of a monster. We will meet more such sons as this book proceeds. Vasily used his privileged position to get everything he wanted: sex, power, riches, thrills. And, as frequently happens, it all ended very badly for him.
He was born in 1921, Svetlana in 1926. You might have thought it problematic enough to be Stalin’s son or daughter—but when Vasily was eleven, and Svetlana six, their mother committed suicide. Svetlana was raised by a nanny and other generally civilized women; Vasily was given over to brutish bodyguards, especially to the chief of Stalin’s personal security team, General Nikolai Vlasik. They were happy to foster a monstrousness in Vasily.
Stalin essentially ignored Vasily, as he did Yakov. He doted on Svetlana (until he decided to ignore her too). When he did pay attention to Vasily, he was very hard on him. Vasily was 20 when the war came to Russia. Like Yakov, he fought. But he was a pilot, like the Mussolini boys. The pilots were the elite of the military. And Vasily received promotion after promotion.
In no time, he was a major general. Then he was a lieutenant general. For these positions, Vasily was not in the least qualified. He performed appallingly. He was drunken, bullying, physically abusive, incompetent, and reckless. His recklessness endangered lives, and sometimes cost them. “No privilege was denied him,” as Svetlana writes. Vasily feared and answered to no one—except to Stalin, of course, before whom he quaked in his boots.
Once, in the war, Stalin actually fired him. The order reads, in part, “Colonel Stalin is being removed from his post as regimental commander for drunkenness and debauchery and because he is ruining and perverting the regiment.” He was reinstated after several months and, once more, promoted.
Vasily and Svetlana with their father
Vasily was a satyr, in addition to a drunkard, and the seat of his activities was the family dacha at Zubalovo, 20 miles from Moscow. Drunken orgies were regular. Imagine Vasily and his sidekicks commandeering women and firing pistols at chandeliers. He was not only a little Stalin, he was a little Caligula too. Stalin himself complained that his son had turned the dacha into a “den of iniquity.” (When you have been rebuked by Stalin, morally, you have been rebuked.)
Vasily was married either four times or three—accounts vary (as I have said in this narrative before). He was definitely married to a daughter of Marshal Timoshenko; he may have been married to a daughter of Molotov, the foreign minister, too. Though he was the dictator’s son, it was no prize to be married to him. “He beat his wives as drunken peasants do in a village,” writes Svetlana. He beat whomever he wanted, “even policemen in the street,” as Svetlana says, for “in those days everything was forgiven him.”
After the war, he formed and directed air-force sports teams. The sports included hockey, basketball, swimming, and gymnastics. When the athletes performed well, he would reward them, lavishly; when they did not, he would punish them, including by having them jailed. In 1950, the hockey team went down in a plane crash. Vasily covered it up, fearing his father’s wrath.
Everyone wanted to please or appease Vasily, because he was the czarevitch, so to speak: the crown prince. But it would not last beyond his father’s lifetime. In this sense, he was not the crown prince, not a successor, just the dictator’s spoiled brat. He knew all this, too. He was highly anxious about his future, as well he should have been. According to Montefiore, he told Artyom Sergeyev, “I’ve only got two ways out. The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria, and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?” (These men were deputies under Stalin, who would vie for power in the post-Stalin era.)
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. By the end of April, Vasily was arrested. He was charged with embezzlement, the utterance of “anti-Soviet statements” (i.e., criticisms of Stalin’s heirs), and myriad other offenses. As Svetlana says, there were “enough charges to put ten men in jail.” Nobody came to Vasily’s defense now. All the sidekicks and hangers-on and flunkies were gone. Vasily was “just an alcoholic,” as Svetlana puts it, whom “nobody needed anymore.” He was sentenced to eight years in prison. They even took away his proud, glorious name, imprisoning him as “Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev.” (“Vasilyev” had been one of his father’s noms de guerre.)
As time passed, he appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, the new Number 1. After almost seven years’ imprisonment, he was taken to see Khrushchev. Another Stalin biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov, tells the story, via Alexander Shelepin, who was the head of the KGB at this time. Shelepin says that Vasily “fell to his knees and begged and implored and wept. Khrushchev took him in his arms and was in tears himself, and they talked for a long time about Stalin. After that, it was decided to release Vasily immediately.” This was in January 1960. Vasily went back to his old ways, to the extent he could, hopelessly alcoholic. They exiled him to the (closed) city of Kazan. He died there in March 1962, at the age of 40. The stone of the grave they put him in bore neither the name Stalin nor the name Vasilyev. It said “Dzhugashvili,” just like poor Yakov.
There is a coda to this story. In 1999, eight years after the end of the Soviet Union, Vasily was partially rehabilitated by the Russian supreme court. The court overturned the 1953 conviction for anti-Soviet statements and reduced the degree of some of the other convictions. Three years later, in 2002, Vasily’s remains were removed from Kazan to Moscow, where they were buried next to those of his mother.
