Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana and Kapler left the Congress together, walked across Sokolniki Park to a tiny café, and picked up the relationship that her father had terminated so viciously eleven years before. She was terrified that Kapler would hold her responsible for the horrors he had endured and begged him to understand why she had never attempted to contact or help him. Had she done so, his sufferings would have worsened. He didn’t reply.

  However, he did tell her about his release from the Gulag. After his case was reviewed, he was told he had been “rehabilitated”: “You can go home now.” He was given a telephone, but he could think of no one to call. He finally phoned his sister in Moscow and said, “Hello, I will be seeing you soon. Sit at home. I’m coming.” He walked slowly from the Lubyanka prison. It was summer, July. Suddenly he felt his feet could no longer carry him. He sat down on a bench. The children were playing in the park, the leaves were rustling in the sunlight, and he burst into tears. He told Svetlana, “I sat there and cried rivers of tears. Then I went to my sister’s. Thank God I cried it out before I got there.” A disheveled man crying alone on a bench in a park didn’t arouse any curiosity in those days.

  The old attraction flared up again. They were soon secret lovers. She was astonished that he was “still the same.” She would look back fifty years later and marvel: “He just laughed at everything. He laughed away everything. He could do that. Not many people could.”39

  By 1954, Svetlana had reunited with Alexei Kapler, who took this photograph of her on the shore of the Black Sea.

  (Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

  With her son, Joseph, she drove in her little Pobeda to Crimea, where Kapler had an assignment. They spent magical seaside days of lovemaking as he took endless photographs of her, but he assured her that their assignation could never be more than a fling. He would not hurt his wife. His marriage to Valentina was not happy, but he felt loyalty to her because she had gotten him through the brutal five years at Inta. He told Svetlana categorically that he would never marry her.

  Friends warned her that she mustn’t take Kapler seriously. He was chronically unfaithful, but Svetlana was not to be dissuaded. She described their reunion to Ilya Ehrenburg: “The miracle stayed alive. . . . We looked in each others’ eyes and it turned out that not one word we said to each other back then had been forgotten, that we can talk, continuing the phrases that we started . . . understanding one another with the same ease and effortlessness.”40

  Kapler told her it was impossible for their affair to last. It would be “like taking a burning match to the river and expecting the water to go up in flames. It can’t happen.” She remembered his lovely words, but not their meaning. She asked, “Why can’t it happen?”41

  One evening Svetlana showed up at the stage door of the theater where Kapler’s wife was performing and asked to be admitted to her dressing room. She confronted her with the news that she and Aleksei were lovers. Valentina only laughed, saying that she knew all about it. She informed Svetlana that Aleksei was “perpetually unfaithful, and had really only loved his first wife.” Svetlana should “not let her imagination get the better of her, because even this would not last.” “Slowly there came into Svetlana’s alert face a look of helplessness.”42 Perhaps Svetlana was hearing her father’s words: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool! He’s got women all around him.” Svetlana immediately withdrew, humiliated.

  Kapler recounted the ending of the affair to the Italian reporter Enzo Biagi:

  My wife was a very reserved, polite kind of person. She never made a fuss, or caused a row. She told me of their meeting, of that strange, unexpected visit. I was shocked at the way Svetlana had behaved; to me it seemed wrong, silly, and also unnecessary. Svetlana had said nothing to me, and had acted with no consideration for anyone else, except herself. That was the end of my second marriage, the end of that second part of my life with Sveta.43

  Of course, it was easy for Kapler to overlook his own culpability. Certainly Svetlana’s behavior was outrageous, though not untypical of a woman caught up in a romantic obsession, but he was not exactly uxorious. He was clearly entertaining lovers behind his wife’s back. It took a year after his relationship with Svetlana ended before Kapler left Valentina and moved in with a young poet named Yulia Drunina, the woman who would become his third wife. And there would be a third phase in his relationship with Svetlana when Yulia suggested they help her in a particularly dark time.

