Stalin's Daughter (19 page)

When she and her father were alone, it was difficult to find subjects to talk about, other than the food they were eating or the botanical details of nearby plants. She was careful not to talk about people, in case she might mistakenly say something about someone that might arouse her father’s suspicions. She never knew what to say or, more important, what not to say. It was easiest when she read to him.

Dejected by the whole ordeal, Svetlana returned to Moscow after three weeks, but as soon as she was back in the Kremlin apartment with her son Joseph, she felt she was again trapped inside a sarcophagus. She grew desperate. Given her psychological history, Svetlana did not know how to be alone. Alone, she felt totally exposed. She thought she would be safe if only she could entwine her life in another, but then, once she had achieved this, she would feel suffocated, a pattern that would take her decades to break, if she ever succeeded.

Now she thought of Sergo Beria, the son of Lavrenty Beria, as a potential partner.

She and Sergo had been children together, watching cartoons in the Kremlin and going to Model School No. 25. Sergo Beria and her close friend Marfa Peshkova had just gotten engaged that year. She confronted Marfa, saying that Marfa should have known that she, Svetlana, had always been in love with
Beria. And ended their friendship. This was childish, petulant, and high-handed, the action of a princess in the Kremlin. She would look back with regret and say that she had thus lost two friends, Sergo and Marfa.
⁴³
Focused only on her own need, Svetlana seemed incapable of thinking rationally or pragmatically about what it would mean to have Lavrenty Beria as her father-in-law. Sergo’s mother, Nina, had already warned her son against such a union, certain that Stalin would think Beria was worming his way into power and would turn against them all.
⁴⁴
The twenty-one-year-old Svetlana seemed willfully naive about the perfidy of the closed political circle she lived inside.

After Marfa and Sergo Beria were married, Stalin called the young man to his dacha. Sergo described the encounter in his memoir. Though Beria is not always a reliable witness, the conversation has a certain plausibility. Allegedly Stalin said:

“Do you know your wife’s family? …” He then told me what he thought of that family: “Gorky himself was not bad in his way. But what a lot of anti-Soviet people he had around him…. I regard this marriage as a disloyal act on your part. Not disloyal to me but to the Soviet State…. I see your marriage as a move to establish links with the oppositionist Russian intelligentsia.” This idea had never even crossed my mind. My wife was pretty, plump like a quail, but not very intelligent and with a rather weak character, as I was to discover later. Stalin went on, … “It must be your father who urged you into this marriage, so as to infiltrate the Russian intelligentsia.”
⁴⁵

Two things are obvious from this conversation: the degree to which Stalin meddled in the private lives of his political allies and their minions and the fact that Svetlana had had a lucky
escape. Had she succeeded in marrying Sergo Beria, her life would have been impossible. Sergo’s contempt for his wife is unpleasant, but the rivalry between Stalin and Sergo’s father, Lavrenty Beria, would have made her life a living hell. However, when driven by need, Svetlana seemed to lose the instinct for self-preservation.

*
In her letters Svetlana underlined, capitalized, and added marginal notes and the occasional drawing, which uncannily gave them the emphasis of her speaking voice.

Chapter 8
The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign

By the end of the 1940s, Stalin had turned on many of the relatives who had celebrated his birthday with him in 1934.
Top row, left:
Anna Redens was arrested in 1948 (her husband, Stanislav, had been executed in 1940).
Middle row:
Maria Svanidze (
left
) was executed in 1942; although Sashiko Svanidze (
third from left
) survived, her sister Mariko was executed in 1942; Polina Molotov (
at Stalin’s left
) was arrested in 1948.
Bottom row, second from left:
Zhenya Alliluyeva was arrested in 1947.

A
fter the war, everyone in the Soviet Union expected an easing of restrictions. The Great Patriotic War had been won at immense cost and through heroic sacrifice. So much
reconstruction had to be undertaken. Surely now the long-promised era of socialist plenty was at hand. Instead, a new wave of repression was about to begin. With the cult of personality he’d fostered, Stalin had consolidated his power and assumed the template of the dictator. His adopted son, Artyom Sergeev, remembered an incident during which he heard Stalin upbraiding his son Vasili for exploiting the Stalin name.

“But I am a Stalin too,” Vasili had said.

“No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”
¹

Power, its preservation and execution, had filled the vacuum of a human being. Stalin was an idea now, infallible. And he was still fighting a war. Propaganda made it clear that the Soviet Union had enemies out to destroy it.

It was Winston Churchill who inserted the term Iron Curtain into the public imagination. On March 5, 1946, in a gymnasium at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declaimed: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”
²
Americans, who still thought of Stalin as Uncle Joe, believed Churchill was meddling. But their attitude would soon change.

Within a year after the end of World War II, the Cold War was under way, dividing the world into capitalist and communist spheres. In the background loomed the terrifying threat of the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. Stalin was now sure the United States intended to attack the Soviet Union sooner or later. In 1946, he placed the meticulous bureaucrat Lavrenty Beria in charge of atomic research. Highly restricted fenced-off settlements for Soviet scientists were constructed in remote regions. Well-trained Soviet spymasters soon brought Stalin the atomic secrets he wanted.
³
The first Soviet atom bomb was detonated in 1949.

Even as the playing field of atomic war was being leveled, suspicions between the two countries had grown exponentially since 1946. In 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act establishing the Central Intelligence Agency. By early 1948, the CIA had already helped to swing an election in Italy away from the Communists.
⁴
Now the deadly game of international intelligence gathering was afoot.