Vasily was a victim, in a sense, like Stalin’s other children, and like many of the sons and daughters of dictators whom we are surveying. Needless to say, Stalin had millions more victims, unknown to him personally. And Vasily was victimizer as well as victim. What Dmitri Volkogonov says is true: “Vasily’s life was an illustration in miniature of the moral sterility of Stalinism.” He was “fine proof that the abuser of power [Josef Stalin, in this case] corrupts everyone he touches, including his own children. The Caesars, having reached the acme of their power, often left behind them children flawed in body and soul, morally dead while the dictator was still living and revelling in his own immorality.”
We now get to Svetlana: the most famous of all the “children of monsters,” probably, except for the sons who succeeded their father in “office”—a Duvalier in Haiti, a Kim in North Korea, an Assad in Syria, another Kim in North Korea. Why is Svetlana so famous? There are two main reasons, I think, one more important than the other. The less important reason is this: She defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1967. This caused a global sensation. But the more important reason is that she got it all down, and superbly. She wrote up her life in three books. The first two have enduring power, and the third is not without interest.
Svetlana was born, as you know, in 1926, when her father was firmly entrenched in the Kremlin. What we have said about other dictators and their daughters, we can say about Stalin and Svetlana: He adored her, and she adored him back. Stalin felt more tenderly toward his daughter than he did toward any other human being. Later, she thought she knew why. She often said, “I reminded him of his mother, who had red hair and freckles all over, just like me.” Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Svetlana’s mother, was not the maternal type. She was the Bolshevik type: devoted to Party and work, not to “bourgeois” interests such as family. Svetlana could not remember that her mother had ever hugged, praised, or kissed her. Nadya thought that her husband coddled their daughter.
Father and daughter
We might pause to imagine a household in which Stalin is the more loving parent.
Still, Svetlana always cherished the memory of her mother, and this cherishing grew with the years. She dedicated her first book “To My Mother.” Later yet, she regarded her mother as a kind of angel, I believe.
She killed herself—Nadya did—in 1932, when she was 31. Svetlana was six. She was told that her mother had died from a burst appendix. She would not find out the truth until later (ten years later). As an adult, she would write that her mother was “driven to despair by a profound disillusionment and the impossibility of changing anything.” In her life with Stalin, Nadya was trapped. (Such was the predicament of countless Russians and other people in the Soviet Union, in any number of stations.)
I should pause once more to say that, from the beginning, there have been people who think that Nadya did not kill herself; that, in fact, Stalin killed her. Serious people take this suspicion seriously. But most who have looked into the question believe that Nadya was a suicide, and that is the assumption of this book.
For the next ten years—that is, until Svetlana was 16—Stalin continued to treat his daughter tenderly. She was “Setanka” and “Setanochka” (nicknames derived from “Svetlana”). She was also his “little fly” and “little sparrow.” Furthermore, she was his “little Housekeeper”: the mistress of the house. Sometimes Stalin rendered this “Comrade Housekeeper.” She was also the “Boss.” Even Stalin’s underlings, members of the Politburo, went along with this game: “All hail Boss Svetlana!” The real boss had another game, too: He would have Svetlana issue orders to him, in writing. Then he would respond, “I obey.” He had a habitual sign-off in his notes to her: “From Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.”
You can imagine how Setanka felt about her father: He was not only her own adored father—and it’s natural for little girls to adore their fathers—he was the king of the whole wide world. In a memoir, she says that she never heard her father’s name except with such words as “great” and “wise” attached to it. This was true at home, at school, and everywhere else. The atmosphere at home was “official, even quasi-military,” she says. Home was run by the secret police, to a considerable extent. But Svetlana was not unduly stifled.
She was a bookish child, even an intellectual one. She loved literature, foreign languages, music. She had fine tutors. She went to school with other Kremlin children. In this period, her life was probably as happy and normal as possible, under the circumstances.
Nonetheless, there were shadows. With some regularity, her schoolmates would simply disappear. They would be there one day, and not the next. Their fathers had fallen from favor, being arrested, imprisoned, or killed. Sometimes, a schoolmate would give Svetlana a note to pass to her father. It had been written by the schoolmate’s desperate mother, whose husband had been dragged away in the night. Could Comrade Stalin do something? The dictator got sick of these notes, telling his daughter not to serve as a “post-office box.”
Worse, much worse, her own relatives disappeared: her aunts, uncles, and cousins. These were members of Nadya’s family. Stalin had taken her suicide, quite naturally, as a gross insult and betrayal. He punished her family for it. He also punished the family of his first wife, Kato. Those relatives were killed or imprisoned too. Why? It’s usually foolish to ask such questions about Stalin: but he probably wanted to erase signs of the past. Svetlana writes that it was hard to think of her beloved aunts and uncles as “enemies of the people,” as the official propaganda had it. “I could only assume that they must have become the victims of some frightful mix-up, which ‘even Father himself’ could not disentangle.” There would come a time, an awful time, when she realized it was all his doing. And he had an explanation for her: “They knew too much. They babbled a lot. It played into the hands of our enemies.”
