Stalin

FAMILY

2 March 1953 at the near dacha. The arrival of the daughter.

Once the seriousness of Stalin’s condition became clear, his children, Svetlana and Vasily, were called to the dacha. This was largely a symbolic gesture. Over time, Stalin’s family had come to play less and less of a role in his life.

Stalin met his first wife when he was still a young revolutionary adventurer. Returning to Tiflis in 1905 after escaping from his first exile and traveling through Transcaucasia, he moved in with the Svanidze family. There were five members of this family: Aleksandr Svanidze, who was involved in the revolutionary movement, and his sisters—Sashiko, Kato (Yekaterina), and Masho—as well as Sashiko’s husband, whom Stalin had known in the seminary. Sashiko and Kato were well-known dressmakers in the city who had nothing to do with the revolutionary movement. So when he brought Iosif Jughashvili into the household, Aleksandr tried to keep this outsider as far away as possible from his sisters.¹ Nevertheless, an infatuation developed between Iosif and Yekaterina, who were both young and attractive. Kato’s sisters could not have been happy about her involvement with an impoverished seminary dropout. Some light is shed on this period by a letter sent to Stalin forty years later, in 1946. An acquaintance of Stalin and the Svanidze family from his Tiflis days asked for help and rather artlessly implied that Stalin owed him a favor. First, Stalin had used the letter writer’s room for assignations with Yekaterina. Second, when Stalin proposed to Kato and “the relatives were opposed,” “I told her, if you like him, don’t listen to anybody, and she heeded my advice.”²

The Svanidze family was basically presented with a fait accompli, and in July 1906 the couple was married.³ This new family member inevitably entangled the Svanidzes in his world. Soon after the wedding, Yekaterina was arrested as an accomplice of revolutionaries. The matter was resolved thanks to her sister Sashiko, who used her ties to wives of police officers. Yekaterina spent about two months under arrest, but instead of being held in a jail cell, she was kept in a local police chief’s apartment—apparently at the request of the chief’s wife, who was a client of the dressmakers.⁴ One important argument for closing Yekaterina’s case was that she was pregnant. In March 1907 the future dictator’s first child, Yakov, was born. Family life and revolution did not mix. Iosif moved his wife and son with him to Baku, where Yekaterina fell seriously ill. In November 1907 she died. This was a heavy blow to Iosif. Unable to take adequate care of his son, he left Yakov with his wife’s family.

There were other women in Stalin’s life. Evidence survives of a relationship with Stefaniia Petrovskaia, a young revolutionary from the landowning class, that began in 1909, when both were exiled to Solvychegodsk in Vologda Province. After serving out her term, Petrovskaia followed Iosif to Baku. When he was arrested in June 1910, the future dictator even asked the police for permission to “enter into lawful wedlock” with her. The permission was granted, but the wedding never took place. In September 1910 Jughashvili, still a bachelor, was again sent into exile.⁵ During this second exile in Solvychegodsk he registered his place of residence (in the home of M. P. Kuzakova) together with fellow exile Serafima Khoroshenina, suggesting that the two were intimate. Soon, however, Khoroshenina was transferred out of Solvychegodsk.⁶ According to rumors now being promoted by some journalists, Stalin then began a relationship with his landlady, Kuzakova, resulting in the birth of a son. There is no hard evidence of this relationship. After finishing his term of exile a few months after the supposed affair with Kuzakova, Jughashvili spent some time living in Vologda. Here he became acquainted with an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl named Pelageia Onufrieva, the fiancée of one of his fellow exiles, Petr Chizhikov. The future dictator flirted openly with the girl and gave her a book with the inscription, “To clever, nasty Polya from the oddball Iosif.” When Pelageia left Vologda, Jughashvili sent her facetious cards, such as: “I claim a kiss from you conveyed via Petka [Chizhikov]. I kiss you back, and I don’t just kiss you, but passionately (simple kissing isn’t worth it). Iosif.”⁷ In his personal files, Stalin kept a photograph of Chizhikov and Onufrieva dating to his time in Vologda: a serious, pretty, round-faced girl in glasses and a serious young man with regular features and a moustache and beard.