The CIA spied on its own citizens in a domestic campaign of fear. Beginning as early as 1945, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began hunting for Soviet spies and Communist sympathizers. Senator Joseph McCarthy created paranoia with his reckless Red Scare propaganda, and his sensationalized public hearings targeted thousands of Americans. But Stalin went much further. He turned his secret police, the MGB (Ministry of State Security), even more murderously against his own people. To instill and then control through fear had always been his strategy, and as he had learned from the earliest days, he had to keep the fear going. His solution was to engineer a campaign of ideological purification that became known as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign. All contacts with the West and Western culture were declared subversive. To be seen engaging in any conversation or transaction with any foreigners was forbidden; to seek to marry a foreigner was a crime. Foreign travel was restricted to high Party officials or those accompanied by “handlers.” A shroud of silence blanketed the country. No one dared to express criticism of the Great Stalin, who had won the war. As Sergei Pavlovich Alliluyev put it, “It was not done by anyone. It just wasn’t accepted, nor was it possible.”
⁵

By late 1947, the new wave of repression hit the Stalin family. At five p.m. on December 10, Zhenya, Pavel Alliluyev’s widow, now forty-nine and remarried, was at home in her apartment in the House on the Embankment. She was busy with her dressmaker,
sewing a new dress to celebrate the New Year. Zhenya’s married daughter Kyra, twenty-seven, was visiting and was in the dining room rehearsing Chekhov’s
The Proposal
with her theater friends. Zhenya’s sons—Sergei, nineteen; and Alexander, sixteen—were also there, as was her frail mother, who lived with them. The doorbell rang. Kyra answered it. Two military men, Colonel Maslennikov and Major Gordeyev, stood at the door. “Is Eugenia Aleksandrovna at home?” they asked. “Yes, come in,” Kyra replied and went back to rehearsing the play. Then Kyra heard her mother say, “Prison and bad luck are two things that you can’t avoid.”
⁶

They took Zhenya away in what she was wearing. Hastily kissing her children good-bye, she told them not to worry since she “had no guilt of any sort.” Other agents arrived; their search of the flat lasted well into the night. As they tapped the potted plants, Kyra asked, “What are you looking for? An underground passage into the Kremlin?” But irony was never a good idea with the NKGB. Anyone who came to the flat that evening was ordered to sit and wait. The agents took away all family photos with Stalin and Svetlana and Vasili in them, as well as all autographed books.
⁷

Transported to Vladimir Prison, Zhenya was accused of spying; of poisoning her husband, Pavel, who had died of a heart attack nine years earlier; and of interactions with foreigners. She was kept in solitary confinement. Her children were not permitted to contact her.

Zhenya confessed to all the accusations. She later told her daughter, “You sign anything there, just to be left alone and not tortured!” In prison, bombarded by the screams of victims begging for death, she swallowed glass. She lived, but suffered the consequences in stomach problems for the rest of her life.
⁸

The nighttime arrest had been so surreal that the fear kicked in only later. Alexander Alliluyev remembered that his brother
Sergei would lie in bed, waiting breathlessly to hear whether the elevator stopped on their floor. Rustlings or other sounds on the staircase would cause him to tremble. A few weeks later, at about six in the evening, the elevator did stop. Kyra was visiting, as, of course, the secret police knew. She was sitting reading
War and Peace.
When she answered the knock on the door, it was the commandants again. Her brothers stood behind her to protect her. As the agents read Kyra the arrest warrant, her grandmother cried. “Grandmother, don’t humiliate yourself, don’t cry, you mustn’t,” Kyra remembered saying.
⁹

Kyra was taken to a waiting car. As they drove across Moscow and she watched the streets disappear behind her, she wondered if she would ever see her city again. The journey across the nocturnal city took place in oppressive silence until the heavy gates of the Lubyanka prison swung open and the car drove into the courtyard. She remained stoic until they took everything from her and put her in a cell. Then she wept.

Her interrogator accused her of spreading rumors about Nadya’s suicide. She was dumbfounded. She didn’t know that Nadya had committed suicide. She had always believed the story about appendicitis. “I belonged to the kind of family where it wasn’t accepted to talk more than necessary. There was no gossip…. They needed something to accuse us of, so that was what they pinned on me: I was supposed to have talked to everybody.”
¹⁰

She was kept in solitary confinement for six months. Her salvation was her memory. It was vital to hold on to the belief that a real world still existed outside the walls of that madhouse. She visualized all the movies and musicals she knew. She was permitted to read. She paced her cell, asking herself what she had done. She had always been a good Pioneer, a good Komsomolka. She could not understand. It had to be Lavrenty Beria, who had always had it in for her family.

My only clue was that I was a relative of Stalin and I knew that Beria was bound to say something to Stalin that he would believe. My mother was very outspoken, she was freedom-loving, she was forthright with Stalin and equally truthful with Beria. He had evidently taken a dislike to her from the moment they set eyes on each other. I realized that all this had to be instigated by Beria. Stalin by this time was deeply under his influence.
¹¹

People advised Kyra to write to Stalin from prison, but she refused. It was better not to remind Stalin of her existence. But so twisted was her (and indeed most people’s) logic in this climate of fear that she could still rationalize, indeed justify, Stalin’s motives. Her brother Alexander explained: