Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by Harper in 2015

Copyright © Rosemary Sullivan 2015

Rosemary Sullivan asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

Cover photograph © The David King Collection

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007491117

Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007491124

Version: 2016-06-29

Dedication

For my mother,

Leanore Marjorie Guthrie Sullivan

Frontispiece: Eight-year-old Svetlana with her father, Joseph Stalin, on vacation in Soshi.

(Svetlana Aliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Djugashvili and Alliluyev Family Trees

Preface

Prologue The Defection

PART ONE: The Kremlin Years

Chapter 1 That Place of Sunshine

Chapter 2 A Motherless Child

Chapter 3 The Hostess and the Peasant

Chapter 4 The Terror

Chapter 5 The Circle of Secrets and Lies

Chapter 6 Love Story

Chapter 7 A Jewish Wedding

Chapter 8 The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign

Chapter 9 Everything Silent, as Before a Storm

Chapter 10 The Death of the Vozhd

PART TWO: The Soviet Reality

Chapter 11 The Ghosts Return

Chapter 12 The Generalissimo’s Daughter

Chapter 13 Post-Thaw

Chapter 14 The Gentle Brahman

Chapter 15 On the Banks of the Ganges

PART THREE: Flight to America

Chapter 16 Italian Comic Opera

Chapter 17 Diplomatic Fury

Chapter 18 Attorneys at Work

Chapter 19 The Arrival

Chapter 20 A Mysterious Figure

Chapter 21 Letters to a Friend

Chapter 22 A Cruel Rebuff

Chapter 23 Only One Year

Chapter 24 The Taliesin Fiasco

Chapter 25 The Montenegrin’s Courtier

Chapter 26 Stalin’s Daughter Cutting the Grass

Chapter 27 A KGB Stool Pigeon

Chapter 28 Lana Peters, American Citizen

Chapter 29 The Modern Jungle of Freedom

PART FOUR: Learning to Live in the West

Chapter 30 Chaucer Road

Chapter 31 Back in the USSR

Chapter 32 Tbilisi Interlude

Chapter 33 American Reality

Chapter 34 “Never Wear a Tight Skirt If You Intend to Commit Suicide”

Chapter 35 My Dear, They Haven’t Changed a Bit

Chapter 36 Final Return

Acknowledgments

List of Characters

Sources

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Also by Rosemary Sullivan

About the Publisher

The Djugashvili and Alliluyev Family Trees

Preface

What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it? In the USSR, Stalin was mythic. He was the vozhd, the supreme leader who built the Soviet Union into a superpower and won the war against the Nazis. To his millions of Soviet victims, however, he was the man responsible for the Terror and the infamous Gulag. In the West, he was widely demonized as one of the world’s most brutal dictators. Try as she might, Svetlana Alliluyeva could never escape Stalin’s shadow. As she lamented, “Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.”¹

In the USSR, her life was unimaginably painful. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide when Svetlana was only six and a half. In the purges of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, Stalin did not spare his family. Her beloved Aunt Maria and Uncle Alexander Svanidze, the brother and sister-in-law of Stalin’s first wife, were arrested and executed as enemies of the people; their son Johnik, her childhood playmate, disappeared. Uncle Stanislav Redens, the husband of her mother’s sister Anna, was executed. Uncle Pavel, her mother’s brother, died of a heart attack brought on by shock. When she’d just turned seventeen, her father sentenced her first love, Aleksei Kapler, to the Gulag for ten years. The Nazis killed her half brother Yakov in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. In 1947 and 1948, during the wave of repression known as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, her mother’s sister Anna and Pavel’s widow, Zhenya, were sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement. Zhenya’s daughter Kyra was imprisoned and then exiled.

After her father’s death in 1953, the tragedies continued. Her elder brother, Vasili, was arrested and eventually died of alcoholism in 1962. Her literary friends in the mid-1960s were sent to forced-labor camps. When she finally found peace in a loving relationship with a man named Brajesh Singh, she was officially refused the right to marry him before he died, though she was given official permission to carry his ashes back to India.

In the middle of her life, at the age of forty-one, Svetlana Alliluyeva decided, impulsively, to defect. On the evening of March 6, 1967, she walked into the American Embassy in New Delhi requesting asylum. This was both an escape from her past and a search for the freedom denied to her in the Soviet Union, where she claimed that she was treated like government property. The American State Department initially refused her entry into the United States on the grounds that her defection would destabilize relations with the Soviets. She waited in Switzerland as diplomats searched for a country to take her.

When she was finally allowed into the United States on a tourist visa, Americans greeted her as the most famous defector ever to leave the USSR. She was soon the millionaire defector—Twenty Letters to a Friend, the memoir she had written in 1963 and carried out of the Soviet Union, was bought for an advance payment of $1.5 million. But she did not understand the concept of money; she gave away much of it and soon lost the rest to the manipulations of Olgivanna Wright, the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, who lured her into marriage with Wesley Peters, the head architect of Wright’s Taliesin Foundation. At the age of forty-five, Alliluyeva gave birth to Olga Peters. Her daughter was a consolation. She had abandoned her twenty-one-year-old son, Joseph, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Katya, when she fled the Soviet Union. KGB intrigues prevented her from contacting them for the next fifteen years.

Her laconic humor helped. She could say, “I don’t any longer have the pleasant illusion that I can be free of the label ‘Stalin’s daughter.’ . . . You can’t regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”² She spent most of her forty-four years in the West as a nomad, moving over thirty times, even briefly defecting back to the Soviet Union.

She was called unstable. The historian Robert Tucker remarked that “despite everything, she was, in some sense, like her father.”³ And yet it’s astonishing how little she resembled her father. She did not believe in violence. She had a risk taker’s resilience, a commitment to life, and an unexpected optimism, even though her life spanned the brutalities of the twentieth century in the most heartrending of ways, giving her a knowledge of the dark side of human experience, which few people are ever forced to confront. Caught between two worlds in the Cold War power struggles between East and West, she was served well by neither side. She had to slowly learn how the West functioned. The process of her education is fascinating and often sad.

Alliluyeva had as much trouble explaining her father as anyone else did. Her attitude toward Stalin was paradoxical. She unequivocally rejected his crimes, yet he was the father who, in her childhood memory, was loving—until he wasn’t. She sought, with only partial success, to understand what motivated his brutal policies. “I don’t believe he ever suffered any pangs of conscience; I don’t think he ever experienced them. But he was not happy, either, having reached the ultimate in his desires by killing many, crushing others, and being admired by some.”⁴

However, she warned that to dismiss him as simply monstrous would be a grave error. The question is what happens to a human being in his private life and within a particular political system that dictates such a history. She always insisted that her father never acted alone. He had thousands of accomplices.

Svetlana Alliluyeva imagined that in the West she could construct a private life as a writer and find someone with whom she could share it. Despite valiant efforts, she believed she had failed, though others are not so sure. It’s astonishing that she survived at all.

Prologue
The Defection

At 7:00 p.m. on March 6, 1967, a taxi drew up to the open gates of the American Embassy on Shantipath Avenue in New Delhi. Watched carefully by the Indian police guard, it proceeded slowly up the circular drive. The passenger in the backseat looked out at the large circular reflecting pool, serene in the fading light. A few ducks and geese still floated among the jets of water rising from its surface. The embassy’s exterior walls were constructed of pierced concrete blocks, which gave the building a light, airy look. The woman noted how different this was from the stolid institutional Soviet Embassy she had just left. So this was America.

Svetlana Alliluyeva climbed the wide steps and stared at the American eagle embedded in the glass doors. All the important decisions of her life had been taken precipitately. Once she crossed this threshold, she knew that her old life would be irrevocably lost to her. She had no doubt that the wrath of the Kremlin would soon fall on her head. She felt defiant. She felt terrified. She’d made the most important decision of her life; she’d escaped, but into what she had no idea. She did not hesitate. Clutching her small suitcase in one hand, she rang the bell.

Danny Wall, the marine guard on desk duty, opened the door. He looked down at the small woman standing before him. She was middle-aged, neatly dressed, nondescript. He was about to tell her the embassy was closed when she handed him her passport. He blanched. He locked the door behind her and led her to a small adjacent room. He then phoned Robert Rayle, the second secretary of the embassy, who was in charge of walk-ins—defectors. Rayle had been out, but when he returned the call minutes later, Wall gave him the secret code indicating the embassy had a Soviet defector, the last thing Rayle was expecting on a quiet Monday evening in the Indian capital.