The jocular cards, presents, and photograph attest to the thirty-three-year-old Jughashvili’s interest in the young woman but do not prove that he was romantically involved with her. We have only a few vague hints. Around the same time that Stalin left Vologda, in 1912, Chizhikov went to visit his parents in Ukraine, where he fell ill and died suddenly, without marrying Pelageia, as he may or may not have intended. Onufrieva suffered the sort of misfortune that befell many of her compatriots. After Chizhikov’s death she married, and as her erstwhile gallant admirer presided over the country, her husband was arrested. It is not known whether she ever tried to appeal to Stalin for help. She died in 1955, having lived her entire life in Vologda.⁸

The evidence that Iosif Jughashvili had an affair with the even younger Lidiia Pereprygina during his last Turukhansky exile is more solid, although rumors that they had a son together have not been proved. In any case, Stalin never recognized Pereprygina’s son or any other illegitimate children attributed to him.

Returning to St. Petersburg after the February 1917 revolution, Stalin was ready to turn a new page. The Alliluev household provided a place of warmth after the upheavals of life underground. The attraction this family held for him is understandable. Stalin had known them since his years in Tiflis and had corresponded with them during his final exile in Kureika. The head of the family, Sergei Alliluev, was a longtime party member who had been arrested many times. The family’s two sons and two daughters were often left without adult supervision and led rather freewheeling lifestyles. Iosif was particularly fond of the youngest, the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl Nadezhda, who reciprocated his feelings despite the twenty-three-year difference in their ages. To a young woman from a revolutionary family, he must have seemed like the ideal man: a tried-and-true revolutionary, brave and mysterious but also personable. In 1919 Stalin and Nadezhda tied the knot. As to the nature of their relationship before marriage, we can only guess.

Nadezhda, a party member beginning in 1918, was a model Bolshevik wife. She worked in Lenin’s secretariat (Lenin knew the Alliluevs and even lived in their apartment in 1917). In 1921 the Stalins had their first child, Vasily. Nadezhda had a hard time keeping up with childrearing, work, and party activism and apparently neglected the last. In late 1921 she was expelled from the party as “ballast with no interest in the life of the party whatsoever.” Only through the intercession of top party officials, including Lenin, was her membership restored, although she had to spend a year earning her way back in as a candidate member. Such were the times. Nadezhda herself probably believed in the ideals of equality and party democracy and was not offended by her treatment. In her request to be readmitted she promised to “prepare herself for party work.”⁹

In addition to the birth of Vasily, Nadezhda’s life was complicated by the introduction of Stalin’s first son, Yakov, into the family. Letters to her mother-in-law, Ekaterine Jughashvili, in 1922 and 1923 included cautious complaints: “Yasha is going to school, fooling around, and smoking, and does not listen to me”; “Yasha is also healthy, but he’s not putting much effort into his schoolwork.”¹⁰ Yakov, fifteen in 1922, was just six years younger than his stepmother. A few years later, in 1926, Nadezhda wrote of Yakov to a female friend: “I have already lost all hope that he will ever come to his senses. He has absolutely no interests and no goal.”¹¹ The boy was also not getting along with his father. Conflict over his intention to marry ended tragically: when he failed to get his father’s consent, he tried to commit suicide. On 9 April 1928 Stalin wrote to Nadezhda: “Tell Yasha from me that he has behaved like a hooligan and a blackmailer with whom I have nothing in common and with whom I can have nothing further to do. Let him live wherever he wants and with whomever he wants.”¹² For a while Stalin’s relationship with his eldest son was in a state of suspension, but on the eve of the war, when Yakov was studying at the Artillery Academy, Stalin was apparently pleased with him. On 5 May 1941, Yakov was present at a large Kremlin reception in honor of military academy graduates. In his remarks to the gathering, Stalin joked that “I have an acquaintance who studied at the Artillery Academy. I looked over his notes and found that a great deal of time is being spent studying cannons that were decommissioned in 1916.”¹³ This was an obvious reference to Yakov’s notes, a sign that the two were spending time together.

In early 1926 Nadezhda gave birth to a daughter, Svetlana. In sharing the good news with Ordzhonikidze’s wife, Zinaida, who was vacationing in the south, Nadezhda wrote, “In short, we now have a complete family.”¹⁴ But with Stalin immersed in his official duties and embroiled in a battle for power, this was no usual family. No doubt he loved his wife and children, but for the most part he loved them from a distance. They spent brief stretches of time together at the dacha outside Moscow and while on vacation in the south. Nadezhda, as if emulating her husband, was always busy with work, party activism, and her studies. In a letter to a friend a month before Svetlana’s birth, she wrote, “I very much regret that I’ve again fettered myself with new family responsibilities,” obviously referring to the impending arrival of her second child. “In our time it’s not very easy since there are such an awful lot of new prejudices, and if you’re not working, then of course you’re a ‘baba’ [peasant woman, used derogatively for women in general].… You just have to have an area of expertise that enables you to escape being someone’s errand girl, as usually happens in ‘secretarial’ work, and do everything that has to do with your area of expertise.”¹⁵ Young and energetic, Nadezhda sincerely and energetically strove to adhere to the new model of the “Soviet woman.” This was not easy. Her surviving letters show that to the end of her life her writing was riddled with syntactic errors. In an effort to make up for the shortcomings of her education, she became an assiduous student. In 1929 she enrolled in the Industrial Academy, hoping to receive, in keeping with the ethos of the times, an advanced technical education. Her children were largely handed over to nursemaids, governesses, and tutors. A housekeeper and cook took care of the Stalin Kremlin household. An important part in Vasily and Svetlana’s lives was played by relatives, as well as their peers among the children of other Soviet leaders who lived in the Kremlin. Together they formed a boisterous band that spent time together at suburban dachas and each other’s Kremlin apartments.

This manner of family life had its advantages and logic. The infrequency of time spent together could perhaps make “the heart grow fonder” and actually strengthen family ties. But the few surviving letters between Stalin and Nadezhda, written during vacations between 1929 and 1931, attest to both love and tension in their relationship. “I send you a big kiss, like the kiss you gave me when we parted,” Nadezhda wrote to her husband. She said she missed him and asked doting questions about his health and treatments. Stalin responded in kind. He tenderly called her Tatka and Tatochka (“Write about everything, my Tatochka”) and even resorted to baby talk. As a loving father, he was always asking about the children: “How are things with Vaska, with Setanka [his nickname for Svetlana]?” “Have Setanka write me something. And Vaska too.” He sent lemons and peaches home to his family. But this sweetness and consideration could suddenly be darkened by jealousy and irritation. In September 1930, after spending part of her husband’s vacation with him and then returning to Moscow, Nadezhda wrote him a letter filled with reproach: “This summer I didn’t feel that delaying my departure would make you happy; quite the opposite. Last summer I could really sense that, but not this time. Of course, there was no point staying with such a mood.” A few weeks later she wrote: “For some reason I’m not hearing anything from you.… Probably you’re distracted by your quail-hunting trips.… I heard from an interesting young woman that you looked great, … that you were marvelously cheerful and you wouldn’t let anyone sit still.… I’m glad to hear it.” Stalin made a halfhearted effort to dispute her implications: “As for your assumption that I did not consider it desirable for you to stay in Sochi, your reproaches … are unfair”; “You’re hinting at some trips. I’m telling you that I have not traveled anywhere (anywhere at all!) and I have no intention of traveling.”¹⁶

Nadezhda’s jealousy was not without grounds. Stalin could be a flagrant philanderer, and his wife was quick to take offense. Many who observed the relationship firsthand commented on Nadezhda’s frail mental health. Mental illness apparently ran in the family, afflicting her mother and at least one of her siblings. It is probably here, at the intersection of Stalin’s unfaithfulness and Allilueva’s mental illness, that the roots of the tragedy should be sought.

