in me was destroyed.”
Something else happened when she was 16: She fell in love, with someone who was all wrong. He was 40, married, a playboy, and Jewish. (In her memoirs, Svetlana doesn’t mention that he was married, or a playboy, but Simon Sebag Montefiore does.) The love interest was a prominent screenwriter named Alexei Kapler. They met when he was a guest at one of Vasily’s notorious parties at Zubalovo. But the romance that ensued between the screenwriter and the schoolgirl was “innocent enough,” writes Svetlana (believably). They went to art exhibitions, the movies, the theater, and the opera. He introduced her to books, including novels by Hemingway, which were extremely hard to obtain. They kissed and sighed. Svetlana basked in the intellectual company and the romance.
Kapler was arrested on March 2, 1943. The next morning, as Svetlana was getting ready for school, Stalin did something he had never done before: show up at her quarters unexpectedly. He was in a volcanic rage. “Your Kapler is a British spy!” he said. Svetlana protested that she loved him. And here is how she describes what happened next: “‘Love!’ screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me across the face, twice.” He also said that a war was on, and all his daughter could do was . . . Here he used what Svetlana describes as a “coarse peasant word.”
Her nanny, who was present, tried to protect her charge, crying that the accusation was untrue. Stalin dismissed this. Then he said to his daughter, “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool. He’s got women all around him!” With that, he left. Svetlana was devastated—“utterly broken,” she says. Her father’s words made her doubt that Kapler had ever loved her at all. Or that anyone could.
In a daze, she went on to school. When she came home, her father summoned her. She found him tearing up the letters and photos that Kapler had sent her. He muttered, “‘Writer’! He can’t write decent Russian!” Why, his daughter “couldn’t even find herself a Russian!” Apparently, says Svetlana, “the fact that Kapler was a Jew” was what bothered her father the most.
He sent him to the Gulag—to Vorkuta, for five years. (A normal person might, for once, sympathize with Stalin.) As Montefiore says, the amorous 40-year-old screenwriter was lucky he wasn’t shot. His five years were relatively easy—he was allowed to work in the theater. After his release, though, he broke parole, returning to Moscow, which was off-limits to him. He was rearrested and sentenced to another five years—this time, in a mine. When he was at last out, he and Svetlana had a brief affair, according to Montefiore. And that was that.
After Stalin’s confrontation with Svetlana that morning before school—March 3, 1943—nothing was ever the same between father and daughter. He lived ten more years, plus two days, but Svetlana hardly saw him. One might say she knew him only until she was 16. As she would write, “He loved me while I was still a child, a schoolgirl—I amused him.” But when she became an adolescent, with some of the problems that often attend that stage, she was less amusing.
Svetlana proceeded to Moscow University. She wanted to study literature, her bent and passion. But Stalin still cared enough about her life to disallow it. “You want to be one of those Bohemians!” he said. He told her to study history instead, after which she could do whatever she desired. That is exactly what she did. At the university, she concentrated on U.S. history, for the Soviet Union’s alliance with America had generated interest in that country, and enthusiasm for it.
Before long, she received a marriage proposal from a fellow student, Grigory Morozov. She had been madly in love with a Kremlin prince: Sergo Beria, son of one of the most monstrous of Stalin’s sub-monsters, Lavrenti Beria. She had known Sergo since childhood, but their relationship did not blossom as she hoped. So smitten was she by him, she even tried to upend his marriage. (She leaves this vexing business out of her books, but others do not.) In the mid-1990s, Sergo Beria was interviewed by Andrew Higgins of the London Independent. Little Beria criticized Svetlana because she had turned against her father. He himself venerated Stalin, as he did his own father.
Anyway, this Morozov proposed to Svetlana. He, like the banished Kapler, was Jewish. In one of her books, Svetlana writes, “I was drawn to kind, gentle, intellectual people. It so happened, independent of any choice on my part, that these lovely people, who treated me with such warmth, both at school and at the university, were often Jews.” She went to her father with Morozov’s proposal. It was May, and they were sitting outside, on a splendid day. For a long time, Stalin just stared at the trees, saying nothing. Suddenly, he said, “Yes, it’s spring. To hell with you. Do as you like.” He set one condition on the marriage: that the groom and husband never set foot in his house. Indeed, Stalin never met his son-in-law.
The next year, 1945, the Morozovs had a child, Josef. Was he named after Stalin? Of course. But he was named after his other grandfather too. (This other grandfather would be arrested a few years later.) Eventually, little Josef met his maternal grandfather, the Red Czar. Svetlana writes, “I’ll never forget how scared I was” the first time her father saw her son. The child “was about three and very appealing, a little Greek- or Georgian-looking, with huge, shiny Jewish eyes and long lashes. I was sure my father wouldn’t approve; I didn’t see how he possibly could. But I know nothing about the vagaries of the human heart, I guess. My father melted the moment he set eyes on the child.” Stalin saw him twice more.
In 1947, after three years of marriage, Svetlana and Morozov divorced. It is often said that Stalin wanted the divorce, or insisted on it. Or that the couple divorced because Stalin was starting his terror campaign against the Jews. Or that he was about to have his son-in-law arrested. Svetlana, for her part, says this is untrue: that she and her husband divorced “for reasons of a personal nature.” The facts are elusive here, as elsewhere. In any event, Stalin would tell his daughter, “That first husband of yours was thrown your way by the Zionists.” She could not convince him of the falsity of this belief. As for Morozov, he went on to be a distinguished lawyer and law professor.
Svetlana never wanted for men—for boyfriends, suitors, or husbands. In 1949, she took a husband much more appropriate, from the Stalin point of view. He was, in fact, a Kremlin prince, Yuri Zhdanov—son of the late Andrei Zhdanov, whom we have already met in this story: It was under him that one of Stalin’s illegitimate sons, Konstantin Kuzakov, worked in the Central Committee. Svetlana’s marriage to Yuri was not a great love match, certainly as she saw it. It was, she writes, “a matter of hard common sense,” devoid of “any special love or affection.”
The next year, they had a child, a girl, Yekaterina. The pregnancy was difficult, the child premature, and the mother miserable. In her misery, she wrote a letter to her father. He answered, with some of the old tenderness. One or two lines were not especially tender. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “Take care of your daughter, too. The state needs people, even those who are born prematurely.” Svetlana was glad to have the letter, any letter at all. (It would be the last her father sent her.) “But it made me terribly uneasy to think that the state already needed my little Katya, whose life was still in the balance.”
Stalin saw Katya once, when she was two and a half. He “wasn’t especially fond” of her, writes Svetlana. “She was funny as a button, with pink cheeks and dark eyes that were big as cherries. He took one look at her and burst out laughing.” By Svetlana’s count, Stalin had eight grandchildren. He saw three of them: her two kids, and Yakov’s Gulia. Vasily did not even attempt to bring his kids by. Svetlana says that Stalin enjoyed his brief encounters with his grandchildren, but “would have just as much enjoyed the children of strangers.”
To Morozov, Svetlana stayed married three years, and to Zhdanov, two. He was a chemist and went on to be the longtime rector of Rostov University. Unlike his ex-wife, he was always a Stalinist.
“My father died a difficult and terrible death,” writes Svetlana. She was at his bedside for three