When Rayle arrived at the embassy at 7:25, he was pointed to a room where a woman sat talking with Consul George Huey. She turned to Rayle as he entered, and almost the first thing she said to him was: “Well, you probably won’t believe this, but I’m Stalin’s daughter.”¹

Rayle looked at the demure, attractive woman with copper hair and pale blue eyes who stared steadily back at him. She did not fit his image of Stalin’s daughter, though what that image was, he could not have said. She handed him her Soviet passport. At a quick glance, he saw the name: Citizeness Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva. Iosifovna was the correct patronymic, meaning “daughter of Joseph.” He went through the possibilities. She could be a Soviet plant; she could be a counteragent; she could be crazy. George Huey asked, nonplussed, “So you say your father was Stalin? The Stalin?”²

As the officer in charge of walk-ins from the Soviet bloc, Rayle was responsible for confirming her authenticity. After a brief interview, he excused himself and went to the embassy communications center, where he cabled headquarters in Washington, demanding all files on Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva. The answer came back one hour later: “No traces.” Headquarters knew nothing at all about her—there were no CIA files, no FBI files, no State Department files. The US government didn’t even know Stalin had a daughter.³

While he waited for a response from Washington, Rayle interrogated Svetlana. How did she come to be in India? She claimed that she had left the USSR on December 19 on a ceremonial mission. The Soviet government had given her special permission to travel to India to scatter the ashes of her “husband,” Brajesh Singh, on the Ganges in his village—Kalakankar, Uttar Pradesh—as Hindu tradition dictated. She added bitterly that because Singh was a foreigner, Aleksei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, had personally refused her request to marry him, but after Singh’s death, she was permitted to carry his ashes to India. In the three months she’d spent here, she’d fallen in love with the country and asked to be allowed to stay. Her request was denied. “The Kremlin considers me state property,” she said with disgust. “I am Stalin’s daughter!” She told Rayle that, under Soviet pressure, the Indian government had refused to extend her visa. She was fed up with being treated like a “national relic.” She would not go back to the USSR. She looked firmly at Rayle and said that she had come to the American Embassy to ask the US government for political asylum.⁴

So far, Rayle could conclude only that this utterly calm woman believed what she was saying. He immediately understood the political implications if her story was true. If she really was Stalin’s daughter, she was Soviet royalty. Her defection would be a deep psychological blow to the Soviet government, and it would make every effort to get her back. The American Embassy would find itself in the midst of a political maelstrom.⁵

Rayle remained suspicious. He asked her why her name wasn’t Stalina or Djugashvili, her father’s surname. She explained that in 1957 she had changed her name from Stalina to Alliluyeva, the maiden name of her mother, Nadezhda, as was the right of every Soviet citizen.

He then asked where she had been staying. “At the Soviet Embassy guesthouse,” she replied, only several hundred yards away. How had she managed to slip away from the Soviet Embassy without being noticed? he asked. “They are having a huge reception for a visiting Soviet military delegation and the rest of them are celebrating International Women’s Day,” she replied. He then asked her how much time she had before her absence at the guesthouse would be noticed. She might have about four hours, she explained, since everyone would be drunk. Even now she was expected at the home of T. N. Kaul, the former Indian ambassador to the USSR. She said in sudden panic: “I really have to call his daughter, Preeti, to let her know I’m not coming.”⁶

For Rayle this was a small test. He replied, “OK, let me dial the number for you.” He searched for the number, dialed, and handed her the phone. He listened as she explained to T. N. Kaul and to his daughter that she had a headache and wasn’t going to make it for dinner. She said her affectionate good-byes to both.⁷

Then she passed Rayle a battered sheaf of paper. It was a Russian manuscript titled Twenty Letters to a Friend and bearing her name as author. She explained that it was a personal memoir about growing up inside the Kremlin. Ambassador Kaul, whom she and Brajesh Singh had befriended in Moscow, had carried the manuscript safely out of the USSR a year ago January. As soon as she’d arrived in New Delhi, he returned it to her. This was astonishing: Stalin’s daughter had written a book. What might it reveal about her father? Rayle asked if he could make a copy of it, and she assented.

Following his advice as to the wording, she then wrote out a formal request for political asylum in the United States and signed the document. When Rayle warned her that, at this point, he could not definitely promise her asylum, Svetlana demonstrated her political shrewdness. She replied that “if the United States could not or would not help her, she did not believe that any other country represented in India would be willing to do so.” She was determined not to return to the USSR, and her only alternative would be to tell her story “fully and frankly” to the press in the hope that she could rally public support in India and the United States.⁸ The refusal to protect Stalin’s daughter would not play well back home. Svetlana understood how political manipulation worked. She’d had a lifetime of lessons.

Rayle led Svetlana to a room on the second floor, handed her a cup of tea and some aspirins for the splitting headache she’d developed, and suggested she write a declaration—a brief biography and an explanation of why she was defecting. At this point, he excused himself again, saying he had to consult his superiors.

The US ambassador, Chester Bowles, was ill in bed that night, so Rayle walked the ten minutes to his home in the company of the CIA station chief. Ambassador Bowles would later admit that he had not wanted to meet Svetlana personally on the chance that she was simply a nutcase. With Bowles’s special assistant Richard Celeste in attendance, the men discussed the crisis. Rayle and his superiors realized there was not going to be enough time to determine Svetlana’s bona fides in New Delhi before the Soviets discovered she was missing. Bowles believed that the Soviet Union had so much leverage on the government of India, which it was supplying with military equipment, that if it found out Svetlana was at the US Embassy, Indian forces would demand her expulsion. The embassy would have to get her out of India.

At 9:40 p.m., a second flash cable was sent to headquarters in Washington with a more detailed report,⁹ stating that Svetlana had four hours before the Soviet Embassy noted her absence. The message concluded, “Unless advised to the contrary we will try to get Svetlana on Qantas Flight 751 to Rome leaving Delhi at 1945Zulu (1:15 AM local time).” Eleven minutes later, Washington acknowledged receipt of the cable.¹⁰

The men discussed their options. They could refuse Svetlana help and tell her to return to her embassy, where it was unlikely her absence had been noticed. But she’d made it clear she would go to the international press with the story. They could keep her in Roosevelt House or in the chancery, inform the Indians that she’d asked for asylum in the United States, and await a court decision. The problem with this option was that the Indian government might take Svetlana back by force. The embassy could try to spirit her out of India covertly. None of these were good options.

The deciding factor was that Svetlana had her Soviet passport in her possession. This was unprecedented. The passports of Soviet citizens traveling abroad were always confiscated and returned to them only as they boarded their flights home. That afternoon the Soviet ambassador to India, I. A. Benediktov, had held a farewell luncheon for Svetlana. It was a grim affair. He was furious with her because she had delayed her departure from India long past the one month authorized by her Russian visa, and Moscow was now demanding her return. She was compromising his career. She would be getting on that flight back to Moscow on March 8.

“Well, if I must leave,” she’d said, “where’s my passport?” Benediktov had snarled to his aide: “Give it to her.”¹¹ Here Svetlana showed she truly was Stalin’s daughter. When she demanded something, she was not to be refused. Benediktov had made a huge mistake that he would pay for later. For the Soviets, Svetlana was the most significant defector ever to leave the USSR.

Sitting in his sickbed, Chester Bowles made a decision. With her Indian papers in order and her Russian passport, Svetlana could openly and legally leave India. He ordered a US B-2 tourist visa stamped in her passport. It would have to be renewed after six months. He asked Bob Rayle if he would take her out of India. Rayle agreed. The men returned to the embassy.¹²

It was 11:15 p.m. As they prepared to leave for the airport, Rayle turned to Svetlana. “Do you fully understand what you are doing? You are burning all your bridges.” He asked her to think this over carefully. She replied that she had already had a lot of time to think. He handed her $1,500 from the embassy’s discretionary funds to facilitate her arrival in the United States.

She was led down a long corridor to an elevator that descended to the embassy garage. Clutching her small suitcase, which contained her manuscript and a few items of clothing, she climbed into a car. A young marine sergeant and the embassy Soviet affairs specialist, Roger Kirk, recently back from Moscow, climbed in beside her. They smiled. It was electrifying to be sitting next to Stalin’s daughter. She wondered, “Why did Americans smile so often? Was it out of politeness or because of a gay disposition?” Whatever it was, she, who had never been “spoiled with smiles,” found it pleasant!¹³

Rayle phoned his wife, Ramona, to ask her to pack his bags for a trip of several days and to meet him at Palam airport in one hour. He did not tell her where he was going. He then went to the Qantas Airlines office and bought two first-class open tickets to the United States, with a stopover in Rome. He soon joined the other Americans at the airport—by now there were at least ten embassy staff members milling about in the relatively deserted terminal, but only two sat with Svetlana.¹⁴

Svetlana easily passed through Indian customs and immigration and, in five minutes, with a valid Indian exit visa and her US visitor’s visa, joined Rayle in the international departure lounge. When Rayle asked her if she was nervous, she replied, “Not at all,” and grinned. Her reaction was in character. Svetlana was at heart a gambler. Throughout her life she would make a monumental decision entirely on impulse, and then ride the consequences with an almost giddy abandon. She always said her favorite story by Dostoyevsky was The Gambler.

Though outwardly cool, Rayle himself was deeply anxious. He was convinced that, as soon as they discovered her missing, the Soviets would definitely insist that she be handed over. If she was discovered at the airport, the Indian police would arrest her, and there would be nothing he could do. He felt the consequences for her would be grave.¹⁵ Execution would have been the old Stalinist style, but her father had been dead fourteen years. Still, the current Soviet government took a hard line on defectors, and imprisonment was always a possibility. When the classical dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961, he was sentenced in absentia to seven years’ hard labor. In Rayle’s mind must also have been the recent trials of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. In 1966 they’d been sentenced to labor camps for their “anti-Soviet” writings, and they were still languishing there. The Kremlin would not risk a public trial of Svetlana, but she might disappear into the dark reaches of some psychiatric institution. Svetlana, too, must have had this in mind. Sinyavsky was an intimate friend. At least she knew that, were she apprehended, she would never be allowed out of the Soviet Union again.