  Svetlana picked up the pieces of her shattered expectations and moved on. In 1955, she obtained permission to visit Leningrad. Russians still needed permission to travel from one city to another, just as they needed permission to change houses or jobs. The fact that this was her first visit to her mother’s beloved city was a measure of how narrow her life was. Though Nadya was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, she had moved to Saint Petersburg,44 as the city was then called, at the age of six.

  In Leningrad, Svetlana visited her grandparents’ apartment at 17 Tenth Rozhdestvenskaya Street. The Party had claimed it as a museum. When Lenin hid out there in July 1917, he stayed in her mother’s room—such a tiny room with its narrow iron bedstead, a dresser, and a table. On the wall were pictures of her family, of her grandparents, of her mother, of her aunts and uncles as children. In Pavel’s room, there still hung a portrait of the English poet Byron, reminding her how romantic and idealistic they had all been in the initial stages of the Revolution.45

  Everything seemed so intimate and yet so hopelessly lost. She walked through the apartment thinking of her mother as a schoolgirl. This was the place where her sixteen-year-old mother had fallen in love with her father. “I felt a breath of family warmth and love. There was still something vital and alive in the air. I could feel my mother’s spirit and sense that it never left this cozy place at all, that it never really lived in the Kremlin and couldn’t stand being there. The Kremlin never was the place for her.”46

  Now they were all gone. Nadya dead in 1932; Pavel dead in 1938; Grandpa Sergei dead in 1945; Grandma Olga dead in 1951; Yakov dead in a German POW camp; Anna and Fyodor inaccessible in their private, eccentric worlds; Vasili in prison. She was the only survivor among the ghosts.

  In 1956, just after her seventieth birthday, Alexandra Andreevna died. She’d been Svetlana’s nanny for the first thirty years of her life. Svetlana could say, “After the many losses I have suffered, the death of my nanny . . . was my first real loss,” by which she meant the loss of someone she had known intimately and continuously, someone whom she had loved and who had loved her unconditionally in return.47

  Chapter 12

  The Generalissimo’s Daughter

  Nikita Khrushchev on February 25, 1956, giving his famous “Secret Speech” in which he denounced Stalin.

  (Courtesy of Sergei Khrushchev)

  Late one afternoon in mid-February 1956, Svetlana received a telephone call. Anastas Mikoyan, deputy chair of the Council of Ministers, was on the line. He said he needed to speak to her urgently and would send a car to bring her to his home in the Lenin Hills. When she arrived, he told her that Khrushchev was soon to give a speech about her father; the document would be made public at the Twentieth Party Congress on February 25 in the following week. He needed to prepare her. He led her to the library and gave her the document. “Read this. Afterward we’ll discuss it, if necessary. Don’t hurry. Think it over.”1 Once she had finished reading it, she could join the family downstairs for dinner.

  Svetlana spent several hours alone in the library reading what would become known as Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech.” When he delivered it at the Party Congress, it lasted four hours. The Secret Speech was a devastating attack on Stalin, whom Khrushchev described as a “very distrustful man, sickly suspicious.” He accused Stalin of “originating the concept enemy of the people,” and engineering a “cult of personality.” Beginning in 1935, Stalin had directed the “mass arrests and deportation of many thousands of people, executions without trial”
and the murder of so-called spies and wreckers, who “were always honest Communists.” Khrushchev said, “Confessions of guilt . . . were gained with the help of cruel and inhuman tortures. . . . Stalin personally advised judges on which investigative methods to use: These methods were simple—beat, beat, and, once again, beat.” Khrushchev made no mention of his own support for Stalin’s atrocities nor of his masterminding the purges in the Ukraine.2

  The speech was agonizing for Svetlana to read, because she “believed every word of it.” She later wrote, “If only I could have refuted it all, not believed it; if only I could have exclaimed, ‘It’s a lie! He didn’t do it!’ But I could not. . . . All this was so terrible that I felt like howling and running away from everyone, myself included.”3 She came downstairs to join the Mikoyans and said simply, “It’s all true.” Mikoyan replied, “I hoped you would understand.”4

  Terrified that she would be identified with her father and hated, Svetlana withdrew into isolation. She did not even seek the consolation of her family. They learned of the denunciation of Stalin by reading reports of Khrushchev’s speech in the newspapers.5 How she prepared her children is unclear, but most likely she said little. Eleven-year-old Joseph continued to revere his grandfather, whose portrait always stood on his bedside table. Six-year-old Katya probably was unaware of the truth at the time, and in later life, she chose a career that took her to the isolation of far-off Kamchatka, where she was reputed to be a staunch Stalinist. Certainly it must have been a complex fate to be Stalin’s grandchildren.

