Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  In the program she undertook, Svetlana was required to be knowledgeable about American geography, history, and economics, for the moment all ideologically acceptable because the United States had become an ally. She wrote essays on Roosevelt’s New Deal, on US-Soviet diplomatic relations in the 1930s, on American trade unions, and on US foreign policy in South America and Europe. She would end up knowing more about the United States than many European and even some American students.

  At least initially, social life in college was difficult. Olga Rifkina recalled that people came to lectures to look at Svetlana and her bodyguard, though gradually “they got used to her and treated her with sympathy.”14 Svetlana always claimed that her new university friends separated her from her father. Many of the students’ parents or relatives had gone through the repression of the late 1930s, but she maintained that “it was the same in our family and it changed nothing in their feelings for me.”15 Of course, this was wishful thinking on her part. People may not have dared to speak out against Stalin, but as Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana must often have been viewed with suspicion, while some may have seen her as a quick route to coveted privileges. Friendships could rarely have been as disinterested as she hoped.

  Most of the children of the Kremlin elite, the “Kremlin set” as Svetlana called them, sought life outside the fortress. They had a running joke. When they left the Kremlin for a particular destination, they would say: “The subjects have gone to the objects,” imitating the parlance of the secret police.16 Svetlana found ways to slip the noose of scrutiny. With her Alliluyev cousins, she would drive for hours around the Moscow suburbs at night, though her father had not given her permission to drive. Then in December she asked her father to dismiss her bodyguard; it was humiliating to have a “tail.” She was seventeen and a half and wanted to be able to walk down the street by herself. She recalled her father’s response: “To hell with you then. Get killed if you like. It’s no business of mine.”17

  Svetlana did not invite her new school friends to the Kremlin, embarrassed that they needed a pass to enter the gates. Olga Rifkina remembered only one occasion when Svetlana invited her home. It was 1944. The last exam at the end of their first year involved assembling a rifle. The university armory room was closed, but Svetlana said she had a rifle at home. Olga remembered passing Stalin’s well-guarded door in the Kremlin apartment. Svetlana’s nanny served them food while they practiced assembling the rifle.18

  After that last exam, however, Svetlana began to distance herself from her group. She seemed to be spending her time with a fellow student named Grigori (Grisha) Morozov (the family’s name was actually Moroz, but the family members had changed it to hide their Jewish origins).19 Four years older and a close friend of Vasili, Morozov was someone Svetlana had known from her high school days. They began to date, often going to the theater or cinema.

  Svetlana may have gotten rid of her personal bodyguard, but the security forces were still watching her. Soon she received a phone call from General Vlasik, Stalin’s chief of security. The conversation was clipped: “Listen, this young Jew of yours—what is it between you?” She replied, “The Jew?” She was shocked. Nobody openly made ethnic distinctions—yet. It would be a couple of years before anti-Semitism became state policy. She said she knew Grigori Morozov from school. They were dating, that was all.

  General Vlasik told her that he knew everything—for instance, he knew that Morozov wanted to get into the new Institute of International Relations but needed a military deferment. “We can help. Do you really want him released from the army?” When she said yes, the general replied, “OK. We’ll do that. We’ll release him.” General Vlasik, too, could decide the fate of people with a phone call.20

  Svetlana was not in love with Morozov—she was still pining for Aleksei Kapler—but she was looking for a way out of her Kremlin life. She felt her father now treated her with a kind of contempt, as if she had somehow been “soiled”: “I wasn’t his little girl anymore. I grew up wrong.” Morozov phoned continually. When he eventually proposed, she agreed to marry him. “He was sweet. I was lonely, and he loved me.”21 She said she would ask her father.

  Svetlana claimed that when she went to Kuntsevo to get Stalin’s permission, her father said flatly that he did not approve of the marriage because Morozov was Jewish. He fumed. “The Zionists put him over on you.” It was “impossible to convince him that this was not so.”22

  Svetlana believed that her father was deeply anti-Semitic, and that this trait increased as he became more and more convinced of the existence of a Jewish conspiracy against the Soviet Union. In the end apparently he told her, “To hell with you. Do as you like.”23

  But Stalin also ranted that Morozov was studying at a university while other young Russians were dying at the front. Svetlana said nothing about her successful efforts to get Morozov a military deferment. When Stalin contacted Vlasik to say, “Our little girl is going to get married,” Vlasik assured him, “We know the fellow. He’s a good Communist. He’s all right.”24 Stalin did not stop the marriage, but he categorically refused ever to meet Morozov, and though he continued to support the couple financially, he kept to his word. Morozov never met his father-in-law. Because it was wartime, there was no wedding celebration.