You and I can do our best to slip into the skin of such people as Svetlana Stalina. To be in sympathy with them. But it takes a very big imagination to slip into the skin of a girl whose adored relatives, after her mother’s death, were killed by her own adored father.
She was 16 when she found out about her mother—about the way she died. With her gift for languages, and her curiosity about the world, she liked to read English and American magazines. They were available to someone in her privileged position. “One day,” she writes, “I came across an article about my father. It mentioned, not as news but as a fact well known to everyone, that his wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, had killed herself on the night of November 8, 1932.” She did not want to believe it, but she could. And “something in me was destroyed.”
Something else happened when she was 16: She fell in love, with someone who was all wrong. He was 40, married, a playboy, and Jewish. (In her memoirs, Svetlana doesn’t mention that he was married, or a playboy, but Simon Sebag Montefiore does.) The love interest was a prominent screenwriter named Alexei Kapler. They met when he was a guest at one of Vasily’s notorious parties at Zubalovo. But the romance that ensued between the screenwriter and the schoolgirl was “innocent enough,” writes Svetlana (believably). They went to art exhibitions, the movies, the theater, and the opera. He introduced her to books, including novels by Hemingway, which were extremely hard to obtain. They kissed and sighed. Svetlana basked in the intellectual company and the romance.
Kapler was arrested on March 2, 1943. The next morning, as Svetlana was getting ready for school, Stalin did something he had never done before: show up at her quarters unexpectedly. He was in a volcanic rage. “Your Kapler is a British spy!” he said. Svetlana protested that she loved him. And here is how she describes what happened next: “‘Love!’ screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me across the face, twice.” He also said that a war was on, and all his daughter could do was . . . Here he used what Svetlana describes as a “coarse peasant word.”
Her nanny, who was present, tried to protect her charge, crying that the accusation was untrue. Stalin dismissed this. Then he said to his daughter, “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool. He’s got women all around him!” With that, he left. Svetlana was devastated—“utterly broken,” she says. Her father’s words made her doubt that Kapler had ever loved her at all. Or that anyone could.
In a daze, she went on to school. When she came home, her father summoned her. She found him tearing up the letters and photos that Kapler had sent her. He muttered, “‘Writer’! He can’t write decent Russian!” Why, his daughter “couldn’t even find herself a Russian!” Apparently, says Svetlana, “the fact that Kapler was a Jew” was what bothered her father the most.
He sent him to the Gulag—to Vorkuta, for five years. (A normal person might, for once, sympathize with Stalin.) As Montefiore says, the amorous 40-year-old screenwriter was lucky he wasn’t shot. His five years were relatively easy—he was allowed to work in the theater. After his release, though, he broke parole, returning to Moscow, which was off-limits to him. He was rearrested and sentenced to another five years—this time, in a mine. When he was at last out, he and Svetlana had a brief affair, according to Montefiore. And that was that.
After Stalin’s confrontation with Svetlana that morning before school—March 3, 1943—nothing was ever the same between father and daughter. He lived ten more years, plus two days, but Svetlana hardly saw him. One might say she knew him only until she was 16. As she would write, “He loved me while I was still a child, a schoolgirl—I amused him.” But when she became an adolescent, with some of the problems that often attend that stage, she was less amusing.
Svetlana proceeded to Moscow University. She wanted to study literature, her bent and passion. But Stalin still cared enough about her life to disallow it. “You want to be one of those Bohemians!” he said. He told her to study history instead, after which she could do whatever she desired. That is exactly what she did. At the university, she concentrated on U.S. history, for the Soviet Union’s alliance with America had generated interest in that country, and enthusiasm for it.
Before long, she received a marriage proposal from a fellow student, Grigory Morozov. She had been madly in love with a Kremlin prince: Sergo Beria, son of one of the most monstrous of Stalin’s sub-monsters, Lavrenti Beria. She had known Sergo since childhood, but their relationship did not blossom as she hoped. So smitten was she by him, she even tried to upend his marriage. (She leaves this vexing business out of her books, but others do not.) In the mid-1990s, Sergo Beria was interviewed by Andrew Higgins of the London Independent. Little Beria criticized Svetlana because she had turned against her father. He himself venerated Stalin, as he did his own father.
Anyway, this Morozov proposed to Svetlana. He, like the banished Kapler, was Jewish. In one of her books, Svetlana writes, “I was drawn to kind, gentle, intellectual people. It so happened, independent of any choice on my part, that these lovely people, who treated me with such warmth, both at school and at the university, were often Jews.” She went to her father with Morozov’s proposal. It was May, and they were sitting outside, on a splendid day. For a long time, Stalin just stared at the trees, saying nothing. Suddenly, he said, “Yes, it’s spring. To hell with you. Do as you like.” He set one condition on the marriage: that the groom and husband never set foot in his house. Indeed, Stalin never met his son-in-law.