  The Secret Speech was not really secret. Khrushchev ordered it read at Communist Party meetings throughout the country. A copy of the speech even reached the New York Times, which ran extracts on its front page on June 4.

  The revelation of Stalin’s crimes was cataclysmic. The propaganda icon—“the creator of happiness,” “the savior of the Russian people,” and “a genius among mortals”—had been a fraud all along, just another ruthless and cruel politician who had committed horrific crimes with impunity.

  Examining his own generation in retrospect, the writer Konstantin Simonov wrote:

  If we are honest, it is not only Stalin we cannot forgive, we cannot forgive anyone, including ourselves. . . . We may have done nothing bad, at least at first glance, but what is bad is that we [became] accustomed to . . . what now seems incredible and monstrous, somehow gradually became some kind of norm, seemed almost customary. We lived amidst all this like deaf people, as if we did not hear the firing going on all round us all the time, people being shot, murdered, people vanishing.6

  Simonov confessed that he had lived for a long time in a duality, knowing and refusing to know, “partly through cowardice, partly through stubborn efforts to reassure myself, partly through coercion of myself, and partly through a reluctance to touch on some things even in thought.”7

  After March 1956, the outward manifestations of the cult of Stalin began to disappear. Portraits of Stalin were taken down at the Museum of the Revolution. All those names glorifying her father, which, as a young girl, Svetlana had had to write out in lists for her teachers, were changed. The ZiS car was renamed the ZiL, in honor of the scholar and Gulag survivor Dmitri Likhachov. Mount Stalin in Pamir became Mount October. Even Stalingrad would eventually be renamed Volgograd.

  A number of Svetlana’s friends turned their backs on her, but some felt only sympathy. Aleksei Kapler’s new wife, Yulia, suggested that Svetlana must be devastated since everyone seemed to be deserting her. Kapler called to invite her to visit, and she gratefully accepted.8

  That year, 1956, was very difficult for Svetlana. The actress Kyra Golovko remembered encountering her at the apartment of friends. She was “even more closed and clamped up than twelve years ago. She looked awful and was dressed very strangely.” Kyra was performing in a play at the MKhAT, and someone suggested they all go. Svetlana said, “in a quiet voice, but which was definitely scary: ‘I do not go anywhere except the Conservatory.’” The play, Kyra suddenly realized, contained several attacks on Stalin’s cult of personality. The room remained silent. Svetlana said that it was time to go and left.9

  Svetlana had begun to work as a junior research fellow at the Gorky Institute of World Literature in early 1956. The researchers at the Institute were warned in advance that Stalin’s daughter would be joining them. “Don’t make a fuss,” they were told. “Treat her normally, like a regular person.” Portraits of Stalin still hung on the walls. As she inadvertently sat under a portrait of her father, a student remarked cruelly, “Do you think she resembles her father? Yes, of course she does!”10

  One of her colleagues at the Gorky Institute, Alexander Ushakov, had already met Svetlana briefly when she was enrolled at the Academy of Social Sciences. It was during the tumultuous early days of the Thaw, when students were excitedly debating the possibility of freedom of thought. Ushakov had come late to the Academy’s general assembly. The hall was full, with nearly all the seats occupied, but then he saw a woman sitting alone with an empty chair beside her. He casually sat down, and they exchanged a few brief words. During the intermission, a friend came up to him and asked, “How do you know Stalin’s daughter?” “What Stalin’s daughter?” he replied. “You are sitting with Stalin’s daughter!”

