It has always been the case that the citizens of the Soviet Union knew little about how their leaders lived behind the walls of the Kremlin, and virtually nothing about the lives of their spouses or companions. Were these women really, for 75 years, mere shadows of their fearsome husbands? What did they do, how did they spend their days, what were their relationships like and how did they cope with the raw power that surrounded them? It was only after the collapse of their country, and after most of them were no longer alive, that their memories, writings, eyewitness accounts, as well as rumours and legends that had been circulating secretly among the people, were leaked to the public. Slowly, the secret archives of the KGB, carefully hidden in the underground rooms of the infamous Lubyanka prison, a dungeon entered by many and left alive by few, began to be opened – of course, only to a select few.
In the spring of 1918, a 49-year-old woman moved into the Kremlin. She had an unattractive face and bulging eyes, and her wide forehead and hair, carelessly tied in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, stood out. Her name was Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya and she was the wife of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The New Tsarina, as she was initially called by some, spent most of the last 14 years of her life in exile, and was therefore unknown to many. The Soviet Union was not ready for her, but Krupskaya had no problem with her.
Born in St Petersburg in 1869, her father wanted her to have a good education and sent her to the Princess Obolenskaya Gymnasium, which was advanced for its time. There she met not only princesses and aristocrats, but also the daughters of revolutionaries. That is why the word ‘revolution’ was mentioned very often in the Krupski household. Everything pointed to the fact that Nadezhda would live the life of a teacher and an old maid. She did not put anything on her outward appearance, she did not flirt with men, she did not dance, she did not even go rowing on the lakes, which was so popular at that time. On the contrary, married women were ridiculed for living in slavery and giving up their own lives.
In 1890, she had already read Marx’s Das Kapital. One day, she was invited to take part in a Marxist debate at which the “Man from the Volga” was to speak. The speaker’s name was Vladimir Ulyanov and it was he who sealed her fate. In 1897 Lenin was deported to Siberia, Nadezhda followed him there and they were married. Three years later, the couple fled to Switzerland, and eleven years after that, they were in Paris, which had become the centre of the Russian revolutionary movement. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, a very different story was happening to another woman.
In 1893, 19-year-old Inessa, an orphaned descendant of French actors, married Alexander Armand, the son of a wealthy textile merchant, on the large Pushkino estate near Moscow, and soon bore him four children. But when she got her hands on Lenin’s pamphlet The Development of Capitalism in the Soviet Union, she knew where her path was leading. For a start, it took her into the arms of her husband’s brother Vladimir, and with him and the children she moved to Moscow, where she gave birth to her fifth child.
Years passed, Vladimir fell ill and died, and Inessa found herself in Paris, where she met Lenin, corresponded with him for a long time and adored him as a revolutionary. Krupskaya, Lenin and Inessa became friends and lived as a threesome. Krupskaya was proud of the fact that she did not care about petty bourgeois habits, jealousy and marital fidelity. Thus, from 1909 Lenin had a wife and a mistress, the latter of whom was a keen writer of revolutionary articles. When the revolution broke out in the Soviet Union in February 1917, the trio travelled by train through Germany to St Petersburg. The revolution succeeded, Nadezhda surrendered in St Petersburg and Inessa did the same in Moscow. In March 1918, the Bolshevik government moved from Petrograd to Moscow, and from then until the mid-1950s, its highest representatives inhabited the Kremlin.
The rooms that once housed the Tsar’s court are now occupied by Bolshevik leaders and their wives. Living in the Kremlin meant being close to Lenin, and this required a great deal of mutual trust and intimacy. It was only later in the early 1930s that some officials began to leave the Kremlin and move to the city. Shared interests and experiences meant that former revolutionaries underground often married only women from their own circle, and interestingly, most of the marriages were successful.
The new empresses, as they were called, quickly adapted to their new roles. Most of the women who lived in the Kremlin did not stand behind the stove and cook and wash the dishes. They were attracted by more interesting things; they organised childcare for the children of women who worked, they looked after the education of the illiterate, the sick, the old and the hungry. Although kindergartens were being set up everywhere, even ones that catered only for the children of the elite, many Kremlin women soon overcame their ideological resistance and began to hire the nursemaids, governesses, cooks and maids who had once cared for the bourgeoisie.