On 8 November 1932, the anniversary of the October Revolution that brought them all to power, Stalin and Allilueva joined other top Soviet leaders and their wives for a celebratory dinner at the Kremlin. The details of what took place at this dinner are unknown. Perhaps Stalin drank too much and started openly flirting with some of the wives.¹⁷ Perhaps Nadezhda was simply in a bad mood or Stalin said something hurtful to her. Or perhaps she was the one who provoked an argument. Whatever the cause, there was an argument, and Nadezhda returned to their Kremlin apartment alone. Sometime during that night she took her own life, using a small pistol that had been a gift from her brother Pavel.

Some have speculated that Allilueva was upset about her husband’s policies and felt ardent sympathy for their victims, including those dying from the devastating famine then taking millions of lives. Their daughter, Svetlana, wrote of a suicide note left by her mother that contained, among its grievances, political accusations, although she had no firsthand knowledge of this note and was citing other people’s descriptions of it. There is absolutely no hard evidence that Nadezhda objected to her husband’s policies. None of her surviving letters mentions the horrific events taking place in the country: violent collectivization, the internal deportations of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and the arrests of countless suspected “enemies.” Her letters give the impression that she, like the rest of the Bolshevik elite, was completely isolated from the suffering of tens of millions outside the Kremlin walls. On 10 July 1932, during the famine, when peasant mothers were watching their children starve to death, Nadezhda wrote a note to Stalin’s assistant Aleksandr Poskrebyshev complaining that she was not receiving her usual supply of new works of fiction from overseas and asked that the head of the OGPU, Yagoda, do something to fix the problem.¹⁸ Admittedly, we do not know for sure whether Nadezhda ever said anything against her husband’s repressive policies in the months before her death, in part because the usual correspondence between Stalin and his wife while he was away on vacation is missing for 1932. Perhaps these letters were destroyed, or perhaps Nadezhda was with her husband during his entire vacation. No evidence has been found to explain the absence of such letters.

His wife’s suicide was apparently a great blow to Stalin. Grief over the loss and pity for his children were combined with anger. Nadezhda had betrayed and humiliated him, cast a cloud over his reputation, and made his personal life a subject of sordid conjecture that endures to this day. “She did a very bad thing… ; she maimed me for the rest of my life,” he told relatives some two and a half years later.¹⁹

Out of habit, Stalin’s family led its customary life for a few years after Allilueva’s death. Almost every member of the household maintained his or her role within the family routine. Seeking relief from painful memories, Stalin moved to a new apartment in the Kremlin and began construction of the near dacha. The children remained under the care of governesses and nursemaids in Moscow and at the old dacha. Stalin, Vasily, and Svetlana were surrounded by the same relatives, especially the families of Pavel and Anna Alliluev (Nadezhda’s brother and sister) and Aleksandr Svanidze (the brother of Stalin’s first wife). This was a complicated and often unsavory world. The relatives schemed to outshine one another in Stalin’s eyes. Apparently Pavel Alliluev’s wife even had a brief affair with the dictator.²⁰ Stalin appears to have enjoyed the competition among his relatives.

After Nadezhda’s death, Stalin tried to spend more time with his children. While they were having dinner together in the Kremlin apartment, he asked them how things were going in school, and he sometimes came to the dacha to pick them up and take them to the theater. On occasion, he brought them with him when he vacationed in the south. He was especially fond of Svetlana, who was a promising student and very attached to her father. He began to play a little game with his daughter, calling her khoziaika (which could be translated as “housekeeper” or “the boss”) while he played the role of the sekretarishka (little secretary) who followed her orders: “Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.” Svetlana would write out orders for her father: “I order you to let me go to Zubalovo tomorrow”; “I order you to take me to the theater with you”; “I order you to let me go to the movies. Ask them to show Chapaev and an American comedy.” Stalin responded with facetious pomposity.²¹ Other members of Stalin’s inner circle were appointed Svetlana’s sekretarishkas, playing along with the vozhd. “Svetlana the housekeeper will be in Moscow on 27 August. She is demanding permission to leave early for Moscow so that she can check on her secretaries,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich from the south on 19 August 1935. Kaganovich replied on 31 August: “Today I reported to our boss Svetlana on our work, she seemed to deem it satisfactory.”²² Until the war began, father and daughter exchanged affectionate letters. “I give you a big hug, my little sparrow,” he wrote to her, as he had once written to his wife.²³

