Читать книгу Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva - Rosemary Sullivan - Страница 21

Svetlana at her father’s funeral in March 1953.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

On March 2, Svetlana was summoned from her French class at the Academy of Social Sciences and told that a car was waiting outside to take her to Kuntsevo. She felt a sudden vertigo. No one but her father ever phoned her from Kuntsevo. Something was wrong—she hadn’t been able to reach him in days. When she’d phoned, the guards told her not to come, it was not a suitable time, and to stop phoning.¹

On the evening of the first, she’d felt so uneasy that she’d driven to the dacha of her friend Lucia Shvernik. They’d watched a silent movie called The Station Master, based on a story by Pushkin in which an old man dies at the roadside searching for his long-lost daughter. When the daughter finally returns to her village, she finds only her father’s grave. “I wept over that movie,” Svetlana recalled. “It absolutely hit me. [My father] was calling me. It was a silent call. I was probably the only person in the world he would have called for.”² The comment is poignant but hardly true. As he lay dying on the evening of March 1, it is unlikely that Stalin was sending a silent call for help to Svetlana, however much she may have longed for him to do so. It is heartwrenching that she imagined he was.

Everything to do with Stalin involves some mystery or intrigue. His slow death is no exception. What actually happened in his last days? The broad outline is as follows.

On the night of February 27, Stalin went to the Bolshoi Theater to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The next day was Svetlana’s twenty-seventh birthday, but her father did not invite her to accompany him.