The next year, 1945, the Morozovs had a child, Josef. Was he named after Stalin? Of course. But he was named after his other grandfather too. (This other grandfather would be arrested a few years later.) Eventually, little Josef met his maternal grandfather, the Red Czar. Svetlana writes, “I’ll never forget how scared I was” the first time her father saw her son. The child “was about three and very appealing, a little Greek- or Georgian-looking, with huge, shiny Jewish eyes and long lashes. I was sure my father wouldn’t approve; I didn’t see how he possibly could. But I know nothing about the vagaries of the human heart, I guess. My father melted the moment he set eyes on the child.” Stalin saw him twice more.
In 1947, after three years of marriage, Svetlana and Morozov divorced. It is often said that Stalin wanted the divorce, or insisted on it. Or that the couple divorced because Stalin was starting his terror campaign against the Jews. Or that he was about to have his son-in-law arrested. Svetlana, for her part, says this is untrue: that she and her husband divorced “for reasons of a personal nature.” The facts are elusive here, as elsewhere. In any event, Stalin would tell his daughter, “That first husband of yours was thrown your way by the Zionists.” She could not convince him of the falsity of this belief. As for Morozov, he went on to be a distinguished lawyer and law professor.
Svetlana never wanted for men—for boyfriends, suitors, or husbands. In 1949, she took a husband much more appropriate, from the Stalin point of view. He was, in fact, a Kremlin prince, Yuri Zhdanov—son of the late Andrei Zhdanov, whom we have already met in this story: It was under him that one of Stalin’s illegitimate sons, Konstantin Kuzakov, worked in the Central Committee. Svetlana’s marriage to Yuri was not a great love match, certainly as she saw it. It was, she writes, “a matter of hard common sense,” devoid of “any special love or affection.”
The next year, they had a child, a girl, Yekaterina. The pregnancy was difficult, the child premature, and the mother miserable. In her misery, she wrote a letter to her father. He answered, with some of the old tenderness. One or two lines were not especially tender. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “Take care of your daughter, too. The state needs people, even those who are born prematurely.” Svetlana was glad to have the letter, any letter at all. (It would be the last her father sent her.) “But it made me terribly uneasy to think that the state already needed my little Katya, whose life was still in the balance.”
Stalin saw Katya once, when she was two and a half. He “wasn’t especially fond” of her, writes Svetlana. “She was funny as a button, with pink cheeks and dark eyes that were big as cherries. He took one look at her and burst out laughing.” By Svetlana’s count, Stalin had eight grandchildren. He saw three of them: her two kids, and Yakov’s Gulia. Vasily did not even attempt to bring his kids by. Svetlana says that Stalin enjoyed his brief encounters with his grandchildren, but “would have just as much enjoyed the children of strangers.”
To Morozov, Svetlana stayed married three years, and to Zhdanov, two. He was a chemist and went on to be the longtime rector of Rostov University. Unlike his ex-wife, he was always a Stalinist.
“My father died a difficult and terrible death,” writes Svetlana. She was at his bedside for three days. Stalin’s regular doctors were in prison—he was purging everyone, in those last days—but there were others, working busily, applying leeches to his neck and head. He died, as I have said, on March 5, 1953—same day as the composer Prokofiev, who received less fanfare.
Svetlana taught Soviet literature and the English language at her alma mater, Moscow University. She later worked as a translator. And she changed her name: to Svetlana Alliluyeva, adopting her mother’s family name. This was in 1957. She had wanted to do it before, in the interval between her high-school days and her university days. In fact, she brought up the subject with her father. One look from him suggested that this was a bad idea. But almost 15 years after the impulse, she went ahead and acted on it. “I could no longer tolerate the name of Stalin,” she writes. “Its sharp metallic sound lacerated my ears, my eyes, my heart . . . .”
Mussolini women have held on to the patriarch’s name, sometimes maneuvering legally to do it. Franco’s daughter has long used her maiden name: She is Carmen Franco, not Carmen Martínez-Bordiú. But Svetlana was different (and had a different father, to be sure). People assumed that the authorities forced her to give up “Stalin,” in the general, national “de-Stalinization” process. This was not so, according to Svetlana herself.
About the name “Alliluyeva”: It is akin to “Hallelujah,” meaning “Praise ye the Lord.” The name came to fit Svetlana better than it had her mother, whose god was Communism. In 1962, Svetlana was baptized in the Orthodox Church. Explaining this step, she writes, “The sacrament of baptism consists in rejecting evil, the lie. I believed in ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ I believed in truth without violence and bloodshed. I believed that the Supreme Mind, not vain man, governed the world. I believed that the Spirit of Truth was stronger than material values. And when all of this had entered my heart, the shreds of Marxism-Leninism taught me since childhood vanished like smoke.”
