even took away his proud, glorious name, imprisoning him as “Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev.” (“Vasilyev” had been one of his father’s noms de guerre.)
As time passed, he appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, the new Number 1. After almost seven years’ imprisonment, he was taken to see Khrushchev. Another Stalin biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov, tells the story, via Alexander Shelepin, who was the head of the KGB at this time. Shelepin says that Vasily “fell to his knees and begged and implored and wept. Khrushchev took him in his arms and was in tears himself, and they talked for a long time about Stalin. After that, it was decided to release Vasily immediately.” This was in January 1960. Vasily went back to his old ways, to the extent he could, hopelessly alcoholic. They exiled him to the (closed) city of Kazan. He died there in March 1962, at the age of 40. The stone of the grave they put him in bore neither the name Stalin nor the name Vasilyev. It said “Dzhugashvili,” just like poor Yakov.
There is a coda to this story. In 1999, eight years after the end of the Soviet Union, Vasily was partially rehabilitated by the Russian supreme court. The court overturned the 1953 conviction for anti-Soviet statements and reduced the degree of some of the other convictions. Three years later, in 2002, Vasily’s remains were removed from Kazan to Moscow, where they were buried next to those of his mother.
Vasily was a victim, in a sense, like Stalin’s other children, and like many of the sons and daughters of dictators whom we are surveying. Needless to say, Stalin had millions more victims, unknown to him personally. And Vasily was victimizer as well as victim. What Dmitri Volkogonov says is true: “Vasily’s life was an illustration in miniature of the moral sterility of Stalinism.” He was “fine proof that the abuser of power [Josef Stalin, in this case] corrupts everyone he touches, including his own children. The Caesars, having reached the acme of their power, often left behind them children flawed in body and soul, morally dead while the dictator was still living and revelling in his own immorality.”
We now get to Svetlana: the most famous of all the “children of monsters,” probably, except for the sons who succeeded their father in “office”—a Duvalier in Haiti, a Kim in North Korea, an Assad in Syria, another Kim in North Korea. Why is Svetlana so famous? There are two main reasons, I think, one more important than the other. The less important reason is this: She defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1967. This caused a global sensation. But the more important reason is that she got it all down, and superbly. She wrote up her life in three books. The first two have enduring power, and the third is not without interest.
Svetlana was born, as you know, in 1926, when her father was firmly entrenched in the Kremlin. What we have said about other dictators and their daughters, we can say about Stalin and Svetlana: He adored her, and she adored him back. Stalin felt more tenderly toward his daughter than he did toward any other human being. Later, she thought she knew why. She often said, “I reminded him of his mother, who had red hair and freckles all over, just like me.” Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Svetlana’s mother, was not the maternal type. She was the Bolshevik type: devoted to Party and work, not to “bourgeois” interests such as family. Svetlana could not remember that her mother had ever hugged, praised, or kissed her. Nadya thought that her husband coddled their daughter.
Father and daughter
We might pause to imagine a household in which Stalin is the more loving parent.
Still, Svetlana always cherished the memory of her mother, and this cherishing grew with the years. She dedicated her first book “To My Mother.” Later yet, she regarded her mother as a kind of angel, I believe.
She killed herself—Nadya did—in 1932, when she was 31. Svetlana was six. She was told that her mother had died from a burst appendix. She would not find out the truth until later (ten years later). As an adult, she would write that her mother was “driven to despair by a profound disillusionment and the impossibility of changing anything.” In her life with Stalin, Nadya was trapped. (Such was the predicament of countless Russians and other people in the Soviet Union, in any number of stations.)
I should pause once more to say that, from the beginning, there have been people who think that Nadya did not kill herself; that, in fact, Stalin killed her. Serious people take this suspicion seriously. But most who have looked into the question believe that Nadya was a suicide, and that is the assumption of this book.
For the next ten years—that is, until Svetlana was 16—Stalin continued to treat his daughter tenderly. She was “Setanka” and “Setanochka” (nicknames derived from “Svetlana”). She was also his “little fly” and “little sparrow.” Furthermore, she was his “little Housekeeper”: the mistress of the house. Sometimes Stalin rendered this “Comrade Housekeeper.” She was also the “Boss.” Even Stalin’s underlings, members of the Politburo, went along with this game: “All hail Boss Svetlana!” The real boss had another game, too: He would have Svetlana issue orders to him, in writing. Then he would respond, “I obey.” He had a habitual sign-off in his notes to her: “From Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.”
You can imagine how Setanka felt about her father: He was not only her own adored father—and it’s natural for little girls to adore their fathers—he was the king of the whole wide world. In a memoir, she says that she never heard her father’s name except with such words as “great” and “wise” attached to it. This was true at home, at school, and everywhere else. The atmosphere at home was “official, even quasi-military,” she says. Home was run by the secret police, to a considerable extent. But Svetlana was not unduly stifled.
She was a bookish child, even an intellectual one. She loved literature, foreign languages, music. She had fine tutors. She went to school with other Kremlin children. In this period, her life was probably as happy and normal as possible, under the circumstances.
Nonetheless, there were shadows. With some regularity, her schoolmates would simply disappear. They would be there one day, and not the next. Their fathers had fallen from favor, being arrested, imprisoned, or killed. Sometimes, a schoolmate would give Svetlana a note to pass to her father. It had been written by the schoolmate’s desperate mother, whose husband had been dragged away in the night. Could Comrade Stalin do something? The dictator got sick of these notes, telling his daughter not to serve as a “post-office box.”
Worse, much worse, her own relatives disappeared: her aunts, uncles, and cousins. These were members of Nadya’s family. Stalin had taken her suicide, quite naturally, as a gross insult and betrayal. He punished her family for it. He also punished the family of his first wife, Kato. Those relatives were killed or imprisoned too. Why? It’s usually foolish to ask such questions about Stalin: but he probably wanted to erase signs of the past. Svetlana writes that it was hard to think of her beloved aunts and uncles as “enemies of the people,” as the official propaganda had it. “I could only assume that they must have become the victims of some frightful mix-up, which ‘even Father himself’ could not disentangle.” There would come a time, an awful time, when she realized it was all his doing. And he had an explanation for her: “They knew too much. They babbled a lot. It played into the hands of our enemies.”
You and I can do our best to slip into the skin of such people as Svetlana Stalina. To be in sympathy with them. But it takes a very big imagination to slip into the skin of a girl whose adored relatives, after her mother’s death, were killed by her own adored father.
She was 16 when she found out about her mother—about the way she died. With her gift for languages, and her curiosity about the world, she liked to read English and American magazines. They were available to someone in her privileged position. “One day,” she writes, “I came across an article about my father. It mentioned, not as news but as a fact well known