Nadezhda Krupska took charge of school education, and she was mainly responsible for the fact that religious instruction was soon banned in schools. She also had a major say in the removal of books by “bourgeois” writers. Yesenin’s poetry was criticised for its ‘religious-patriarchal basis’, and Dostoyevsky’s works were banned for their ‘extremely conservative views and pathological scenes’. Blok, Bulgakov, Platonov, Akhmatov, Tsvetayev and later Pasternak were also publicly attacked. Kant, Nietsche and Tolstoy suffered a similar fate.
In September 1920, Inessa Armand died after feeling unwell since the International Women’s Conference. “Inessa can hardly stand on her feet,” Krupska wrote. Lenin advised her to go to the Caucasus and rest, and the woman obeyed him. But there she contracted cholera and died. Her body was brought to Moscow. Lenin was completely broken by this, and during the funeral procession that wound its way through the streets of Moscow, Nadezhda had to support him. The next day, Inessa’s ashes were buried at the Kremlin gates in Red Square. Although Bolshevik protocol did not allow it, Lenin demanded a funeral and it was carried out. To this day, members of the Armand family vehemently deny any idea of love between Lenin and Inessa, but acquaintances of Inessa say that Lenin was the father of her sixth child, who died.
Another Soviet feminist of the time, Alexandra Kollontai, was convinced that Inessa’s death caused Lenin’s illness to worsen and thus his death. At that time, the civil war was coming to an end and the Kremlin was in the throes of a fierce struggle to seize power. Lenin’s death alarmed Krupskaya, who feared what would happen after his death. Despite rumours of an affair between Lenin and Inessa, Lenin and Krupskaya were very fond of each other. After twenty years of marriage, they were no longer as passionate as they once were, but Nadezhda was his alter ego. When Lenin fell ill, she took care of him all the time.
The Central Committee gave control of Lenin’s treatment to Stalin. Lenin’s secretary secretly gave him Lenin’s will, in which Lenin wrote: “Stalin is brutal, and this quality, which we Communists can still tolerate, is unacceptable in a General Secretary. I suggest that you find a way of removing him from this post and appointing someone else to it.”
After this letter, Stalin increasingly forced Lenin into isolation and away from his work. Krupskaya resisted this, knowing that work was the only thing keeping the patient alive. When Stalin found out that Lenin had secretly dictated a message to Trotsky, he was furious. He harassed her on the telephone with the most vulgar words and threatened to report her to the Central Committee. Shortly afterwards Lenin developed a high fever, lost the power of speech and control of the left side of his body. Not even a year had passed when he died.
During the weeks and months she spent with him, Krupska accepted that he would soon die, so she did not cry at his funeral in February 1924. She said that Lenin was active until his last day, but others could tell that in his last months he was more like a child. Absent-mindedly, he was said to have looked around with a slight smile on his mouth, like someone entering a second childhood.
Krupskaya also knew that after Lenin’s death, she had to decide who to support in the battle to succeed Lenin. The choice between Stalin and Trotsky was a choice between double evils, but she chose Trotsky. He had already distanced himself from her and so she was left alone in her struggle. Everyone knew that Stalin had denigrated her and blamed her for Lenin’s premature death. Nevertheless, she begged him to bury Lenin, not to display him as a stuffed doll. He did not oblige her. In 1931, she came in tears to Lev Kamenev, a member of the Politburo, and asked him to protect her from Stalin’s brutality. But he could not or would not help her.
On 26 February 1939, she invited friends to celebrate her 70th birthday with her. Stalin, though invited, did not come, but sent her a cake. Late in the evening she felt nauseous and the doctor explained that it was probably food poisoning. She was quickly taken to hospital, but died the next morning. At the funeral, Stalin himself carried her urn of ashes.
Free love
Before and after the revolution, Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai have always emphasised the great role of women and campaigned for their rights. They were also the first women to defend the right to free love. The intelligent and beautiful Alexandra Kollontai put female sexuality at the very heart of communist propaganda. The new collective life could also mean a higher form of love and compassion, she argued, adding that it was completely irrelevant for working people whether love took the form of a long-term relationship or was a fleeting passion. People were puzzled by her ideas and Krupskaya replied, “Monogamy is the most normal form of love and the most in keeping with human nature.”
In 1920, Alexandra Kollontai was 48 years old and already recognised as a leader of the Bolshevik women’s movement. Krupskaya, who had never in her life allowed herself to be disturbed by another man, disapproved of Kollontai’s public liaison with Pavel Dybenko, a commander 16 years her junior, but kept silent. But the new theory of free love had a profound impact on Soviet society in the 1920s and 1930s and was the subject of constant debate. Especially in the Kremlin, marriage was sometimes seen as a bourgeois relic, and some Kremlin grandees, including Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, maintained a “second” family outside the Kremlin walls.