She further writes that “my father’s whole life stood out before me as a rejection of Wisdom, of Goodness, in the name of ambition, as a complete giving of oneself to Evil. For I had seen how slowly, day by day, he had been destroyed by evil, and how evil had killed all those who stood near him. He had simply sunk deeper and deeper into the black chasm of the lie, of fury and pride. And in that chasm he at last had smothered to death.”
In 1963, she met a man named Brajesh Singh, an Indian Communist. She was instantly drawn to him. His manners were European, she would later say. And there was another aspect: His “gentle calm” and “serene smile” suggested “the traditional Hindu virtues of nonviolence and spiritual equilibrium.” During their second conversation, Singh asked her, “Has life greatly changed in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death?” Yes, of course, Svetlana replied—but these changes were perhaps not “deep or fundamental.” She then revealed to him her parentage. “Oh!” he said. Oddly enough, he would never question her about her father, in the three years they knew each other.
He was about 20 years her senior—in his mid-fifties, while she was in her mid-thirties. He was from an old, wealthy, distinguished family. He was losing his faith in Communism. More and more, he was feeling himself a Hindu. He and Stalin’s daughter fell in love and eventually lived together. They were a household, with Svetlana’s children, Josef and Katya. The shadow over this was that Singh was sick. He had been sickly, failing, for years. He and Svetlana wanted to get married—but for this they needed the state’s permission. Svetlana was still in a sense the state’s property.
In May 1965, she went to see the Number 1, Alexei Kosygin. He received her in her father’s old office. “What have you cooked up?” he said. “You, a healthy young woman, a sportswoman: Couldn’t you have found someone here? I mean, someone young and strong? What do you want with this old, sick Hindu? No, we are all positively against it, positively against it.” If she and Singh got married, Kosygin explained, “he would then have the legal right to take you to India, a poverty-stricken, backward country! I was there. I know. Besides, Hindus treat women badly. He’ll take you there and abandon you.”
Svetlana and Singh never married, formally. But she always referred to him as her “husband,” and we may consider this relationship her third marriage. (There would be one other.) Singh died in October 1966. It was Svetlana’s wish to go to India, to spread his ashes on the Ganges. Singh had wanted such a ritual to be performed. But for this trip, as for a marriage, Svetlana would need the state’s consent. She went to see Kosygin again. Amazingly, he said yes: He gave his consent. Svetlana would be let out for a month. The only condition was that she not speak to the press.
So, Svetlana Stalina, or Svetlana Alliluyeva, would travel to India, urn in hand. The experience would radically change her life.
Worldly and intellectual though she was, she had never been abroad—except for ten days in East Germany: “I saw nothing but war ruins and frightened, silent people.” In India, she contrived to stay longer than a month. She in fact spent more than two months in the Singh family’s village, Kalakankar, in Uttar Pradesh. She loved life there. It would also be true to say she loved life outside the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc. She was required to attend some functions at the Soviet embassy in New Delhi. And she discovered something interesting: that she had “lost the habit” of a Soviet way of life. “India had set free something in me,” she writes. “Here I had ceased feeling like a piece of ‘government property,’ which in the U.S.S.R. I had been all my life.” She started thinking of not going back.
And on March 6, 1967, she walked into the U.S. embassy. She requested political asylum. An American on duty said to her, “So you say your father was Stalin? The Stalin?”
She was flown to Rome that very night. From there, she went to Switzerland. She was enchanted by this country, as most people are, and she would gladly have stayed there. But the Swiss government would have required that she not involve herself in politics in any way. And that was unacceptable to her. “To remain silent for another forty years could have been achieved just as well in the U.S.S.R.,” she writes. She wanted to explain, to one and all, “why I was cutting myself off forever from the Communist world.” On April 21, six weeks after she entered the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, she landed at Kennedy Airport in New York. Upon bounding down the steps from her plane, she said, “Hello! I’m happy to be here!”
But wait a second: Didn’t she have two children back in the Soviet Union? She did. This weighed on her mind before she went to the embassy, and it would weigh on her for many years afterward. As on other subjects, she said different things at different times. Often, she reasoned (or rationalized) as follows: Josef was 21, and married. Katya was 16, and more or less grown up. They could take care of each other, and their fathers loved them. I had done all I could for them. They did not need me in order to succeed. At other times, she thought she had committed a “sin” against her children.
There in the embassy—the American embassy in Delhi—she had written a statement about her life and intentions. It ended with these lines: “My children are in Moscow and I do understand that now I might not see them for years. But I know they will understand me. . . . Let God help them. I know they will not reject me and one day we shall meet—I will wait for that.”
