Luis’s mother, Carmen (the third Carmen, remember), has had two marriages since her first. Sadly, she is a tabloid figure, the object of mockery. She has some of the flamboyance and outrageousness of Alessandra Mussolini—but not the taste for politics, apparently. Speaking of fodder for the tabloids, one of Carmen’s brothers, Jaime, was convicted of abusing his girlfriend in 2009. The woman declared that Jaime was a “good person” except under the influence of cocaine.
So, Doña Carmen, the dictator’s daughter, has had problems to deal with, as most people do. And, according to Stanley Payne, she is a remarkably normal person: a woman without many airs, a woman “uncorrupted” by her peculiar circumstances. As I write, she is a year away from her 90th birthday.
Two of the Mussolini sons—Vittorio and Bruno—flew for her father in the civil war. Their younger brother, Romano, did not. For one thing, he was a child during that war; for another, he played the piano. But he met Franco in 1963, as he recounts in a book. The dictator “had never forgotten his rise to power in 1939 thanks to my father’s and Hitler’s support.” Romano found him in a pessimistic mood. Franco said, according to this account, “The Communists will win because there are millions and millions of poor in the world, and the poor will always be Communists.”
Before we get to Stalin, we should have a word about Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state. He had no children. But he did have a wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. She was his comrade in Communism and life alike. Krupskaya had a medical condition that apparently prevented her from having children. Lenin had a mistress as well: Inessa Armand. She had several children, both by her husband and by his brother. For a while, Lenin, Krupskaya, and Inessa lived at close quarters in a kind of ménage. It is said that Lenin liked children, taking a paternal interest in Inessa’s. There must have been limits to his liking, however: He sent children to concentration camps.
This is what Richard Pipes, the historian, pointed out when I raised with him the subject of Lenin and children. He cited an interesting source on the matter: Alexander Yakovlev, the Gorbachev-era Communist (about whom Pipes was completing a book).
Lenin’s successor, Stalin, was second to none in sending children to concentration camps. He had three of his own, from his two wives. He sired at least two other children as well. This was during his years of internal exile in the 1910s. One of his landladies, Maria Kuzakova, gave birth to a son in 1911. His name was Konstantin. A Stalin biographer, Robert Service, writes, “There was little doubt on the question of paternity. Those who saw Konstantin as an adult recorded how like Stalin he was in appearance and even in physical movement.” Stalin never had anything to do with him, but there are a few curious details.
Konstantin Kuzakov was admitted to Leningrad University. Stalin must have had a hand in this, according to another biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore. In 1932, the NKVD (a forerunner to the KGB) made Kuzakov sign a statement swearing that he would never discuss his “origin.” He worked in the Central Committee apparat under Andrei Zhdanov, a trusted deputy of Stalin’s. Zhdanov was also the father of the man who would become Stalin’s daughter’s second husband. (We will hear more about this later, of course.) Kuzakov went on to be a television official in the Ministry of Culture. He died in 1996, five years after the death of the Soviet Union.
He and his biological father never properly met, but there was an interesting encounter. Montefiore quotes Kuzakov himself: “Once, Stalin stopped and looked at me, and I felt he wanted to tell me something. I wanted to rush to him, but something stopped me. He waved his pipe and moved on.”
In 1914, Stalin met an adolescent girl named Lidia Pereprygina. She was 13, and he was 35. He got her pregnant. The baby died not long after being delivered. Stalin got Lidia pregnant again, and this second child lived. Born in 1917, he would bear the name of Alexander Davydov: adopted by the fisherman whom Lidia married. Unlike Konstantin, Alexander never had a glimpse of Stalin. Like Konstantin, he was made to sign a secrecy oath by the NKVD. He later ran a canteen in the mining town of Novokuznetsk—known from the 1930s until the 1960s as Stalinsk. He died in 1987.
Stalin had an adopted son, in addition to his two illegitimate sons and the two sons he had with his wives. This was Artyom Sergeyev, son of Fyodor Sergeyev, a top Bolshevik and ally of Stalin’s. The senior Sergeyev died in a notorious accident in 1921: An experimental high-speed train, the Aerowagon, derailed. Lenin himself assigned Stalin to look after Sergeyev’s widow and infant son. Artyom would call his adoptive father “Uncle Stalin.” He rose to be a major general in the Soviet army. He died in 2008—still devoted to the USSR, and to Stalin in particular. He regarded Gorbachev, the reformer who lost the Soviet Union, as a traitor.
An obituary in the Guardian, the British newspaper, told of his final moments: “As he lay on his deathbed, a group of war veterans brought him a medal in commemoration of Stalin.” The old general sat up slowly, and as the veterans pinned the medal on his pajamas, he said, proudly, “I serve the Soviet Union.” Those were his last words.
Stalin’s son Yakov served the Soviet Union, too. He was born of the dictator’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, in 1907. His mother died later in the year. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, was to write in one of her books that Yakov must have taken after his mother—“for there was nothing rough or abrasive or fanatical about him.” He was gentle, unassuming, and honest. After Yekaterina, or “Kato,” died, Stalin promptly forgot about Yakov. The boy was raised by his grandmother and other relatives. A biographer of Svetlana’s, Martin Ebon, writes that Yakov “was a relic of Stalin’s past. But he remained on the periphery of his father’s life, a goading reminder of Stalin’s early personal history, for more than three decades.”
One of the things that Stalin denied him was his name: Stalin, that is. The dictator’s two children with his second wife enjoyed the glory of the name. But Yakov was always a Dzhugashvili—that being his father’s original, Georgian name. Stalin discarded it for himself in about 1910. As Ebon notes, Yakov was “marked for emotional defeat early in life.”
He moved from Georgia to Moscow in 1921, when he was 13 or 14. He lived with Stalin and his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (“Nadya”). He had a hard time of it. To begin with, he had to learn Russian, which was difficult for him. Unfortunately, many things were difficult for him. He was a bit slow, or clumsy, or earnest. Stalin thought him a despicable country bumpkin. He scorned and bullied him. “In his eyes,” Svetlana writes, “Yakov could do nothing right.” Stalin “had no use for him and everybody knew it.”
Yakov married a priest’s daughter, Zoya. His father disapproved. In despair, Yakov went into the Stalins’ kitchen and shot himself, although failing in suicide. The bullet either grazed his chest or pierced a lung (accounts vary). His father snorted, “He can’t even shoot straight.” According to Svetlana, her father treated her brother even worse thereafter.
Stalin’s first son, Yakov Dzhugashvili
The young man worked at menial, or at least humble, jobs. He and Zoya had a baby, who died at less than a year. They soon divorced. In the mid-1930s, Yakov got married again, to Yulia, who was Jewish. Stalin once more disapproved. Svetlana writes, “He never liked Jews, though he wasn’t as blatant about expressing his hatred for them in those days as he was after the war.” Yakov and Yulia had a daughter, Galina, called “Gulia.”
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