Stalin’s relationship with his sons was much more fraught. For many years he avoided Yakov and his family, and Vasily gave him a great deal of trouble.²⁴ The boy understood very early that he was the son of a powerful man. He preferred soccer to studying and often behaved defiantly toward those around him. “Vasily thinks he’s an adult and insists on getting what he wants, which is often foolish,” the commandant of the Zubalovo dacha reported to Stalin in 1935, when Vasily was fourteen. The situation only grew worse with time. Unable to tolerate the outrageous behavior of his imperious student, in 1938 one of Vasily’s teachers complained to the boy’s father, telling Stalin that Vasily was getting special treatment from the school administration and that he sometimes used threats of suicide to get his way. Stalin thanked the teacher for his honesty and described his son in extremely negative terms: “Vasily is a spoiled youth of average ability, a little savage (a real Scythian!) who is not always truthful, loves to blackmail weak authority figures, is often rude, and has a weak, or rather, unfocused will. He has been spoiled by ‘kith and kin,’ all the while emphasizing that he is ‘the son of Stalin.’” He asked the teacher to be firmer and promised that he would “take him by the scruff of the neck” from time to time. As was often the case, the letter was all for show, and the matter was ultimately resolved in typical Stalin manner. A purge of the school was conducted and the directors were fired, along with the teacher who had dared complain to Stalin. Vasily was sent to study at an aviation school in Crimea, where the special treatment continued. He was met at the train station with great fanfare by the school’s leadership, quartered away from the other cadets in a hotel, and fed special meals in the officers’ mess. Once, obviously pulling a prank, Vasily ordered some special dish. Since the local cook did not know how to make it, someone was sent to a nearby town to find out. Vasily rode all over Crimea in a car and also on a motorcycle. His education was overseen by senior military officials in Moscow. In 1940 he graduated with the rank of lieutenant. He liked to fly, but his character showed no sign of improvement. The system created by the father did irreversible harm to the son.

Vasily’s departure for Crimea came just as the old Stalin-Alliluev-Svanidze extended family ceased to exist. During the Great Terror, Stalin began to annihilate his own relatives. Between late 1937 and late 1939, Aleksandr Svanidze, his wife, and the husband of Anna Allilueva were arrested and then shot. In late 1938, apparently unable to endure the stress, Pavel Alliluev also died. Stalin had nothing further to do with those relatives who remained at liberty. The war further diminished the family. During its first days, Yakov, who, unlike Vasily, received no special protection, was taken prisoner by the Germans. Stalin ordered the arrest of Yakov’s wife but later freed her. Some accounts maintain that Stalin was offered Yakov in exchange for certain German generals (Paulus is most often named) but that he refused. There is no documentary evidence of this claim, and the story lacks credibility since it is hard to understand what would motivate Hitler’s leadership to pursue such an exchange. When the war ended, Stalin was given testimony by Yakov’s fellow prisoners.²⁵ After Germany was defeated, Yakov’s 1941 interrogation protocol was seized, and testimony was obtained from the guards and commandant of the camp where he died.²⁶ All this evidence shows that Yakov comported himself honorably as a prisoner. He was shot by a sentry while attempting to leave the prison grounds in 1943. Perhaps this news improved Stalin’s opinion of his son, and it may explain why, during his final years, the vozhd took an interest in his young granddaughter, Yakov’s daughter.

Vasily and Svetlana were disappointments for Stalin during the war. Vasily, who was stationed near Moscow, would host drunken parties at the Zubalovo dacha. At one such gathering, in late 1942, sixteen-year-old Svetlana met the thirty-eight-year-old Soviet filmmaker Aleksei Kapler, who had gained prominence as the screenwriter of popular films about Lenin and the revolution. The two began an affair that ended several months later when Stalin ordered Kapler’s arrest. Apparently he was furious over Svetlana’s relationship with Kapler, whom she has described as her first love, and considered it all the more inappropriate in wartime. According to Svetlana, his reaction forever destroyed the closeness between them:

I’d never seen my father look that way before.… He was choking with anger and was nearly speechless.… “Your Kapler is a British spy. He’s under arrest!” …

“But I love him!” I protested at last, having found my tongue again.