When she arrived in New York, she said, “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia.” And she had not come empty-handed. She carried a manuscript: Twenty Letters to a Friend, which she had composed in the summer of 1963. She wrote the book at great speed: in just 35 days. It is all about her life, an outpouring of memories and thoughts, a testament. “The free letter form,” she writes in an author’s note, “enabled me to be completely candid.” Published in America, the book became a bestseller.
Authorities in the Soviet Union were not pleased with “the defector Alliluyeva,” as the state media had it. Kosygin came to the United States in June 1967—two months after Svetlana’s arrival—for the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey (with President Lyndon Johnson). He found time to denounce the defector to the worldwide press: “Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aim or for any aim of discrediting the Soviet state.” Kosygin must have kicked himself for letting Stalin’s daughter out to spread those ashes—the ashes of the man whom he had forbidden her to marry.
Night and day, the Soviet propaganda machine worked against Svetlana. Stung, fuming, she held a little ceremony at a charcoal grill. She announced to those present, “I am burning my Soviet passport in answer to lies and calumny.” When the passport had been reduced to ashes, she took those ashes and blew on them. Away they went on the wind.
In 1969, she had another memoir published, Only One Year. This memoir, she wrote in America. Its title was not a good one, as she would admit in her third memoir. The title had worked better as she had conceived it in Russian. What the author meant was, “Look what has happened to me, in just one year!” In any case, the second memoir was a bestseller, like the first. It covered the tumultuously eventful year she had from the time she left the Soviet Union. Its dedication: “To all new friends, to whom I owe my life in freedom.”
During that first year outside the Soviet Union, she talked on the phone with a Russian who had been in America for a long time: Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister whom the Bolsheviks overthrew exactly 50 years earlier, in 1917. He had read Twenty Letters and liked it. In due course, Svetlana became a U.S. citizen and registered with the Republican Party. Her favorite magazine was National Review, she said—the conservative, anti-Communist journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. She donated $500 to the magazine.
A very strange episode, in a life of very strange episodes, took place in the first few years of the 1970s. The widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great architect, repeatedly invited Svetlana to visit her at Taliesin West, near Scottsdale, Arizona. I will have to take a little time to explain Taliesin West. Mrs. Wright will take some explaining, too.
There are two Taliesins: the one near Scottsdale and one near Spring Green, Wisconsin. At these places, the architect established his home and studio and school. Wisconsin was for the summer, and Arizona was for the winter, generally speaking. Also, Taliesin (at either location) was a commune, or “fellowship.” After the architect’s death, his widow, Olgivanna, became the mistress of Taliesin.
Once, she had a daughter named Svetlana. In the 1940s, this Svetlana was a young mother, and pregnant with another child. She was killed in a car crash. Her two-year-old son was killed along with her. Many years later, Mrs. Wright began reading and hearing about a new Svetlana—the famous one, who had defected from Russia. She felt a connection to her. And, as I’ve mentioned, she repeatedly invited her to come visit her in Arizona. Intrigued, Svetlana finally accepted.
Mrs. Wright was keen for her to meet Wesley Peters, the senior apprentice to her late husband. He was also her son-in-law—the widower of the late Svetlana, and the father of those children. Peters still lived in the Taliesin fellowship, as he always would. Svetlana Alliluyeva was immediately drawn to him. He had “an Abraham Lincoln face,” she writes, meaning that it was dignified, sad, and kind. (This portrait comes from Svetlana’s aforementioned third memoir.) Mrs. Wright had been hoping she would have a special liking for Peters. She did. They were married three weeks after her arrival in Arizona. Mrs. Wright was introducing her as “my daughter Svetlana.”
Stalin’s daughter now styled herself “Lana Peters.” In 1971, the year after they were married, she and Wes had a baby, Olga. Svetlana was 45 years old; she had had her first child, Josef, at 19.
Initially, Svetlana enjoyed her life with Wes Peters. But she soon disliked life in the fellowship, a “queer institution,” she writes. Mrs. Wright ran it autocratically. And Wes had no desire to buck her. Svetlana found Taliesin stultifying and oppressive. It reminded her of a previous life: “After my first three blessed years of American freedom of choice, informality and friendliness, I felt as though I were back in my forbidding Soviet Russia.” In addition, the marriage was costing her a lot of money—money she had earned from her books. She paid off her husband’s sizable debts, and was happy to do so. But the fellowship wanted money, too: more than she was willing to pay.
Wes cooled on her, according to her account. She was in a state of dismay over her marriage. “He married me because of my name; if I were Nina or Mary he would never have looked at me.” They separated when Olga was still a baby, and in short order divorced.