Kollontai finally tired of Dybenko’s constant affairs and broke off the relationship in 1924. Dybenko attempted suicide but failed, so the Party sent Kollontayeva as ambassador to Norway to protect her from rumours. Stalin, who liked to interfere in the personal affairs of his subordinates, asked Dybenko if he had really broken off the relationship with Kollontayeva, and Dybenko replied yes. Stalin then said, “You really are a fool.” Fifteen years later, Dybenko was arrested and Kollontaiyeva did not lift a finger to save him.
When the Aurora opened fire on Winter Palace at night on 25 October 1917, some claimed that a woman of heavenly beauty was standing on the deck of the Aurora. She is said to have given the order to fire. This legend has not died out over the years and has found its place in Soviet literature, film and theatre, based on the life of Commissar Larissa Reisner, whose famous exploits in the Volga Civil War were detailed and elevated her to the level of heroism.
Larissa Reisner was not a Kremlin woman, but she was connected to Kremlin men. A poet, revolutionary and journalist, her life was hard and short – she died in 1926. She appeared like a comet and became a symbol of the new role of women in the new world. All those who described her after her death emphasised her extraordinary beauty. She was passionately in love with Alexander Blok, the king of poets, and hoped that his proximity would turn her into a famous poet. But Blok read her poetry almost contemptuously. Before the Revolution, she became close to his rival Nikolai Gumilov. Gumilov’s wife, the poet Anna Akhmatova, set them up for unpleasant scenes. Gumilov also refused to acknowledge her poetry. “You simply have no talent,” he told her.
Before the Revolution, she agitated among the sailors of the military base at Kronstadt. Here she met and fell in love with Fyodor Razkolnikov, the leader of the local Bolsheviks. He was a strong personality, full of crazy courage, and when they were together it seemed as if nothing was impossible for them. The Civil War found her on the Volga, helping to defend the coastal towns from attacks by white troops and the Czech Legion.
Barely a month after the assassination of the Tsarist Romanov dynasty in July 1918, the Tsarist yacht Mezhen was seized and sailed to Nizhny Novgorod. She took up residence in the yacht’s luxurious quarters and behaved like a tsarina towards the crew. She contracted malaria at the front, returned to St Petersburg with the intention of conquering it with her poetry. The townspeople saw her and Blok riding their commandeered horses around the city and talking animatedly. The poet Vsevolod Rodgestvensky was astonished to see the luxury in which Larissa lived. Her apartment was full of Persian carpets, golden chandeliers, precious furniture and oriental luxury.
In March 1921, Razkolnikov was appointed head of the diplomatic mission in Afghanistan, and Larissa travelled with him, where she ended up in the spotlight. She sent home numerous essays. Despite her influence with the Bolshevik government, she did nothing to save Gumilov, who had been arrested for preparing an uprising of Kronstadt sailors. Gumilov thus ended up in front of a firing squad.
After two years in Kabul, she suddenly left Razkolnikov and returned to Moscow to try her hand at journalism with the help of Karl Radek, Secretary of the Comintern. Radek was one of the few Bolshevik leaders who remained politically active after Lenin’s death. His influence led her to become a special reporter for the newspaper Izvestia. Larisa Reisner fought, danced, wrote songs and stunned everyone around her in the name of the revolution. This took all her strength and, aged just thirty, she contracted typhoid fever. She did not believe until the end that she was going to die. Thousands passed by her coffin and Radek had to be supported by friends in the funeral procession. Then began his fall from grace. He was a supporter of Trotsky, then a traitor to him and a fan of Stalin, he gave false testimony against his comrades and did everything to save his own skin.
Boris Pasternak, after his death, described Larissa as a mystical phenomenon, without whom it would have been difficult to survive the harsh reality of the Soviet Union. She was not successful as a poet, but she became his muse, and it was her name that he gave to the heroine of his novella Doctor Zhivago. Larissa Reisner and Lara differed in many ways, but for Pasternak, Larissa’s name was a symbol of inspiration, faith, hope and love.