The Qantas flight to Rome landed punctually, but Rayle’s relief soon turned to dread as he heard the announcement that the flight would be delayed. The plane had developed mechanical difficulties. The two sat in the departure lounge waiting as minutes turned to hours. Rayle looked at Svetlana. She, too, had begun to be agitated. To cope with the mounting tension, Rayle got up periodically to check the arrivals desks. He knew that the regular Aeroflot flight from Moscow arrived at 5:00 a.m. and a large delegation from the Soviet Embassy always came to greet the diplomatic couriers and the various dignitaries arriving or departing. Members of the Aeroflot staff were already beginning to open their booth. Finally, the departure for Rome was announced. At 2:45 a.m. the Qantas flight for Rome was airborne at last.¹⁶

As they were in midair, a cable about the defector arrived at the American Embassy in New Delhi. In Washington Donald Jameson, who served as CIA liaison officer to the State Department, had informed Deputy Undersecretary of State Foy Kohler of the situation. Kohler’s reaction was stunning—he exploded: “Tell them to throw that woman out of the embassy. Don’t give her any help at all.”¹⁷ Kohler had recently served as American ambassador to the USSR and believed that he had personally initiated a thaw in relations with the Soviets. He didn’t want the defection of Stalin’s daughter, especially coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, muddying the waters. When the embassy staff read the flash cable rejecting Svetlana’s appeal for asylum, they replied, “You’re too late. They’ve gone. They’re on their way to Rome.”¹⁸

The staff failed to check the status of the Qantas flight. Had they discovered that Svetlana and Rayle were sitting for almost two hours in the airport lounge and could have been recalled, Svetlana would have been driven back to the embassy and “kicked out.” The whole course of her life would have gone very differently. But Svetlana’s life always seemed to dangle on a thread, and chance or fate sent her one way rather than another. She would come to call herself a gypsy. Stalin’s daughter, always living in the shadow of her father’s name, would never find a safe place to land.

PART ONE

Chapter 1
That Place of Sunshine

Family group, c. 1930. Standing, from left: Mariko and Maria Svanidze, Stalin’s sisters-in-law from his first marriage. Seated in center, from left: Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova (Svetlana’s nanny), Nathalie Konstantinova (governess), and Svetlana’s maternal aunt Anna Redens. Front row, from left: Svetlana and her brother, Vasili, with Nikolai Bukharin’s daughter sitting on his knee. Standing on right: Sergei Alliluyev, Svetlana’s maternal grandfather.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Over her lifetime, Svetlana often would take out the photographs from her early childhood and muse over them, experiencing that lovely, brutal nostalgia of photos trapping time. Her mother had always been the one with the camera taking the pictures. Everyone at the family gatherings was so young and alive, so simple and ebullient, wearing a picnic face. The first six and a half years of her life, until her mother’s death in 1932, were, in Svetlana’s mind, the years of sun. She would speak of “that place of sunshine I call my childhood.”¹

Who can live without personal retrospect? We will always glance back to our childhood, for we are shaped deep in our core by the impress of our parents, and we will always wonder how that molding determined us. Svetlana willfully believed in her happy childhood, even as she gradually understood that it was secured by untold bloodshed. What was it about this strange childhood that she would always turn to it for solace?

Svetlana grew up in the Kremlin, the citadel of the tsars, a walled fortress on the edge of the Moskva River, almost a small autonomous village but with imposing towers, cathedrals, and palaces centered on Cathedral Square with massive gates opening onto Red Square and the city beyond. One might think this royal fortress was impossibly grand, but when she was born there in 1926, the second child of Joseph and Nadezhda (“Nadya”) Stalin, the Russian Revolution was only nine years old. The public would always see her as the princess in the Kremlin, but her father’s Bolshevik discipline dictated a relatively modest life.

The Stalins lived in the old Poteshny Palace, a three-story building erected in 1652. It was known as the Amusement Palace and served as a theater for comic performances until, in the nineteenth century, it housed the offices of the Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police. The Poteshny retained its elegant theatrical chandeliers and carpeted staircase, up which the Stalins climbed to their gloomy, high-ceilinged apartment on the second floor.

Svetlana remembered that apartment: “There was [a room] for the governess, and a dining room large enough to have a grand piano in it. . . . In addition there was a library, Nadya’s room, and Stalin’s tiny bedroom in which stood a table with telephones.”² There were two rooms for the children (she shared hers with her nanny), a kitchen, the housekeeper’s room, and two bathrooms. Wood-burning stoves heated all the rooms. As she described it, “it was homely, with bourgeois furniture.” Families of other Bolshevik leaders lived across the lane in the Horse Guards building and casually dropped by.

In keeping with the ideology of the Party, there was no private property. Everything belonged to the state, down to the wineglasses and silverware, which meant, in the end, that everything was up for grabs. In the early days, even Party members had ration cards for food, but their use was hypothetical. In a country where the populace was starving, there was always enough food for the intimate soirees when the Party magnates gathered in one another’s apartments. All the leaders were assigned one of the country dachas abandoned by the rich upper classes who had fled in the early days of the Revolution.

When Svetlana was born, on February 28, she entered an already crowded household. Her brother Vasili had been born five years earlier, on March 21, 1921. The story went around that Nadya, demonstrating Bolshevik austerity and an iron will, had walked to the hospital after dinner to deliver her son. Once the ordeal was over, she phoned home to congratulate Stalin.³ Svetlana’s half brother Yakov Djugashvili, the child of Stalin’s first marriage, had also joined the household in 1921. Yakov was nineteen years older than Svetlana and would become her champion until his brutal death in a Nazi POW camp.

Family life had a Chekhovian quality, with relatives wandering into and out of the Kremlin apartment. There were two branches of the family: the Alliluyevs and the Svanidzes. Nadya’s own family constantly visited. By now the large clan included Nadya’s parents, Olga and Sergei Alliluyev; her brothers, Fyodor and Pavel; Pavel’s wife, Eugenia (“Zhenya”); her sister, Anna; and Anna’s husband, Stanislav Redens. All the family members would come to play tragic parts in the Stalin narrative.

The Svanidze branch arrived from Georgia in 1921, shadows out of Stalin’s past. In 1906, when the Georgian-born Joseph Stalin was still just a local agitator fomenting revolution under the code name Soso, he married the sister of a school friend and fellow underground revolutionary, Alexander (“Alyosha”) Svanidze. In those prerevolutionary days, when the triumph of the Bolsheviks seemed impossibly distant, Svanidze’s three sisters ran an haute couture fashion house in Tiflis (Tbilisi), called Atelier Hervieu. The waiting room was always full of counts, generals, and police officers. While the sisters fitted the dress of a general’s wife in one room, the revolutionaries discussed their plans for sabotage next door and hid their secret documents inside the stylish mannequins.⁴

The youngest sister, the exquisitely lovely Ekaterina Svanidze, whom everyone called Kato, fell in love with the mysterious and witty Comrade Soso. By then he was head of the Bolshevik faction in Tiflis, and it was no surprise that the tsar’s secret police often came calling. Kato was pregnant within months of their marriage and gave birth to Yakov in March 1907. She contracted typhus shortly afterward. The family reported that Kato, just twenty-two, died in Soso’s arms on November 22, 1907. At the funeral, a distraught Soso threw himself into the grave with the coffin, and then he disappeared for two months.⁵

Stalin’s first wife, Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze, who died in 1907.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Looking back, Stalin would tell his daughter, Svetlana, that Kato “was very sweet and beautiful: she melted my heart”⁶—but not quite enough, it seemed, for him to assume responsibility for their infant son. He abandoned Yakov to the care of his mother-in-law and the Svanidze sisters. One of the few contacts that the family had with Stalin was a letter from Siberia during one of his pre-Revolution exiles, asking them to send him wine and jam.⁷

On a visit to Georgia in 1921, the Svanidze family encouraged Stalin to bring his fourteen-year-old son back with him to Moscow. Stalin’s brother-in-law, Alyosha Svanidze, who’d been so close to Stalin in his early revolutionary days, also came, bringing along his sisters, Mariko and Sashiko, thus joining the Kremlin elite. A Europeanized Georgian, Alyosha had studied in Germany and was something of a dandy. His beautiful, flamboyant wife, Maria, from a wealthy Jewish family, who had sung in the Tiflis opera before her marriage, came with him. It would have been much safer for them had they all stayed in Georgia.

Artyom Sergeev, Nadya and Stalin’s adopted son, occasionally visited. His father had been killed in 1921 while testing a new high-speed train powered by an airplane engine. Though Artyom’s mother was still alive, Stalin adopted the boy, in keeping with the Bolshevik custom of assuming the care of orphans of Party members. Artyom became the bosom buddy of Svetlana’s brother Vasili.⁸

The only person who was always absent from these family gatherings was Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina, affectionately known as Keke. Nadya would write her mother-in-law encouraging letters: “Things here seem to be all right, we’re very well. The children are growing up. . . . Altogether we have terribly little free time, Joseph and I. . . . Still, I’m not complaining and so far, I’m coping with it all quite successfully.”⁹

Though she had visited the Kremlin once to meet Nadya, Stalin’s widowed mother refused to abandon her beloved Georgia. She lived in the old Viceroy’s Palace in Tiflis, where she chose to occupy a room on the ground floor next to the servants’ quarters, while the top floors were reserved for social functions.

To Svetlana, who seems to have met her only once in Georgia, her paternal grandmother, Keke, was a stranger and therefore rarely a part of her family mythology. Svetlana knew the stories: that her grandfather Vissarion “Beso” Djugashvili had been a cobbler who, in his drunken rages, had beaten his son brutally until Keke finally kicked him out. Keke had scraped together the money to send Joseph to the Gori Church School and then on to the Tiflis Seminary, intending him to become a priest. Svetlana always said that the notorious brutality of the Orthodox priests, who punished their students with solitary confinement for days in dungeonlike cells, had shaped her father’s penchant for cruelty.

Stalin’s mother, Ekaterina “Keke” Djugashvili, who refused to leave her native Georgia to visit Moscow.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

As an adult, Svetlana would only sparingly comment on her father to friends, but one of the things she did say was that the only person her father ever feared was his mother.¹⁰ But such was the mystification in which her father cloaked himself that even his daughter did not know his real birth date. Stalin was actually born on December 6, 1878, a year earlier than he claimed.¹¹ In keeping with his habit of inventing much of his own biography, Stalin chose December 21, 1879, as his official birthday. The family always celebrated on this day.