  With Stalin’s permission, the young couple moved into the House on the Embankment. This was a huge complex of 505 apartments, designed by the architect Boris Iofan and completed in 1931. Built on the banks of the Moskva River facing the Kremlin, the complex covered three acres and was the largest apartment block in Europe. The House on the Embankment was intended as a residence for Party officials and other members of the elite. It had a theater, exclusive stores, and a collective kitchen where residents could order pre-prepared dinners. A number of Svetlana’s relatives had moved there in 1937, including the families of Aunt Anna and Aunt Zhenya. It was, however, a sinister building. In tsarist times, a tunnel had been built under the river, and this tunnel was made to align with Block 12 of the new complex when it was built. Secret police could come up the back stairs.25 Svetlana and Morozov lived in apartment 370 in the ninth entrance.

  Marfa Peshkova recalled that, once out of the Kremlin, Svetlana seemed to become much more independent. She held parties in the apartment for her literary friends, at which they read and discussed their poems. When friends came over, she always made a point of turning her father’s portrait to the wall.26 But soon the eighteen-year-old was pregnant. When Stalin learned of Svetlana’s pregnancy, he had Zubalovo reopened, saying a pregnant mother needed country air. As always, the message from Stalin was mixed—just enough demonstration of family ties to keep his daughter dangling.

  On May 9, 1945, radios blared the announcement of the end of the European war. Jubilant crowds poured into the streets of Moscow. American Ambassador George Kennan stood on the balcony of the American Embassy watching the thousands of people on the pavement below tossing people into the air and passing them over friendly hands. And cheering America. The United States had helped the USSR defeat the Germans—war aid had included everything from weaponry to Spam. Kennan waved to the throng below, stepped up, and shouted, “Congratulations on the day of victory. All honor to the Soviet allies.” But he remained pensive. He feared Stalin’s intentions. Fascist Italy and Germany had been defeated, but he felt that “a third totalitarian state was poised to dominate much of the post-war world.” Kennan would eventually turn out to be a significant figure in Svetlana’s life, but for the moment, he didn’t even know that Stalin had a daughter.27

  Svetlana phoned her father. “Congratulations on your victory, Papa! I just heard that the war is over.” Stalin replied, “Yes, thank you very much. Yes, we have won.” He asked her what she was doing. She said she was about to have her child. He said, “Well, all right, and take care of yourself.”28 And that was it. He did not invite her and her husband to celebrate the victory with him. Svetlana and Morozov had their celebratory party in their own apartment.


  The war was over, but the price to the USSR was astounding. Of the 34.5 million men and women mobilized, an incredible 84 percent were killed, wounded, or captured. The total military deaths are estimated at 8.6 million, though estimates have gone as high as 23 million; at least 17 million civilians died, but the number is imprecise because statistical records do not include the hundreds of thousands who starved to death. “The Soviet population suffered out of all proportion to the sufferings of Soviet allies.” No part of the country escaped the carnage. It had been the “disaster of a century.”29

  Svetlana and Morozov’s only child, Joseph, was born two weeks after Victory Day. She insisted that the name was not a covert appeal to her father. Both of the child’s grandfathers were named Joseph. She finally took the infant Joseph to see his grandfather at his Kuntsevo dacha that August. It happened to be the day the Americans bombed Hiroshima. “[My father] noticed me, of course, but my news—that I’d had a baby—didn’t matter very much in this context. I went back home.”30

  Svetlana had few ties with her father now. If she phoned, Stalin might say he was busy and bang down the phone. It would take her weeks to find the courage to phone again. She and Morozov continued their studies. Their child lived mostly at Zubalovo with his two nannies: Svetlana’s old nanny, Alexandra Andreevna Bychkova; and the nanny who looked after Gulia, Yakov’s daughter. Most Soviet women left their children like this. While the elite left their children with nannies, the majority left them at nurseries on Monday morning and picked them up late on Friday; otherwise they left them with their babushkas (grandmothers). Even if this was common practice, Svetlana seemed not to remember how bitterly she had resented her mother’s absences. Svetlana’s relatives would comment laconically, “She wasn’t a warm mother,” but then add that she’d never learned what a mother was.31

  By most accounts, Morozov was a charming young man, and the marriage began well. Decades later Svetlana could recall how simple life had been and how happy they were as students.32 Yet, later, she would also characterize her young husband to her daughter Olga as a “shirt-tearer.” He would become outraged at something and yell at her while literally tearing his shirt.33

