Stalin's Daughter (15 page)

Svetlana, age sixteen.

B
y January 1942, the Red Army had driven the Wehrmacht from Moscow’s gates. The skeletal remains of German tanks lay like burned husks outside the city. Hitler had drastically miscalculated both Russian wiliness in tactical defense and the brutality of the Russian winter. It is estimated that
one million Russians, both military and civilian, died, but Stalin won the battle for Moscow. In June Svetlana and her retinue were given permission to return to Moscow. The previous autumn, a fire had almost destroyed the Zubalovo dacha; the family moved into the surviving wing. By October an ugly new house, painted camouflage green, was built in the shell.

Svetlana did not see her father until August, when she was summoned to his Kuntsevo dacha to attend a dinner for Churchill. The British prime minister had flown to Moscow for a consultation about Allied strategy. The news Churchill was bringing was not good. There would be no Allied second front to distract Hitler from his assault on the USSR for a good while yet.

Svetlana had no idea why she was summoned to this dinner. Her father forbade any interaction with foreigners, and she was never included in diplomatic circles. When he introduced her to Churchill and said she was a redhead, Churchill remarked that he too had been a redhead but, waving his cigar over his bald pate, said, “Look at me now.” She was too shy to respond. Very soon, her father kissed her and told her to run along. Reflecting on this strange moment much later, she concluded that her father had been performing for Churchill, demonstrating what a charming domestic life he had.
¹

Svetlana was still a schoolgirl in the tenth grade. She was reading Schiller, Goethe, Gorky, Chekhov, and the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin. She loved Dostoyevsky, even though her father had banned his books. Slowly she was growing into an independent-minded young woman. But according to her friend Marfa Peshkova, Stalin was becoming more and more disapproving of his teenage daughter. If she wore a skirt above her knees, wore shorts, or wore socks instead of stockings, he would rage: “What’s this! Are you going around naked?” He
ordered her to wear
sharovary
(baggy pants tight at the ankles) and had a dress made for her that covered her legs.
²
His reprimands often brought Svetlana to tears, but she was stubborn and staged her rebellion shrewdly. She heightened the hem of her dress slowly until it was back above her knees. She knew her father was too busy to notice.

In the autumn of 1942, a new student, Olga Rifkina, entered Model School No. 25. Olga had an unusual background for this elite school. She was from a poor Jewish family living in a one-bedroom communal apartment shared with two other families. Her mother kept them all going by working as a journalist for
Pravda.
The year 1941 had been terrible. That June the government had issued a directive for the evacuation from Moscow of all children under the age of three. Olga and her mother, grandmother, and baby brother Grisha left for Penz. When they returned to Moscow in May 1942, Olga had missed a year of school.
³
Model School No. 25 had special placement for such children. She was enrolled and sent to live with her grandmother.

Olga’s memories of the school were mostly unhappy. While the teachers never singled out students who were poor, the other children made her aware of her inferiority. She would look back and say, “Only one person, who seemingly had the most reason to preen, … was a true ‘personality’ not tied to her position. This was Svetlana Stalina.”
⁴
Olga remarked in an interview:

I really did like Svetlana very much right away…. She was a particularly humble person. And even shy. And she had a lot of charm and femininity. She attracted my attention. I always looked admiringly at her. And our friendship survived all our lives. Until the last day.
⁵

Soon the two girls became deskmates. After school they would take long walks along the Moskva River, though these walks were often interrupted when Svetlana would suddenly say, “I can’t be late. My Papa is coming. I haven’t seen him in two weeks.” Olga had the impression that, like most people, Svetlana thought of her father as the “great, big Stalin, but not exactly a father.”
⁶

Because of the food shortages caused by the war, most people, including Olga’s family, often went hungry. Olga recalled that, after coming home from school, she would eat a bowl of soup and then, with a glass of
kakavella
(a drink made from boiled cocoa pods), do her homework. When there was no food for the evening, her grandmother would tell her to go to bed while she still wasn’t hungry; otherwise she’d never be able to sleep. Olga remarked, “Svetlana, of course, could not imagine any of this. At the time she was artificially isolated from regular life…. She never had to buy anything, she could barely tell the denominations of money apart.”
⁷

At school, Svetlana did not parade as Stalin’s daughter. She often complained that the other students looked on her as if she were an “insider” and had access to secret information. But she assured Olga, “I don’t know anything, nor do I really care.” She hated the teacher who made her write out lists of all the things that carried her father’s name: the mountain in Perm, Stalingrad on the Volga, the ZiS car (Zavod imeni Stalina, Factory in the Name of Stalin). Olga recalled: “Poor Svetlana. She wanted so much to be equal with everyone else. I remember once she stepped on a young man’s foot and he called her a ‘ginger cow’—she even beamed with joy.”
⁸

One indication of her status, however, was that Svetlana had her bodyguard, Mikhail Klimov, who had accompanied her in the evacuation to Kuibyshev. Most of the elite children had bodyguards—the Molotov children had three. The bodyguards
had their own separate room beside the school cloakroom, where they spent their day. Both Olga and Svetlana played piano, and they often went to the conservatory together to hear music by their favorite composers: Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, or Prokofiev. Klimov would buy the tickets. If there was violin music on the program, he would complain: “We are going to saw the wood again” and sit behind them, shuddering.
⁹
Svetlana claimed to have grown fond of Klimov, but it was disconcerting to have someone always shadowing her.

Both girls were readers. Svetlana had a copy of the 1925
Anthology of Russian Poetry of the Twentieth Century.
Together they would read the subversive work of Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Sergei Yesenin. While still in grade ten, Olga gave Svetlana a notebook full of her poems. She felt Svetlana was a kindred spirit: she, too, had had her happy childhood shattered by misery; she, too, was deeply attached to her absent mother. In response, Svetlana wrote a poem to Olga:

Through poetry, as if through clear tears, looking

Into her soul, again and again

How can I not understand her, if I too am

Waiting in vain for my dear mother? …

To the lovely girl with the eyes of spring

I find I am unable to speak

About myself and about how close and clear

Are her thoughts, her dreams, and her grief.
¹⁰

Though addressed to Olga, the poem was really an elegy for Nadya, now dead ten years. It spoke to Svetlana’s terrible isolation. Nothing of the pain of loss had healed. Olga slowly came to realize that Svetlana was “essentially an orphan.”
¹¹

After her return to Moscow, Svetlana spent much of her
time at the Zubalovo dacha while her father, preoccupied with the war, was mostly in his bunker hunkered down with his Politburo. Her brother Vasili also lived at Zubalovo with his wife, Galina. Now twenty-one, Vasili had graduated from the Lipetsk Aviation Institute. In October 1941 he became a captain. By February 1942, he had been promoted to colonel. His friend Stepan Mikoyan, wounded and in the hospital, recalled his surprise when Vasili visited him in Kuibyshev in his colonel’s uniform. According to Mikoyan, Vasili later explained that his father had taken him aside and told him he didn’t want him to fly. Too many sons of the elite had already been lost: Mikoyan’s brother, Khrushchev’s son, the war hero Timur Frunze. Vasili was appointed chief of the Air Force Inspection Command to keep him grounded. He flew only one or, at most, two combat missions. Though Stalin was often strict and rude with Vasili, Stepan Mikoyan believed he actually loved his son. Vasili soon had a grand office in Moscow on Pirogov Street.
¹²

Stalin’s younger son, Vasili, was a colonel of the Red Army Air Force by the time this photo was taken in 1943.

Vasili surrounded himself with fellow pilots and treated them like courtiers. He liked to fete them at Aragvi, his favorite Georgian restaurant, where the food was lavish even when the war was raging and Moscow was still being bombed. An orchestra played the latest dances, and the Russian elite sang into their vodka.
¹³

That fall Vasili turned Zubalovo into a party house; he particularly liked pilots, actors, directors, cameramen, ballet dancers, writers, and famous athletes. Stepan Mikoyan thought he gave these late-night drinking parties in subconscious imitation of his father, who used to summon select members of his Politburo to Kuntsevo and keep them up drinking until four or five a.m.
¹⁴
Most who came were somehow involved in the war—the pilots were flying bombing missions; the filmmakers were shooting footage at the front, often from inside the trenches or with cameras mounted on tanks; the writers were working as journalists covering the war. The evenings had a Hemingwayesque flamboyance. Everyone came to watch films in the small private cinema at the dacha and to listen to the American jazz tunes that were constantly churning on the record player. There would be long drunken nights with people dancing the fox-trot. For many the hard edge of death framed the moment with an intensity unknown in peacetime.

Vasili insisted that his sister come to the parties. Svetlana mostly watched the bacchanal from the sidelines. Friends who attended, like Marfa Peshkova, noted that she had suddenly turned into an attractive young woman, though she still seemed closed off in her own private torment. Sometimes the parties got out of hand. On one occasion, when Vasili was very drunk, he insisted that his pregnant wife tell a joke. When she refused, he hit her, though luckily she fell back onto a couch. Enraged, Svetlana threw her brother out of the house along with his drunken buddies. Yet the parties continued.
¹⁵

Svetlana with her friend Stepan Mikoyan, the son of the longstanding Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan, in 1942.

Svetlana assumed that no one noticed her, but she had caught the attention of Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler. The Jewish Kapler, then thirty-eight, was one of the most famous screenwriters in the USSR. He was the author of the epic films
Lenin in October
and
Lenin in 1918
, and in 1941 he had been awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize. Kapler was supposedly working with Vasili on a film about air force pilots, though evenings were spent mostly drinking, and the film was never made. Kapler was within the inner sanctum of the head of state—best friends with the dictator’s son, who was wild and outrageous. It was heady stuff. He was obviously a man who loved risk. Though he was married, he and his wife were separated, much to his distress, and he was on his own.

One night the Zubalovo group was invited to a film preview on Gnezdnikovsky Street, and Svetlana found herself talking with Kapler about movies. All those years of watching films in the Kremlin with her father paid off. Kapler was intrigued.
Describing his impression of her to a journalist years later, Kapler said that he had been surprised. Svetlana was not like the other girls in Vasili’s retinue. She was not what he expected. He was taken with “her grace and intelligence … the way in which she would talk to those around her, and the criticisms she made on various aspects of Soviet life—what I really mean is the freedom within her.”
¹⁶
Her “judgments” were “bold and her manner unpretentious.” She was not decked out like the other women in their gorgeous outfits, preening for attention. She wore “practical, well-made clothes.”