This, then, was Svetlana’s intimate family. She maintained that at the center of it all was her mother, Nadya, who died when Svetlana was six and a half. What does a child remember of her mother at such an age? By her sudden disappearance, Nadya became a key to understanding Svetlana’s emotional life. The photograph Svetlana most loved was the one of her mother holding her when she was an infant. It was proof that her mother loved her.

Svetlana couldn’t remember her mother’s face, but she could remember the smell of her Chanel perfume, which Nadya wore despite Stalin’s disapproval. Her mother would come into her room to say good night, would touch her, then touch her pillow, and she would fall asleep engulfed in perfume.¹² But she could barely remember her mother kissing her or stroking her hair. Her mother was a strict disciplinarian. Hearing from Vasili, her tattletale older brother, that she’d been naughty, Nadya wrote to her daughter from her vacation in Sochi:

Hello, Svetlanochka!

I had a letter from Vasya [Vasili] saying that my little girl is carrying on and being terribly naughty. I hate getting letters like that. . . . When Mama went away, her little girl made a great many promises, but now it turns out she isn’t keeping them. Please write and let me know whether you’ve decided to be good or not. You decide. You’re a big girl and are able to think for yourself. Are you reading anything in Russian? I’m waiting to hear from you.

Your Mama ¹³

This letter, written when Svetlana was four or five, was the only letter she ever received from her frequently absent mother.

Svetlana, age six, with her eleven-year-old brother, Vasili, in a photo from 1932 taken before their mother committed suicide on November 9.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Svetlana felt she was a quiet, obedient child. Three decades later, she could write: “[Mother] expected a good deal of me,” still hurt that there were few memories of tenderness in her mother’s treatment of her.¹⁴ But there was one thing in particular that she did recall. It was the memory of her mother drawing a little square over her heart with her finger and telling her, “That is where you must bury your secrets.”¹⁵ In the backbiting political world of the Kremlin, Nadya kept her feelings and her secrets hidden, something her daughter, who would become notorious for her emotional outbursts, did not emulate.

As a child, of course Svetlana thought her mother was beautiful. In retrospect, she believed her mother showed her love through her dedication to her children’s education, which she took in hand from their earliest childhood and which, for Svetlana, made her the model of the dedicated mother.

Nadya is an elusive figure in the Stalin universe. She was a sixteen-year-old girl when, according to the family and to her daughter, she fell madly, passionately in love with the thirty-nine-year-old Stalin, already Lenin’s loyal ally and a star in the Bolshevik firmament. Much to her parents’ annoyance, she ran off with him in 1918 to join the Revolution, becoming his secretary. Nadya was headstrong, stubborn, puritanical, and idealistic. To outsiders she appeared cold, but this exterior hid a passionate and volatile temperament.

Nadya’s warmth, as well as her frustration, surfaces in a letter to the aunt of her stepson Yakov, Maria Svanidze, of whom she was clearly very fond. Maria and her husband, Alexander, were then living in Berlin, where he was working for the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade. Nadya wrote the letter just before the birth of Svetlana, who, despite her mother’s ambivalence about the pregnancy, obviously treasured the letter, translating it into English herself and saving it:

JANUARY 11, 1926

Dear Maroussya

You write that you feel bored. You know, my dear, it’s the same thing everywhere. I have nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes that looks even strange: in so many years not to develop close friendships, but that depends on character. It is strange that I feel much closer to non–party members, I mean women. This public is much simpler to get along with.

I regret that I have again took [sic] upon myself strong family bonds [here Svetlana added a footnote: “N. S. Allilueva was expecting her daughter Svetlana at that time”]. This is not so easy in our days, because there appeared to be so many new prejudices, like if you are not working you are a “baba,”* although perhaps one does not work only because one does not have due qualifications. And now when I am going to be with family business, it is impossible to think about one’s qualifications. I advise you, dear Maroussya, to obtain some skills for Russia, while you are abroad. I am serious. You simply cannot imagine how unpleasant it is to work simply for earnings, doing any work; one must have a specialty, specialization, which would liberate you from dependence on others. . . .

Well, my dear Maroussya, do not feel lonely, do obtain necessary qualifications and come to us next time. We shall all be very happy to see you. Joseph is asking me to give you his love. He has very good feelings toward you (he says “she is a smart baba”). Do not get angry—that is his usual way to treat us, women. . . .

I kiss you and goodbye,

Nadya ¹⁶

Nadya was fed up with being a shadow in the Kremlin and was determined not to be a baba. As soon as Svetlana was born, Nadya, then twenty-five, searched for a nanny to care for her infant daughter so that she would be free to pursue her own education. After interviewing prospective candidates, she settled on Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova.

Alexandra Andreevna knew about loyalty. She had been born in 1885 on an estate in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow, and worked as maid, cook, nurse, and housekeeper until she joined the Saint Petersburg household of Nikolai Yevreinov, a theater director and critic, a member of the prerevolutionary liberal intelligentsia. The Yevreinov family taught the illiterate Alexandra Andreevna to read and write. When the outbreak of the Revolution forced them to flee to Paris, they invited her to accompany them, but she refused to leave the motherland. During the famines of the early 1920s, she fled, with her one remaining son (the other had died of starvation), to Moscow, where Nadya Stalina discovered and hired her. Svetlana’s adopted brother, Artyom Sergeev, would say that Alexandra Andreevna was “an absolutely wonderful nanny.” She reminded him of Pushkin’s faithful nanny, Arina Rodionova.¹⁷

Alexandra Andreevna was a remarkable storyteller who threaded her conversation with Russian proverbs, filling the children’s ears with tales of her village and of her “theater” days in Saint Petersburg. Her greatest gift was her capacity to keep silent as she weathered all the vicissitudes over the years in the Stalin household. Svetlana would say of her, “For me, during my whole life, she was an example of calmness, hard work, warmth, some kind of epic tranquility, and an unending optimism.”¹⁸

Nadya left Svetlana’s nanny strict instructions never to let her charge be idle. Svetlana remembered her nanny taking her to preschool for music lessons with twenty other children. Svetlana sang in a children’s chorus and was soon taught to read and transcribe music and play the piano. Alexandra Andreevna stayed with Svetlana for thirty years until her death in 1956, serving as nanny for Svetlana’s own children. If there was any ethical grounding for Svetlana in the morally ambiguous Stalin universe, it came from her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna. “If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person,” Svetlana later wrote, “I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”¹⁹

In 1928, when Svetlana was two, Nadya enrolled at the Industrial Academy to study synthetic fibers, a new branch of chemistry. There were also endless Party meetings, and what free time Nadya had she spent with Stalin. She hired tutors to oversee her children’s education, while she was mostly absent.

As Svetlana put it with some resentment, “It was not the thing at that time for a woman, especially a woman Party member, to spend much time with her children.”²⁰ All the Kremlin wives had Party jobs. In their spare time, some took up tennis. There were tennis courts and croquet sets on those dacha lawns. It was an uncanny replication of the old tsarist aristocracy’s way of life.

Nadya hired a German housekeeper from Latvia, Carolina Til, to run the Kremlin apartment and left everything to her German efficiency. She also hired a governess for Svetlana and a male tutor for Vasili, much as the tsars had done. Svetlana learned to read and write German and Russian by the time she was six.

From left: Carolina Til, the housekeeper, and the nanny Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

The life of all the children in the numerous Kremlin apartments followed a similar routine, run by governesses and tutors. But it was not all discipline. Stepan Mikoyan, whose father was an Old Bolshevik and a Soviet statesman, one of the few who survived Stalin’s purges, lived in the Horse Guards building and used to play with Vasili and Svetlana. He remembered afternoons when all of the children of government officials, including the staff—there must have been thirty or forty children—raced through the gardens. Svetlana was a tomboy and fearlessly climbed the Tsar’s Cannon, the largest cannon in the world, just like everybody else.²¹

There were rollicking children’s parties at which twenty or thirty children might read a fable by the nineteenth-century writer Ivan Andreyevich Krylov, imitating the animals and wearing actual bearskins. But they would also chant satirical couplets about “political double-dealers.” Their parents would be the audience, and even Stalin might be there, a passive witness, as was his habit, watching indulgently from the sidelines. “Once in a while,” his daughter would remark laconically, “he enjoyed the sounds of children playing.”²²

Svetlana remembered her sixth birthday. The Kremlin flat was full of children. They had prepared songs and dances, and she recited some German poetry. It had been a feast, complete with tea and small cakes in cups. Svetlana had to hold this memory in a sealed compartment since she recognized, years later, that much of the rest of Russia had been starving.

Only once did Svetlana recall spending a full day with her mother. She remembered watching in amazement as Nadya furiously cleaned the underside of the claw-foot bathtub and then the rest of the apartment. She was too young to understand that the motive was probably less her mother’s obsession with cleanliness, though there was that, than a wife’s repressed anger, for there was much unhappiness in the Stalin family. Stalin and Nadya often fought. Years later Polina Molotov, Nadya’s close friend, told Svetlana, “Your father was rough with [your mother] and she had a hard life with him. Everyone knew that. But they’d spent a good many years together. They had a family, children, a home, and everyone loved Nadya.” Although it wasn’t a happy marriage, Polina asked, “What marriage is?”²³

Svetlana remembered her mother hitting her only once. A new tablecloth made of disk-shaped pieces of embroidery hung alluringly from the dining room table. When Svetlana took her scissors and cut out one of the disks—they were so beautiful—her enraged mother slapped her across the face.²⁴ It was a terrible shock. When Stalin heard her cry, he came running to comfort her.

Svetlana reciprocated this role of placater. When her mother and father were arguing, she would run to her father and wrap her small hands around his boot. Only then would he calm down. Nadya’s close friend Irina Gogua, witness to such domestic arguments, remarked, “The only creature who softened [Stalin] was Svetlana.”²⁵

If her mother was cool, Svetlana got the emotional response she craved from her father. She was Stalin’s favorite child. He called her his “little sparrow” or “little fly.” It was to his knees that she flew, and from him she got the kisses and caresses her mother withheld. She took his constant absences for granted; they made his appearances all the more dramatic and the child all the more needy.