  On December 1, 1945, a year and a half into her marriage, Svetlana wrote to her father, who was vacationing in Sochi. In early October, she’d sent him a photograph of her son, and he’d sent a gift of mandarins in return:

  Hi my dear Papochka,

  I’ve never been happier than today when I received your letter and the mandarins. . . . I’m waiting for you in Moscow and maybe you will send another kind letter like that one. Kissing you, my dear daddy.34

  Svetlana was trying desperately to repair relations with her father. It would seem that her marriage was already in trouble. She would soon be twenty, and married life was not what she’d expected. When she was distraught, Svetlana would turn to her father to seek emotional support.

  There were probably a number of reasons for the alienation between her and Grigori, of course, but one, according to her friend Marfa Peshkova, was the multitude of Morozov relatives coming to visit and asking for a better apartment or for their children to be placed in various elite schools and institutions.35 Her cousin Vladimir Alliluyev dismissed Morozov as an opportunist. “Svetlana’s husband filled the apartment with his friends and continuously asked for various comforts and favors. Svetlana found herself shoved into the back corner.”36 Svetlana was still shy in any public gathering, and this portrait of her becoming a shadow in her own home among her husband’s guests is not unlikely.

  Rumors in Kremlin inner circles claimed that Stalin engineered the divorce, though Svetlana always denied this. The main problem was elsewhere. She’d just turned nineteen when she had Joseph, and soon she found herself pregnant again. She claimed to have had three painful abortions in her three-year marriage.37 This might seem shocking, but abortion had always been a common form of birth control in the Soviet Union until, along with homosexuality, it was declared illegal after the census indicated a drastic fall in population—and even then, exceptions were always made.38 When Svetlana finally became seriously ill after suffering a miscarriage, she decided to flee. She told Grigori she was moving back to the Kremlin and taking Joseph with her.

  Years later, she would write to her friend Rosa Shand:

  In fullest sincerity I can tell you to-day—looking back from years of search and experience—I should have stayed together with my very First Young husband. There was nothing wrong with him. We were so young—so foolish—just didn’t know a damn thing about life. And it was always me who was dissatisfied, and tried to run away to find “something better.”39

  Consoling a friend who was going through a divorce, Svetlana reflected:

  I was never used to a family life, and for that reason it was easy to break it. But still I felt lonely afterwards, and made many mistakes, trying immediately to find some substitute for the lost companionship . . . how young and stupid I have been!40

  Grigori and Svetlana’s marriage ended in 1947. Divorce in the Soviet Union was not particularly complicated. It involved a two-stage procedure: the couple submitted an application to a district court, and within a month they would be divorced. But for poor Morozov, divorce was even simpler. One day Morozov was not allowed back into the House on the Embankment. Svetlana’s brother Vasili had taken the matter in hand. When a couple married in the Soviet Union, the wife’s Soviet passport—all Soviet citizens were required to hold passports—was stamped and included the husband’s name. A new stamp indicated a divorce. Vasili took Morozov’s and Svetlana’s passports and had them returned to their virgin state by simply removing the original stamps. It was as if the marriage had never occurred.

  Stalin was pleased with the divorce. He had built a new dacha at Kholodnaya Rechka, north of Gagra on the Abkhazian coast, and now ordered a small dacha constructed for Svetlana nearby. She visited. It was the first time father and daughter had been together for any extended period in a long time.

  Stalin kept his usual schedule—waking at 11:00 a.m. and dining at 10:00 p.m. Svetlana remembered Andrei Zhdanov, Lavrenty Beria, and Georgy Malenkov coming over from their nearby government dachas. As usual, the meal would last until 4 a.m. For Svetlana, dinner with her father had always been an ordeal. As a teenager, she had often been the butt of Stalin’s jokes. If he noticed she’d slipped away after some coarse joke, he would shout, “Comrade Hostess! Why have you left us poor unenlightened creatures without giving us some orientation? Now we don’t know where to go! Lead us! Show us the way!” That joke, a parody of the slogan “Comrade Stalin Leads the Way,” went on for years.41 But now the collective dinners at his dacha merely appalled her. Stalin, as usual, forced his comrades through endless toasts—it was said he liked to get them drunk to see what they might reveal in unguarded moments—and the dinners would end with the bodyguards carrying home their charges “dead drunk,” many, as Svetlana remembered, “having lain for some time in a bathroom, vomiting.”42

  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