“I seemed to be re-living the strange disastrous pattern of my Russian life,” Svetlana writes. In other words, she was bringing up a small child after a divorce. This child would be an all-American girl, Svetlana determined. She would not teach Olga any Russian. And the past would be a foreign country, for as long as possible. In 2012, Olga gave an interview, with an arresting detail: She had always thought of her grandfather Stalin as one of the three men in the historic photographs, taken at Yalta—one of the mighty triumvirate, along with Churchill and Roosevelt. These were the men who beat the Nazis and won World War II. What granddaughter wouldn’t be proud of that? But one day her mother sat her down and explained about Stalin’s monstrous crimes. That must have been an awful conversation.
Svetlana was restless, moving from place to place. She would do this to the end of her days. She was also a seeker, trying or borrowing from many religions. Among these religions were Hinduism, Catholicism, Quakerism, and Christian Science. (She credits the last of these with freeing her from alcoholism, to which she had been succumbing. Her problem especially alarmed her in view of her brother Vasily’s death, and life.)
In 1982, she moved, with Olga, to England. Two years later, she came out with her third memoir, The Faraway Music. She got the title from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. Many people know the line about the different drummer: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” But the next words are these: “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” In her foreword, Svetlana says, “I have always managed to hear a different drummer.” Never, she says, “did I ‘keep pace’ with other Kremlin children” or with the Communist Party. “I kept marching under some individualistic music of my own.”
Her first two memoirs had been published by the powerful American firm of Harper & Row. The Faraway Music was published by an Indian outfit, Lancer. It made no splash and is virtually unfindable today. Svetlana means it to be the third installment of a trilogy. It is not comparable to the other two books, however, in beauty, depth, or polish. Yet it tells the (highly interesting) Peters saga, doesn’t it? It has other value as well.
When she wrote The Faraway Music, she was in a changed mood, politically and personally. She was no longer the ardent admirer of America and the ardent critic of the Soviet Union. She positioned herself in between, the representative of a “third way.” The USSR and the USA were morally equivalent, two “giants,” endangering the world with their arrogance and belligerence. The countries she now liked were gentle social democratic ones, such as Norway and Sweden (which could remain gentle and social democratic because they were protected by American military might).
America had disappointed Svetlana. The country’s “intellectual and artistic circles,” she writes, “never accepted me in their milieu.” After her early splash, she became a “housewife,” consumed with the quotidian chores of raising Olga. She sorely missed “those sophisticated intellectuals and artists I used to know in Moscow and Leningrad.” She longed to be “amidst such fine minds.”
In 1984—17 years after her defection—she went back to the Soviet Union. She had been talking with her son, Josef, on the phone, and this increased her longing. He was now a doctor—a cardiologist—and he was also an alcoholic. He had been hospitalized, and Svetlana thought that he needed her. So, she petitioned the Soviet embassy in London, successfully; yanked Olga out of school; and flew home, if home it was.
When she got there, she was quoted as saying she had never enjoyed “one single day” of freedom in the West. Anything she might have said in favor of the United States or against the Soviet Union was to be discounted. She had been manipulated by other people. This posturing aside, Svetlana’s homecoming proved very unhappy. Josef did not welcome her. Mother and son fought bitterly. As for Katya, her daughter, she refused to see her mother altogether. Katya was a die-hard Communist and viewed her mother as a traitor, among other things. Recall the statement that Svetlana had written while at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi. She said of her children, “I know they will not reject me and one day we shall meet—I will wait for that.” It did not work out as Svetlana had hoped.
She and Olga spent just two months in Moscow. Then they moved to Tbilisi, where the Stalin name was still strong. Svetlana spoke no Georgian; her American daughter spoke neither Georgian nor Russian. Both of the Peters women were miserable. There was little to eat or wear. People had no idea how to deal with them, and vice versa. And they got out as soon as they could. The new, and final, Number 1, Gorbachev, gave them permission to leave. They spent just 18 months in the Soviet Union.
Landing at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Svetlana said, “I had to leave for a while to realize, ‘Oh, my God, how wonderful it is’”—the “it” being America. All the things she had said against the West after her arrival in Moscow? She had been misquoted or mistranslated. She went up to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to stay with old friends.
But she kept moving around. Over the next 25 years, she went to England, France, America again, many places. She knew poverty. For a while, she was living in a charity home in West London—or so said reports. She also lived in Portland, Oregon, with Olga, who was managing a vintage-clothing store. Svetlana spent her last few years in a nursing home in Richland Center, Wisconsin (some 20 miles from Spring Green). She liked to sew and read books. Pictures show her a beautiful old lady, who had weathered a lot. She was born a Kremlin princess—the princess of the whole, vast USSR—in 1926. She died in that Wisconsin nursing home in 2011, age 85.
Her son Josef predeceased her: dying in 2008. Katya is a scientist, a vulcanologist, apparently living in rude conditions at the edge of a volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia’s far east. In 2005, she spoke of her mother to a British journalist, David Jones: “She is such a selfish, cruel woman. She didn’t seem to care whether she hurt me.”