It was Nadya who embraced the Svanidze side of the family. She was particularly protective of Yakov, whom Stalin apparently treated with contempt. The adolescent boy spoke only Georgian when he joined the household. Svetlana thought this was one of the reasons her father seemed to dislike him. Stalin was reportedly self-conscious of his own Georgian-accented Russian. Svetlana would say that her father “knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form; . . . in Russian he could not be an eloquent orator or writer, lacking synonyms, nuances, depths.”²⁶ Instead he often used silence to assert his authority, a much more effective tool to control others, who could never figure out quite what Stalin was thinking.

As a child, Svetlana didn’t even know that her father’s roots were Georgian. Once her brother Vasili, who constantly teased her, told her that the family were Georgians. When Svetlana asked him what being Georgian meant, he said that “they went around in long Circassian cloaks and cut everybody up with daggers.”²⁷ Svetlana claimed that Stalin, seeking to distance himself from his roots, banned visiting Georgian colleagues from bringing the usual gifts of Georgian wines and fruit, raging that such generosity came at public expense, and Nadya concurred.

Looking back, Svetlana said the room she most loved in their Moscow apartment was her mother’s room. In her mother’s absence, she would retreat there whenever she could to sit on its thick, raspberry-colored Oriental rug or curl up on the old-fashioned Georgian takhta (divan) with its embroidered cushions. She loved to touch the books on Nadya’s desk and drawing table. Given the dangerous household in which she grew up, Svetlana needed this idealized image of the beloved mother for psychic survival, but the outsider sees only an absent mother and a desperate, emotionally needy child. Of course, the truth was that Nadya herself was barely surviving.

Life at Zubalovo

Buried in the minds of those of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives. Despite what her life would become, Svetlana had such a place.

As a member of Lenin’s inner circle, Stalin was awarded a dacha called Zubalovo. It was not far from the village of Usovo, about twenty miles outside Moscow. The family lived there weekends and summers from 1919 to 1932, and the extended family continued to visit until 1949, long after Nadya’s death.

The dacha took its name from the former owner, Zubalov, an Armenian oil magnate from Baku. The whole area around Usovo had once served as a vacation retreat for the wealthy in prerevolutionary Moscow. After the owners fled during the Revolution, the dachas were divided among the Party elite. Stalin and Anastas Mikoyan got Zubalovo. There was more than a small amount of revenge in this. Both men had directed strikes protesting the long working hours and miserable conditions at Zubalov’s oil refineries in Baku, Azerbaijan; and Batumi, Georgia.

On the expansive grounds of Zubalovo, there were three separate houses called the big house, the small house, and the service block, all surrounded by a redbrick wall. The larger one was taken over by Mikoyan and other Old Bolshevik families. Nadya’s siblings, the Alliluyevs, and some of the Svanidzes used the service block, while Stalin and Nadya had the smaller dacha. It was always filled with visitors.²⁸

Stalin immediately had the dacha remodeled, removing the gables and old furnishings. He had a balcony built on the second floor—“father’s balcony”—and a terrace covering the back of the house. Stalin and Nadya occupied the upstairs, while the children and visiting relatives and friends lived downstairs. Purple lilac bushes framed the front of the house, and a grove of white birch stood at a slight distance. There was a duck pond, an apiary, a fenced-in run for chickens and pheasants, an orchard, and a clearing where buckwheat was planted to attract the bees. This Bolshevik estate served much the same role as it had when owned by the industrial elite, “a small estate with a country routine of its own” as Svetlana described it.²⁹

As a child, Svetlana knew the landscape like her own skin. She knew where the best mushroom patches could be found; she fished every stream and pond with her grandfather and brother and discovered where the trout rested in the slipstreams. She knew where to pick the berries among the brambles, which left her arms and legs covered in scratches. She brought home buckets of berries for the cook and, happy and exhausted, waited for praise. Svetlana had her own garden plot to tend and her own rabbits to raise. The smell of the larch trees, the white skin of the peeling birches, the flamboyant green of the new leaves, the smell of Russian soil—all this imprinted itself on her mind.

During the summer many children of the ruling elite came to stay. She’d lead them to the poultry yard to collect the eggs of the guinea fowl and pheasants or take them out on expeditions to pick mushrooms. On the estate they had a tree house to climb into and swings and a seesaw to ride. The children went camping in the woods, sleeping in a lean-to overnight and fishing in the local river. They would cook their catches over the fire, and bake pheasant eggs in the hot cinders.

Stalin, who had learned to love Russian baths in Siberia, eventually had a banya built at Zubalovo. It was a roofed hut with birch branches in the eaves sending their fragrance over the bathers. When her father was absent, Svetlana used to read her children’s books there, spread out on a rug on the floor.

Relatives floated into and out of Zubalovo: her grandparents Olga and Sergei Alliluyev; her Aunt Anna and Uncle Stanislav; and Uncle Pavel and Aunt Zhenya. Uncle Pavel told stories of the time after the Civil War when Lenin sent him on an expedition to the far north to prospect for iron ore and coal. They’d lived in tents, ridden reindeer, and made their clothes from reindeer pelts.³⁰ The Svanidzes also came to the dacha, particularly Uncle Alyosha and his dramatic wife, Maria. Stalin was often there but preoccupied. He could be found sitting at his table working on the terrace.

Svetlana’s grandparents, Olga and Sergei, were the dominant presences at the dacha. It was Sergei who brought Stalin into the Alliluyev household. The Russian-born son of a freed serf, he had trained himself as a mechanic and was working at the Tiflis rail yards when he joined the Mesame Dasi (Third Group), the Georgian socialist party formed in the early 1890s. He first met Stalin in 1900, when his future son-in-law was already famous locally for his brilliant organization and political exhortations at the clandestine May Day workers’ demonstrations. In those days, Sergei was mostly in charge of printing Marxist propaganda posters and leaflets, for which he was arrested and jailed seven times. Whether he participated in revolutionary violence is unclear, though he seemed to have had no objections when his nine-year-old daughter, Anna, was used by the revolutionaries as a mule to carry explosive cartridges sewn into her undervest on the train from Tiflis to Baku.³¹ Sergei offered the family’s apartment as a refuge for Stalin when he was hiding out from the tsar’s secret police.

Olga was a more complex figure. In 1893, she’d run off with Sergei, who was the family’s lodger, to escape her tyrannical father. She was sixteen; he was twenty-seven. She seemed a willing ally in Sergei’s revolutionary politics. Her life and the lives of her four children had been a narrative of constant moving from city to city, police searches, fear, keeping secrets, visiting Sergei in prison, and watching friends disappear. She distributed Marxist tracts, as did her young daughters, a dangerous practice that could bring them a jail term as it did their father. It was she who suggested their Saint Petersburg apartment on Rozhdestvenskaya Street as a hiding place for Lenin in the summer of 1917, when he stayed for several days before fleeing to Finland when the Revolution seemed to be dissolving, only to return to organize the Bolshevik triumph that October. And she also welcomed Stalin’s visits. Stalin was effusive in his gratitude to Olga, writing to her from his Siberian exile:

NOVEMBER 25, 1915

Olga Eugenievna:

I am more than grateful to you, dear Olga Eugenievna, for your kind and good sentiments toward me. I shall never forget the concern which you have shown me. I await the time when my period of banishment is over and I can come to Petersburg, to thank you and Sergei personally, for everything. I still have two years to complete it all. . . . My greetings to the boys and girls. . . .

Respectfully yours,

Joseph ³²

This was the son-in-law who would one day betray her every trust.

As soon as her youngest daughter, Nadya, turned fourteen, Olga asserted her independence by undertaking training as a midwife. When Russia entered World War I, she joined the Red Cross, tending the wounded who arrived from the German front. She lived mostly at the hospital and, according to her son Pavel, began to take lovers.

By the time they were in residence at Zubalovo, Sergei and Olga were completely alienated. He would arrive from one end of the dacha, she from the other, and they would stare each other down across the length of the dining room table. Sergei had been sidelined as an Old Bolshevik, though he remained a fervent believer, while Olga seemed skeptical, and was the earliest to suspect the true nature of her son-in-law.

Through those long summers at the dacha, this seemed an explosive, hot-tempered, typically Georgian family—Grandpa Sergei, angry when a child was restless at the table, was known to pour his soup into the child’s lap.³³ Olga had reverted to her Eastern Orthodox religion. When the Stalin children and their friends, brought up in the atheistic ideology of Communism, mocked Grandma Olga’s beliefs, she would respond, “Where is your soul? You will know when it aches.”³⁴ However, she didn’t seem to mind the ascendency and benefits her son-in-law’s position gave her.

Svetlana, who inherited Olga’s red hair and blue eyes, identified with her grandmother. She claimed that her mother had banned her grandmother from visiting their Kremlin apartment because she resented Olga’s constant criticism of her Bolshevik devotion to her career and her failure to stay at home with her children.³⁵ Svetlana probably picked this up from her aunts, as it is hardly the memory of a six-year-old child. Apparently Olga would shout at Nadya that she’d brought up four children, though Nadya, remembering her fractured childhood, might have found this ironic. Olga was explosive but not particularly self-reflective, traits her granddaughter Svetlana also seemed to inherit.

As a child, Svetlana would not have had much understanding of these complex family undercurrents. What child does? At Zubalovo, her grandparents, and particularly her grandfather, were benevolent parental substitutes. Sergei kept a machine shop in a separate hut at the dacha and invited the children into his workshop to play with his tools and make things. Sometimes he would hang candy from the trees for them to pluck and take them on long mushroom-picking hikes through the forest.