“Love!” screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word. And for the first time in my life he slapped me across the face, twice. “Just look, nurse, how low she’s sunk!” He could no longer restrain himself. “Such a war going on, and she’s busy the whole time---------!” Unable to find any other expression, he used the coarse peasant word.²⁷

The next blow came from Vasily. By early 1943 he held the rank of colonel and had been placed in charge of an air regiment. That April he and a group of his subordinates decided to do some fishing. The fish were stunned using explosives. One shell exploded on land, killing one of the regiment’s officers and wounding Vasily with shrapnel. He, of course, was treated at the Kremlin hospital in Moscow. Stalin was enraged. Apparently this escapade was one transgression too many, or so one might conclude from an order issued by People’s Commissar for Defense I. V. Stalin on 26 May 1943:

(1) Immediately remove V. I. Stalin from his position as commander of an air regiment and do not give him any other command posts in the future until I permit it.

(2) Inform the regiment and former regimental commander Colonel Stalin that he is being removed from his post for drunkenness and debauchery and for spoiling and corrupting the regiment.²⁸

Being long accustomed to his father’s empty threats, Vasily was not terribly worried by this reproach. Indeed, he was soon given new, more senior posts, and by war’s end he was a twenty-four-year-old general. Stalin’s son could get away with almost anything. Around the same time Svetlana, now a university student, married a former schoolmate. She soon gave birth to a son, named Iosif after his grandfather. Nevertheless, Stalin refused to meet with his son-in-law, who was Jewish and had not fought in the war. Perhaps he consented to the marriage only to avoid the acrimony that came with the Kapler affair.

Once Germany was defeated and wartime pressures receded, Stalin did not return to his family—or rather did not allow his family back into his life. He had grown accustomed to solitude and his nocturnal lifestyle, and he rarely made time for his children. Apparently he never developed grandfatherly feelings. By now he was in his declining years, weary, in poor health, and obsessed with thoughts of treachery and the hunt for enemies. The final blow dealt against his family was the arrest of Pavel Alliluev’s wife and Nadezhda’s sister Anna. They were released only after his death.

Stalin’s children, admittedly, were hardly a comfort in his old age. Vasily sank rapidly into alcoholism and dissipation, and by his thirtieth birthday he was already an old man, plagued with a number of chronic diseases. Thanks to his father’s indulgence, he nevertheless held increasingly senior army posts and squandered government funds with impunity. The younger Stalin greedily chased the good life: he built and repeatedly renovated his suburban estate, spent lavishly on an elaborate hunting lodge, and established sports teams, luring top athletes with huge salaries and apartments. He had goods shipped in from Germany via airplane, ran through a series of lovers and wives, and drank heavily in the company of sycophantic hangers-on. Toward the end of Stalin’s life, after yet another scandalous episode, the father removed the son from the key post of air commander for the Moscow Military District. Vasily was sent to study at a military academy, thereby removing any remaining constraints on his drinking. Meanwhile, Svetlana divorced the husband her father did not like and married one he did—Yuri Zhdanov, son of Stalin’s late comrade. This marriage, however, was not happy and did not last long.

After his death, Stalin’s children suffered deeply symbolic fates. Vasily, after drunkenly insulting his father’s successors, was put in prison and died in exile at the age of forty. Svetlana married an Indian Communist. When she was given permission to travel to India for his funeral, she took the opportunity to defect and move to the United States, where she died in 2011. While in emigration, Svetlana published a memoir of life in the Stalin family, Twenty Letters to a Friend, which was both nostalgic and embellished. She placed the blame for her father’s pathological cruelty on the scheming and insinuations of Lavrenty Beria. In the end, her attitude toward the system her father created was most eloquently expressed by her defection to the country that he considered socialism’s most fearsome enemy.