Olga has for many years gone by the name of Chrese Evans. (The first name is pronounced “Chris.”) The 2012 interview I quoted earlier was published in Paris Match. Accompanying the article was a photo of its subject. What does she look like? The magazine described her as an American “au look rock’n’roll.” I would put it this way: Imagine that Stalin had a granddaughter who was a Pacific Northwest hipster, with all-black clothing and tattoos, one of which says (it appears) “Momma’s Girl.” That’s what she looks like. And she, like her mother, though different in appearance, is beautiful. She told Paris Match that she felt close to Buddhism.
Svetlana deserves to be remembered, not just as Stalin’s daughter, but as a writer, a memoirist. Her first two books ought to endure. She partially renounced them, in different moods, but they are true, brave, and beautiful. She ends Twenty Letters to a Friend with a tribute to her nanny, Alexandra Andreyevna. The nanny had been “dearer” to her than “anyone on earth.” “If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person, I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”
Her books are teeming with stories and observations. But she is more than a storyteller or observer. She is a Sovietologist (to use a word that now seems antique). Svetlana is enlightening—sometimes profound—on Stalin, the Soviet Union, and totalitarian society at large. She had great material, you might say, truthfully. But no one would have wished the life for himself, just to have the material. Svetlana occasionally said that she wished her mother had married a carpenter.
Her father was the great and haunting theme of her life. “Wherever I go,” she once said—it could be some remote Pacific island—“I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.” She could not escape “Stalin,” with “Alliluyeva,” “Peters,” or anything else. I met a Russian lady who accompanied Svetlana one day, during Svetlana’s 1984–86 stint in the Soviet Union. It seemed obvious to my friend that Svetlana wanted to be regarded as just a normal person. But my friend couldn’t help thinking, “This is Stalin’s daughter.” So it was with a great many.
About Stalin, Svetlana could be “conflicted,” to use modern psychological parlance. She once stayed at the home of David Pryce-Jones, the British historian and novelist (not to be confused with the earlier-mentioned David Jones), and his wife, Clarissa. In a memoir, Pryce-Jones tells us something important about his guest: “Having said point blank that she refused to talk about her father, she would come down from her room and talk exclusively about him, tormented that she couldn’t help loving a father who she knew was a monster.”
Bizarrely, cruelly, there were some people who blamed Svetlana for Stalin’s crimes—or who took out their anguish on her. Her daughter Chrese told David Jones, “There was a period when so many people held her responsible for [Stalin’s] actions that she actually started to think maybe it was true. It’s so unjust.” A friend of Svetlana’s was quoted in an American newspaper as saying, “She feels the world’s hatred of Stalin is on her shoulders.” In 1983, shortly before her return to the Soviet Union, Svetlana said, “My father would have shot me for what I have done.” That is true. Her father once accused her of making “anti-Soviet statements.” She had barely begun.
I believe that Svetlana did her best, considering the circumstances—the circumstances of her almost unimaginable life. Could anyone have done better? Could anyone have turned out more “normal,” less crazy, more productive? She made mistakes—Katya would surely agree—but she had a conscience. And that conscience broke through to see Stalin and the Soviet Union for what they were. That was no great achievement, you might argue: Anyone, even a daughter, could see that Stalin and the Soviet Union were monstrous! That takes no special morality or courage! Oh? Consider a few things.
In Twenty Letters, Svetlana writes that the other top men in the Soviet Union—Khrushchev, Bulganin, et al.—were “under the spell” of her father’s “extraordinary personality, which carried people away and was utterly impossible to resist. Many people knew this through their own experience—of these, some admit it, though others now deny it.”
Gulia Dzhugashvili, Svetlana’s niece, would always worship the memory of Stalin—this despite the fact that Stalin’s response to her father’s capture by the Nazis was to arrest and imprison her mother, who had a three-year-old child (Gulia). Moreover, Stalin had always treated her father, Yakov, abominably. Think of Yevgeny, Gulia’s half-brother, or alleged half-brother: He is as great a Stalin defender as there is.
Consider, too, Vladimir Alliluyev, a cousin of Svetlana’s. Stalin had his father killed. He sent his mother to the Gulag. In the 1990s, Alliluyev wrote a book advocating the return of Stalinism. In a letter to a Russian literary magazine, Svetlana wrote that the book had aroused in her “feelings of revulsion.” It was “a political tract whitewashing 70 years of Soviet history.”
Relatives who survived the Gulag could not bring themselves to blame Stalin for what happened to them—or to their loved ones who were killed. The guilty party must have been Beria or some other miscreant beyond the great man’s control. “Josef Vissarionovich,” as they called him, lovingly, could do no wrong.
This was the sort of effect that Stalin had on people, incomprehensible as it may be. But his lone daughter broke through the mesmerism, or “spell,” as she labeled it. Her conscience rose in rebellion against her father and his state. This makes her exceedingly rare among sons and daughters of dictators.