Svetlana’s maternal grandfather, Sergei Alliluyev, in the late 1920s.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Many of the Bolshevik Party elite shared those summers at Zubalovo. Svetlana called all of them uncles. “Uncle Voroshilov” and “Uncle Mikoyan” came to the Stalin dacha with their families. One of the visitors she liked best was Stalin’s old comrade Nikolai Bukharin, who filled the dacha with laughter and was loved by everyone. He taught Svetlana’s nanny to ride a bike and always brought animals to the dacha and the Kremlin gardens: hedgehogs, garter snakes in jars, hawks, even a tame fox. Long after Stalin had Bukharin executed in the final show trial of 1938, his fox still ran through the Kremlin gardens. Other friends came, like Sergo Ordzhonikidze and his wife, Zinaida. As a six-year-old, Svetlana watched the adult parties with a child’s curiosity: Semyon Budyonny played the accordion and the adults sang Russian folk songs. Even Nadya might dance the Georgian lezghinka, and Stalin, who had an excellent singing voice and fine pitch, might also sing.³⁶ Only Mikoyan, Budyonny, and Kliment Voroshilov outlasted Stalin. These “uncles” and “aunts” began to disappear in the mid-1930s; many were executed, and some, like Ordzhonikidze, committed suicide. Svetlana remembered only that, as a child, she couldn’t understand where everybody had gone. People simply “vanished.” No one explained why.³⁷

Stalin was forty-eight when Svetlana was born, and he preferred his vacations without noisy children. He and Nadya often took vacations in Sochi on the Black Sea, where the warm baths helped his rheumatism, in all likelihood a product of his numerous Siberian exiles. It seemed that often a whole retinue of Party members would drive south in a flotilla of cars. Svetlana kept her mother’s photographs of those trips. There was the image of Abel Enukidze, her mother’s beloved godfather, at picnics on the beach. Other Politburo members, like Molotov, Mikoyan, and Voroshilov, would be there. Taking vacations together was part of Party orthodoxy. Stalin had a deformed arm as a result of childhood accidents, as well as webbed toes on one foot, so he never swam. He preferred to stretch out on a deck chair on the beach reviewing documents. Svetlana was five years old before she was allowed to accompany her parents to their dacha in Sochi.

Looking back in her memoir, written when she was thirty-seven, Svetlana could speak only of these leaders’ “deaths,” not of their murders. “I want to put down only what I know and what I remember and saw myself,” is how she keeps the psychological trauma at a distance.³⁸ But here the split begins: Zubalovo was once a place of light and magic where old friends, revolutionary comrades, gathered to share summers and laughter with their children. And then everything turned murderously black.

In retrospect Svetlana would not deny the paradox of that childhood happiness. Its privileged isolation protected her from the terrible suffering of the time: the brutal internal Party struggles as Stalin asserted his ascendency over his rivals with purges of Old Bolsheviks and the Party elite; the deaths of millions of peasants from man-made famines caused by forced collectivization in the countryside in the name of rapid industrialization. The classless Bolsheviks had replicated the tsarist regime: now the people were the serfs and the leaders walled themselves within safe boundaries. There were not then the bourgeois excesses that the regime would become famous for after the war.

Nor could Svetlana deny the magic of that first world, when she lived with the timeless unconsciousness of a child in a place peopled with beings she loved. Should she merely have rejected this whole world? But she was at the core of a paradox. How could a world that seemed wonderful be also terrible? Her father petted and loved her and showered her with paternal tobacco kisses as, at her nanny’s urging, she trotted up to him with presents of violets and strawberries. How could he already be at the same time one of the world’s bloodiest dictators, biding his time?

Svetlana called her childhood normal, full of loving relatives, friends, holidays, pleasure. She even claimed that it was modest, and for the child of a head of state, perhaps it was, though the millions of Russians who were starving and displaced would have been outraged.

In her memoir she wrote: “If only out of respect for their memory, from love and profound gratitude for what they were to me in that place of sunshine I call my childhood, I ought to tell you about them.”³⁹

It was a willful declaration, for the memories were full of paradoxes and frustrations. “I keep trying to bring back what is gone, the sunny, bygone years of my childhood,” she would write over thirty years later, as if acknowledging the impossibility of this.⁴⁰

From the child’s point of view, the world may have been undiluted sun, though with a child’s intuition, she must already have sensed the cracks in her paradise. From an adult perspective, it was a labyrinthine tangle of pain and anxiety.

Chapter 2
A Motherless Child

Nadya with a young Svetlana, c. 1926.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

During the afternoon of November 7, 1932, Svetlana stood with her mother at the front of the crowd watching the soldiers march past the Hall of Columns to honor the fifteenth anniversary of the Great Revolution. This was the first time she had been allowed to attend the annual celebrations. It was an extraordinary festival, with stilt walkers, fire-eaters, and circus performers moving into and out of the throng of thousands of people. She looked up at her father on the platform where his giant image hung behind the Party magnates lined up dutifully on either side of the vozhd. She was only six and a half, but she understood that her father was the most important man in the world.

Earlier that day, her mother had called her into her room. “I saw my mother so rarely that I remember our last meeting very well.” Svetlana sat on her favorite takhta and listened as her mother delivered a long lesson on manners and deportment. “Never drink wine!” she said.¹ Nadya and Stalin always quarreled when he dipped his finger into his wine and put it into his children’s mouths. She protested that he would turn her children into alcoholics. Her final words to Svetlana were in character. Nadya dismissed as self-indulgence the emotional effusiveness that she associated with her mother, Olga; and her sister, Anna. Crying, confessions, complaining, and even frankness were not in her repertoire. The most important thing was to do one’s duty and to hide one’s secrets in the small square over one’s heart.

As her nanny put her to bed, Svetlana recounted how Uncle Voroshilov led the whole parade riding on a white horse.

On the morning of November 9, Alexandra Andreevna got the children up early and sent them out to play in the dark, rainy dawn. When they were bundled into a car hours later, the staff all seemed to be crying. They were driven to the new dacha at Sokolovka. Stalin had begun to indulge his penchant for building dachas, and that fall the family was using the Sokolovka dacha instead of Zubalovo. The house was gloomy, with a dark interior that seldom got any light. The children knew something was terribly wrong and kept asking where their mother was. Eventually Voroshilov arrived to take them back to Moscow. He was in tears. Their father seemed to have disappeared.

So many apocryphal stories have gathered around what had happened the previous night that it is impossible to sort fact from fiction, gossip from truth, but a rough outline of the night can be reconstructed.

In the late afternoon of November 8, Nadya was in the apartment in the Poteshny Palace preparing for the inevitably boisterous party to celebrate the Revolution. Her brother Pavel, currently stationed in Berlin as the military representative with the Soviet trade mission, was visiting and had brought her gifts, one of which was a lovely black dress. The Kremlin wives always complained that when they met Nadya at the fashionable Commissariat of Internal Affairs dressmaker on Kuznetsky Bridge, reserved for the Party elite, she selected the most drab and uninteresting clothes. They were amused that she was still following the outdated Bolshevik ethic of modesty.² That night, in her elegant black dress, she was beautiful; she had even placed a red rose in her black hair.

Accompanied by her sister, Anna, Nadya crossed the snowy lane to the Horse Guards building and entered the apartment of Comrade Voroshilov, the defense commissar, who was hosting the anniversary celebration for the Party magnates and their wives. Stalin sauntered down the lane from his office at the Yellow Palace in the company of Comrade Molotov and his chief of economics, Comrade Valerian Kuibyshev. They had only one or two guards with them, though the Politburo had banned the vozhd from “walking around town on foot.”³ The Politburio had concluded that Stalin was no longer safe, so hated were the policies of terror he had already adopted against so-called industrial saboteurs, bourgeois experts, and political terrorists conspiring with foreign powers. Assassination seemed a real possibility.

For everyone this was an occasion to unwind. The food arrived from the Kremlin kitchen—an ample spread of hors d’oeuvres, fish, and meat, with vodka and Georgian wine—served by the housekeeper. The men, many still sporting the tunics and boots that were a throwback to their revolutionary past, and the women in their designer dresses, sat at the banquet table. Stalin sat in his usual spot in the middle of the table, across from Nadya. This was a hard-drinking, exuberant lot, ready to down toast after toast to the old revolutionary triumphs and the new industrial achievements.

In the anecdotal reports in the multiple memoirs left behind by those present at the party that night, stories coalesce around the following details. Stalin was drunk and was flirting boorishly with Galina, a film actress and the wife of the Red Army commander Alexander Yegorov, by lobbing bread balls at her. Nadya was either disgusted or simply tired of all this. There had been gossip about Stalin’s current dalliance, with a Kremlin hairdresser. Stalin liked to confine his philandering to those from whom discretion could be ensured, and a hairdresser working at the Kremlin would have belonged to the secret police. Nadya had seen it all before and knew these affairs never lasted, though neither she nor anyone else seemed to know how far they went. Years later Stalin’s bodyguard Vlasik made the suggestive comment to Svetlana that her father “was a man after all.”⁴ That night, Nadya was seen dancing coquettishly with her Georgian godfather, Abel Enukidze, then administrator of the Kremlin complex, a usual stratagem for an angry woman to demonstrate her studied indifference to her husband’s flirtations.

Many accounts claim that it was a political toast that inflamed Nadya. Stalin toasted “the destruction of enemies of the state” and noticed that Nadya did not raise her glass. He shouted across the table, “Hey you, why aren’t you drinking? Have a drink!”⁵

She replied venomously, “My name is not hey,” before storming out of the room. The revelers could hear her shouting over her shoulder, “Shut up! Shut up!” as she exited. The room fell silent in shock. Not even a wife would dare turn her back on Stalin. Stalin only muttered contemptuously, “What a fool,” and kept on drinking.