  When they met again at the Gorky Institute, Ushakov asked Svetlana if she remembered him. She had been wearing a bright green dress on the previous occasion, and she replied, “I remember the green dress but not you.” They both laughed. Gradually Svetlana “came to life a bit,” as Ushakov put it. “But she was a very uptight person.” Ushakov recalled:

  Our group met often. We drank alcohol, drank tea, told each other stories. In these moments each person wants to share something. But she usually sat silently; sometimes she smiled and laughed. . . . She smoked a lot then—she would sit in a chair—she always slouched a bit—and while others talked, she always remained silent. Some difficult processes go on inside a person. She had difficult processes, but they never came out.

  Many saw her as a strange person. People like me had to explain to our colleagues: “You understand, she is the daughter of Stalin. She lived in particularly harsh conditions. Always next to her, there was a person from the authorities. . . . Don’t think of her as being similar to us. . . .”

  She was closed-in. She did not like to open up her soul and to throw out everything that was inside of it. And of course, she was the victim of this whole system to a large degree. . . . She was not like those who were, let’s say, imprisoned and terribly abused by the Soviet authorities. . . . But the epoch drove right through her because she was Stalin’s daughter; all the pluses and minuses of this system went straight through her.11

  By the end of March 1956, every institute in the country had received a copy of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. When it was read from the podium at the Gorky Institute, many were devastated by its revelations. Svetlana sat quietly in the audience without saying a word, but the extent and cost of her ostracism are clear from a brief encounter. When the soon-to-be-famous writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who also worked as a researcher at the Gorky Institute, approached her after the speech and kindly made the gesture of helping her on with her coat, she burst into tears.12

  Soon she joined Sinyavsky’s research team, compiling documents related to Russian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The team had access to books banned to the public. She discovered Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We, the exuberant literature of the 1920s, and the works of artists arrested and destroyed in the 1930s. This was a narrative of Russian literature more subversive and more candid than the “canonized lies” she’d been forced to study under the spirit of Zhdanovshchina. Dostoyevsky’s novel Demons overwhelmed her. She saw it as a prophetic template of her father’s world, in which the revolutionaries, impelled by internal, paranoid conspiracies, climbed the ladder of power over the corpses of their fellows.13

  After his Secret Speech, Khrushchev began to institute a number of political and cultural reforms
. In the arts, censorship was relaxed, and some foreign publications were allowed into the country. It was a utopian moment that, borrowing Ehrenburg’s title, came to be characterized as the Thaw. It suddenly seemed “as if the horrors and rigours of Stalinism were going to have a happy ending. . . . People were excited and started talking and arguing in a way they hadn’t done in decades. . . . If you were young and reform minded, . . . it was something you never forgot.”14 At the Gorky Institute, Sinyavsky and his friends were obviously a route to a new freedom of thought that Svetlana had not believed was possible.

  In this euphoric atmosphere, Svetlana, too, was becoming something of a rebel. A friend at the time, Galina Belaya, recalled that Svetlana used to invite friends to her apartment in the House on the Embankment. In particular, she remembered when they all gathered—Svetlana’s children were there, and she’d had to run off to borrow forks and spoons from the Molotovs—and Andrei Sinyavsky and Anton Menshutin sang their subversive “criminal” songs satirizing the old Soviet “songs of the masses.”15 Both Galina and Svetlana knew that Sinyavsky was publishing his work abroad under the name Abram Tertz. The KGB now tolerated samizdat (literally, self-publication), more or less, but to smuggle a manuscript to the anti-Soviet West for publication was still strictly forbidden.

  In September 1957, Svetlana decided to change her name from Stalina to her mother’s name, Alliluyeva. She said the metallic sound of the name Stalin lacerated her heart. Voroshilov, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who had been her mother’s friend, showed no surprise and merely said, “You have done right.” Yet the first official who saw her new documents could not believe she had rejected her father’s glorious name: “So they forced you to change your name?” He refused to believe she had initiated the change herself.16