Nadya’s close friend Polina Molotov rushed out after her. According to Polina, she and Nadya circled the Kremlin a number of times as Polina reminded her of how much pressure Stalin was under. He was drunk, which was rare: he was just unwinding. Polina said Nadya was “perfectly calm” when they said good night in the early hours of the morning.⁶

When Nadya returned to the Kremlin apartment, she entered her room and closed the door. After fourteen years of marriage, she and Stalin slept separately. Her room was down a hall off to the right from the dining room. Stalin’s room was to the left of the dining room. The children’s rooms were down another hall, and much farther down that hallway came the servants’ rooms.

Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Nadya took the small Mauser pistol that her brother Pavel had given her as a gift and shot herself in the heart.⁷

Nobody seems to have heard the shot—certainly not the children and none of the servants. In those days, the guard stood outside at the gate. Stalin, if he was home, seems to have slept through it all.

The housekeeper, Carolina Til, prepared Nadya’s breakfast, as she did every morning. She claimed that when she entered the room, she found Nadya lying on the floor beside her bed in a pool of blood, the little Mauser pistol still in her hand. Til ran to the nursery to wake Svetlana’s nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, and together they went back to Nadya’s room. The two women laid Nadya’s body on the bed. Rather than call Stalin, whose anticipated reaction terrified them, they phoned Nadya’s godfather, Abel Enukidze, and then Polina Molotov. The group waited. Finally Stalin woke and entered the dining room. They turned to him: “Joseph, Nadya is no longer with us.”⁸

Rumors would later surface that, after the party, Stalin had gone to the Zubalovo dacha with another woman and had arrived home in the wee hours of the morning. He and Nadya quarreled, and he’d shot her. Stalin was a kind of magnet for vengeful myths, but this one is unlikely. More convincing is the relatives’ certainty that Nadya committed suicide, and they were angry: how could she abandon her children like that?

They also claimed Nadya left a bitter and accusatory suicide note for Stalin, though supposedly he destroyed it immediately upon reading it. Pavel’s wife, Zhenya, reported that for the first few days, Stalin was in a state of shock. “He said he didn’t want to go on living either. . . . [Stalin] was in such a state that they were afraid to leave him alone. He had sporadic fits of rage.”⁹

Nadya and Stalin together at a picnic, from a photo taken in the early 1920s.

(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

The family needed to believe that he was devastated, and it is possible that he was. He had, in his way, loved Nadya, as his love letters to her attest. Even dictators can be sentimental. But his reaction was cruelly egocentric and focused on himself. Stalin’s sister-in-law, Maria Svanidze, recorded in her private diary the moment when she told Stalin that she blamed Nadya: “How could Nadya have left two children?” He responded, “The children have forgotten her after a few days, but I am left incapacitated for the rest of my life.”¹⁰ It is hard to imagine a father saying this of his grieving children, but Stalin’s self-pity seems convincing. Svetlana always believed, more realistically, that her mother’s suicide exacerbated Stalin’s paranoia: No one could ever be trusted; even those closest betrayed.

Why did Nadya, just thirty-one, kill herself? We will never know the truth, but speculations abound. The easiest explanation is that she was mentally ill. Initially, even Svetlana believed this. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: “[Nadya’s] medical report, preserved by Stalin in his archive, and the testimonies of those who knew her, confirm that Nadya suffered from a serious mental illness, perhaps hereditary manic depression or borderline personality disorder though her daughter called it ‘schizophrenia,’ and a disease of the skull that gave her migraines.” Nadya suffered multiple other ailments. She had had several abortions, a not uncommon form of contraception in those days, which resulted in a number of gynecological problems.¹¹ She retreated to spas and German health resorts, an indulgence, indeed almost a fetish, of most of the Party elite.

But eventually Svetlana came to see her mother’s despair as motivated by her opposition to Stalin’s repressive policies. The question is whether there is any credibility to this idea.

Nikita Khrushchev, her fellow student at the Industrial Academy, claimed Nadya tried to assert her independence from Stalin.¹² When she registered at the Academy in 1928, she retained her own name, Alliluyeva, though in truth this was not unusual among Bolshevik wives. She refused to travel to the Academy in a government car and rode the tram; this was why she had a pistol. Her brother Pavel had brought back two Mauser No. 1 pistols from a trip to England, giving one to Nadya and one to Molotov’s wife, Polina. Alexander Alliluyev, Pavel’s son, would later remark, “They took the tram to their school, and there was some real danger at that time in Moscow. Because of that, my father brought those two damned pistols from England. And in regards to this, Stalin said to my father, ‘You couldn’t find another gift?’ The gun had tiny bullets, but they were enough for Nadya to shoot herself in the heart.”¹³

From her correspondence as a teenager, it is easy to see Nadya as a dogmatic, idealistic young Communist. During the Civil War that raged after the Bolsheviks’ triumph, she seemed able to rationalize the violence as necessary to the survival of the Great Revolution. When, in June 1918, Lenin sent Stalin south to Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925) with 450 Red Guards to secure food supplies for Moscow and Petrograd, the seventeen-year-old Nadya and her brother Fyodor accompanied him as his assistants. A railway carriage was pulled to a siding, and Stalin used it as his headquarters. They hadn’t yet registered their marriage, but under Bolshevik convention, Nadya was already considered Stalin’s wife.

Immediately Stalin began to purge the city of suspected counterrevolutionaries. When he wrote repeatedly to Lenin demanding sweeping military powers, Nadya typed his letters. When Lenin ordered him to be ever more “ruthless” and “merciless,” Stalin replied, “Be assured that our hand will not tremble.”¹⁴

Stalin conducted a campaign of “exemplary terror.” He burned villages to show the consequences of failure to comply with the Red Army’s orders and to demonstrate what counterrevolutionary sabotage would lead to. His enthusiasm for indiscriminate violence did not seem to faze Nadya, typing away in her railway carriage.

Nadya loved Stalin and seemed comfortable rationalizing, indeed even glamorizing, the Bolshevik cult of violence. The passionate love letters they sent each other when they were apart had an electric, if conventional, intensity. As late as June 1930, when Nadya was in Carlsbad talking a cure for debilitating headaches (another report suggests that she was actually suffering acute abdominal pains, possibly from an abortion), Stalin wrote: “Tatka [his pet Georgian name for her]. Do write to me something. . . . It is very lonely here, Tatochka. Am sitting at home, alone, like a little owl. I have not been to the country—too much work. I have finished my own task. I plan to go the day after tomorrow to the country, to the children. Well, good-bye. Do not stay there for too long, come back soon. I—kiss—you. Yours, Josef.”¹⁵ One of her letters to him ended: “I beg you to take good care of yourself. I kiss you warmly, as you had kissed me at my leaving. Yours, Nadya.”¹⁶

But domestic life with Stalin had a different tenor and was extremely volatile. Nadya made a first attempt to leave him in 1926, when Svetlana was only six months old. After a quarrel, she packed up Svetlana, Vasili, and Svetlana’s nanny and took the train to Leningrad (as Saint Petersburg was renamed in 1924 after Lenin’s death), where she made it clear to her parents that she was leaving Stalin and intended to make her own life. He telephoned and begged her to come back. When he offered to come to get her, she replied, “I’ll come back myself. It’ll cost the state too much for you to come here.”¹⁷

Perhaps Stalin’s worst characteristic as a husband was the tantalizing quality of his affection. With her pride and reticence, Nadya rarely revealed family secrets, but her sister Anna remarked that she was a “long-suffering martyr.” Stalin, usually distant and inscrutable, could flare up with an uncontrollable temper and could be callously indifferent to his wife’s feelings. Nadya complained that she was always running Stalin’s errands—he needed a document in the commissar’s office; he needed a book from the library. “We wait for him, but never know when he will come home.”¹⁸

Nadya’s second year at the Industrial Academy, 1929, was the Year of the Great Turn and the forced collectivization of the peasantry into kolkhozy, or collective farms. The process was brutal. In order to root out private enterprise, village markets were shut down and livestock was confiscated. Kulaks, or prosperous peasants (owning one cow could constitute prosperity), were deported. Under this policy, known as dekulakization, peasants, “treated like livestock . . . often died in transit because of cold, starvation, beatings in the convoys, and other miseries.”¹⁹ By the year of Nadya’s death, 1932, the infamous Gulag (forced-labor camps) held “more than a quarter of a million people,” and 1.3 million, “mainly deported kulaks,” were living as “special settlers.”²⁰

In 1932 and 1933, famine raged in the Ukraine. Stalin and his ministers were shipping grain supplies abroad to pay for smelters and tractors in order to sustain the rapid pace of industrialization. Though the Ukraine Politburo begged for emergency relief, no assistance came. Millions died. In 1932, a number of Nadya’s fellow students at the Industrial Academy were arrested for speaking out about the famine. Nadya, too, was rumored to oppose “collectivisation and its immorality.” Critical of Stalin, she secretly sympathized with Nikolai Bukharin and the right-wing opposition.²¹ Stalin commanded Nadya to stay away from the Academy for two months.²²

In the early days, Nadya attempted to exert some influence. When Stalin was vacationing alone in Sochi in September 1929, Nadya wrote him a careful letter, reporting that the Party was exploding over a dispute at Pravda; an article had been published without first being cleared by the Party hierarchy. Though many had seen the article, everyone was laying the blame on her friend Leonid Kovalev, and demanding his dismissal. In a long letter with the simple salutation “Dear Josef,” she wrote:

Don’t be angry with me, but seriously I felt pain for Kovalev, for I know the colossal work that he has done in the paper. . . . To dismiss Kovalev . . . is simply monstrous. . . . Kovalev looks like a dead man. . . . I know that you detest my interference, but still I believe that you should look into this absolutely unjust outcome. . . . I cannot be indifferent about the fate of such a good worker and comrade of mine. . . . Good-bye, now, I kiss you tenderly. Please, answer me.²³

Stalin wrote back four days later: “Tatka! Got your letter regarding Kovalev. . . . I believe you are right. . . . Obviously, in Kovalev they have found a scapegoat. I will do all I can, if it is not too late. . . . I kiss my Tatka many, many, many times. Yours, Josef.”²⁴ Stalin did act on Nadya’s request and wrote to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, in charge of adjudicating cases of disobedience to Party policies, to say that scapegoating Kovalev was “a very cheap but wrong and unbolshevik method of correcting one’s faults. . . . Kovalev . . . IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES WOULD EVER let one line about Leningrad be printed, had it not been silently or directly approved, by somebody at the bureau.”²⁵ Kovalev was eventually dismissed from Pravda—not as an “enemy of the people” but rather as “a straying son of the Party.”²⁶

Nadya wrote back rather pathetically: “I am very glad that in Kovalev’s matter you have shown me your trust” and went on to report that the Academy was very friendly. “The academic achievements are judged according to rules: ‘kulak,’ the ‘center,’ the ‘poor one.’ We laugh a lot daily about that. I am already characterized as a right-wing,” a strange admission to make to Stalin who would soon destroy the so-called right-wing opposition.²⁷

There were clearly mounting tensions between Nadya and Stalin. She wrote in the summer of 1930, “This summer I did not feel that you might be pleased with a postponing of my departure, quite the contrary. The last summer I did feel that, but not now. . . . Answer me, if not too displeased by my letter, or rather, as you wish.”²⁸ He wrote back to say that her reproaches were “unjust.”²⁹ In October she wrote, “No news from you. . . . Maybe hunting quails absorbed you too much, or just too lazy to write.”³⁰ Stalin responded with irony: “Lately you have begun to praise me. What does that mean? Good or bad news?”³¹ Nadya’s letters to Stalin in Sochi often contained reports of the hunger in Moscow, the long lines for food, the lack of fuel, the disrepair of the city. “Moscow looks better now, but in some places like a woman who covered with powder her defects, especially after rains, when the paint runs in stripes. . . . One wishes so that these shortcomings would one day leave our lives, and people would then feel wonderful and work remarkably well.”³²

By the time of her suicide, it is possible that Nadya was not schizophrenic but rather disillusioned with her husband’s revolutionary politics. The night of her death, she refused to raise her glass in Stalin’s toast to “the destruction of enemies of the state.”

Nadya’s friend Irina Gogua, who had known her since their shared childhood in Georgia, when the Alliluyev children, having no bathroom in their own apartment, had come for weekly Saturday baths at her house, remembered how Nadya behaved in Stalin’s presence.

[Nadya] understood a lot. When I returned [to Moscow], I understood that her friends were arrested somewhere in Siberia. She . . . demanded to see their case. So she understood a lot. . . . In the presence of Joseph she resembled a fakir, who performs in the circus barefoot walking over broken glass. With a smile for the audience and with a terrifying intensity in her eyes. This is what she was like in the presence of Joseph, because she never knew what was coming next—what kind of explosion—he was a real cad. The only creature who softened him was Svetlana.

Gogua was not surprised when she heard the gossip that Nadya had committed suicide. Though the truth about her suicide was immediately suppressed, Gogua claimed that it was known among the security organizations. She added an interesting detail to her story. “Nadezhda had very perfect features and very beautiful features. But here is the paradox. The fact that she was beautiful was observed only after her death. . . . In the presence of Joseph, she was always like a fakir—always internally tense.”³³

As recently as 2011, Alexander Alliluyev, the son of Nadya’s brother Pavel, offered a convincing detail in the puzzle of Nadya’s suicide with a piece of the story that came to him from his parents.³⁴

Pavel was at work when he heard the news that his sister had committed suicide. He immediately phoned his wife, Zhenya. He told her to stay where she was; he’d be right home. When he arrived, he asked where she had hidden the packet of papers that Nadya had given them. “In the linen,” Zhenya replied. “Get them,” he told her.

Nadya had been planning to leave Stalin. She intended to go to Leningrad and had even asked Sergei Kirov, head of the Communist Party organization there, about getting a job in the city. In the packet of papers she left with her brother was supposedly a parting letter for him and his wife.

Zhenya kept the existence of the letter secret for two decades and spoke to her son, Alexander, of its contents only in 1954, after Stalin’s death. She told her son that Nadya had written that she “could not live with Stalin anymore. You take him for someone else. But he is a two-faced Janus. He will step over everybody in the world, including you.” Alexander commented, “We all came to know what kind of a person Comrade Stalin was, but at the time, only Nadya knew about this.”

Zhenya asked Pavel what they should do with the letter, and he replied, “Destroy it.” The destruction of the letter and documents, of course, makes it impossible to verify the story, as is the case with so many stories about the inscrutable Stalin.

As an adult, Svetlana always believed that Nadya committed suicide because she had concluded there was no way out. How could one hide from Stalin? Svetlana’s nanny later told her of overhearing Nadya’s conversation with a female friend just days before she committed suicide. Nadya said that “everything bored her, she was sick of everything, and nothing made her happy.” “What about the children?” the friend asked incredulously. “Everything, even the children,” Nadya replied.³⁵ Such boredom was a sign of profound depression, but it was a painful account for her daughter to hear. Her mother had been “too bored.” Svetlana’s responses to her mother would always swing, unresolved, between sentimental idealizations and bitter anger.

Svetlana could not remember how or when she was told of her mother’s death or even who told her. She remembered the formal resting in state that began at 2:30 on November 9. The news of Nadya’s death had been shocking, and hundreds of thousands of Muscovites wanted to say good-bye to her, even though many were hearing her name for the first time. Stalin kept his family life very private.

Nadya’s open coffin rested in the assembly hall at the GUM; a huge building with atria, it housed government offices as well as the GUM department store. Irina Gogua remembered that the lines of people outside were so long that some of the uninitiated public wondered what the stores were giving away.³⁶ Svetlana remembered that Zina, the wife of Uncle Sergo Ordzhonikidze, took her hand and led her up to the coffin, expecting her to kiss her mother’s cold face and say good-bye. Instead she screamed and drew back.³⁷ That image of her mother in her coffin seared itself in her mind, never to be dislodged. She was rushed from the hall.

There are several versions of Stalin’s behavior at the ceremony. In one, he sobbed, and Vasili held his hand and said, “Don’t cry, Papa.” In another, Molotov, Polina’s husband, always recalled the image of Stalin approaching the coffin with tears running down his cheeks. “And he said so sadly, ‘I didn’t save her.’ I heard that and remembered it: ‘I didn’t save her.’”³⁸ In Svetlana’s retelling, Stalin approached the casket and, suddenly incensed, shoved it, saying, “She went away as an enemy.”³⁹ He abruptly turned his back on the body and left. Had Svetlana herself heard this? The anecdote sounds like retrospective invective and does not seem like the observation of a six-year-old in hysterics. Perhaps this was someone else’s story.

A cortege of marching soldiers accompanied the coffin carried on a draped gun carriage covered in flowers. Vasili walked with Stalin beside Nadya’s coffin in the procession to the Novodevichy Cemetery. Svetlana was not present.

Svetlana believed her father never visited her mother’s grave. “Not even once. He couldn’t. He thought my mother had left him as his personal enemy.” Yet there were stories from Stalin’s drivers of secret nocturnal visits to Nadya’s grave site, especially during the coming war.⁴⁰

Mourners walk alongside Nadya’s coffin during the procession to Novodevichy Cemetery in November 1932. Vasili is the small boy in the front row. Svetlana was not present.

(Meryle Secrest Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University)

Pravda reported Nadya’s death in a perfunctory manner, without explanation. Her suicide was a state secret, though everyone in the apparat knew about it. The children, along with the public, were told another story: Nadya had died of peritonitis after an attack of appendicitis.

It would be ten years before Svetlana learned the truth about her mother’s suicide. Though this might seem astounding, it is entirely credible. The terror that Stalin had begun to spread around him particularly infected those closest to him. Who would dare tell Stalin’s daughter that her mother had committed suicide? Many would be shot simply for knowing the truth. It soon became “bad form” even to mention Nadya’s name.

Stalin was clearly shocked by Nadya’s death, but he got over it. He wrote to his mother:

MARCH 24, 1934

Greetings Mother dear,

I got the jam, the ginger and the chukhcheli [Georgian candy]. The children are very pleased and send you their thanks. I am well, so don’t worry about me. I can endure my destiny. I don’t know whether or not you need money. I’m sending you 500 rubles just in case. . . .

Keep well dear Mother and keep your spirits up. A kiss.

Your son,

Soso

P.S. The children bow to you. After Nadya’s death, my private life has been very hard, but a strong man must always be valiant.⁴¹

But for very young children the scars caused by a parent’s death are profound, in part because death is not something their young minds can grasp; they understand only abandonment. Svetlana’s adopted brother, Artyom Sergeev, remembered Svetlana’s seventh birthday party, four months after her mother’s death. Everyone brought birthday presents. Still not sure what death meant, Svetlana asked, “What did Mommy send me from Germany?”⁴² But she was afraid to sleep alone in the dark.

A childhood friend, seven-year-old Marfa Peshkova, granddaughter of the famous writer Maxim Gorky, remembered visiting Svetlana after Nadya’s death. Svetlana was playing with her dolls. There were scraps of black fabric all over the floor. She was trying to dress her dolls in the black fabric and told Marfa, “It’s Mommy’s dress. Mommy died and I want my dolls to be wearing Mommy’s dress.”⁴³

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