Enjoy it while you’re still young
Galina Sergeyevna Kravchenko was born in 1904. She attended a girls’ school in Lubyanka (before the KGB secret service moved in). A talented dancer and a real beauty, she left school and attended ballet classes, which later became part of the Bolshoi Theatre. She had already danced in some ballets and operas when a film director persuaded her to go into film. She was also a talented acrobat, swimmer and horse-rider and soon became a model of the modern Soviet woman. One day, the film director called the 26-year-old girl on the phone: “Come to us and you will see an interesting man – you will fall in love with him.”
She met a graduate of the Aviation Academy, Alexander Lvovich – Lyutyk, son of Lev Kamenev and Olga Davidovna, who was Trotsky’s sister. Lyutik immediately told her that he had a Harley Davidson motorbike. It was every girl’s dream to ride a motorcycle like that. They married in June 1929, had a son, Vitalik, and both lived for seven years with the Kamenevs, who had a six-room apartment in the centre of Moscow.
Lev Kamenev had another son, Yura, who was still at school, and his father never talked about politics at home, although as a member of the Politburo and other high-ranking officials he could have said many things. Olga Davidovna headed the department for cultural cooperation with foreign countries. In her youth she was beautiful, but now it was said that she had become capricious and difficult. She never mentioned her brother Trotsky, who was deported in 1927. Olga Davidovna knew exactly what was happening in the country, so she used to say to Galina: ‘Enjoy yourself while you are still young. Things will take a turn for the worse. We are in for a miserable misery.”
Kamenev had another family. He was in love with a woman called Glebova and had a child with her. Everyone knew about it, including his wife Olga Davidovna. Galina was in charge of the family’s food shopping. Every month they gave her five hundred roubles to buy food and lunches, because there was no cooking. She took a state car to a special Kremlin shop which had two sections, one for government officials and the other for party functionaries.
Although only Lev Kamenev and Olga Davidovna were eligible, Galina was always loaded with food for at least eight people. They also got half a kilo of butter a day and one kilo of the best caviar. She could also buy an unlimited amount of delicatessen and alcohol. The party functionaries and their families all had their clothes made by the tailor of the Commissariat of the Interior, who made tailor-made clothes for them and only for them. Galina also met Stalin’s wife here.
In December 1934 Galina was returning from filming in the Crimea. She was met at the train station by Lyutyk, pale as a wall, who told her that a popular party secretary of Leningrad and member of the Kirov Politburo had been killed. The KGB immediately arrested Lev Kamenev, then Glebova, and Lyutik was expelled from his job. On 5 March 1935, three months after Kamenev was deported to Siberia, Lyutik was also arrested and accused of trying to shoot Stalin. Four policemen searched the apartment, where Galina also kept all the reels of film she had shot. They unwound each reel, examined the films in daylight and then threw them on the floor. It took her a whole month to roll them back up.
A few days later, Olga Davidovna was taken away and sentenced to three years of exile in Gorky. Galina was thrown out of her apartment and moved with her son to a building that had been a second-class hotel before the revolution. In 1938, Kamenev’s second son, Jura, decided to join his mother in Gorkö. He never returned. He was arrested and shot together with Olga Davidovna. Ljutik asked Galina to write to Stalin and somehow get him out of prison. It didn’t help, he was deported to Alma Ata and she never saw him again. Her film career went downhill, as she rarely made films anymore.
Galina later remarried. Her 19-year-old son Vitalik, whom she had with Lyutyk, was arrested in 1951. Her second husband was also pursued and she was interrogated several more times. The documents relating to the murdered members of the Kamenev family could cover a large table. Kamenev died in 1936, Olga Davidovna and Yura Kamenev in 1941, Lyutyk Kamenev in 1939. Cause of death? Here the words in the documents have been erased.
A fatal recognition
In early 1918, the new government moved from Petrograd to Moscow. They all brought their wives with them, but not Stalin. He was a widower, as his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, had died of tuberculosis in 1909, leaving him a son, Yakov. So it became necessary for Stalin to find a new wife. While in Petrograd, he stayed temporarily with the friendly Svanidze family. His mother advised him to find a wife in Georgia. But a simple Georgian peasant girl would not have been suitable for the future leader. So where will he find a suitable wife?
In the next room at the Svanidze family’s was a young girl, the eldest daughter Nadezhda, unspoiled and untouched. Her mother was different, for she cast an eye after every man she met. For a time, even Stalin himself was said to have been her lover. But he chose her daughter instead. Not everyone was happy with his choice. She was only 16 years old, he was already 39, and according to the law in force, Nadezhda was a minor, their marriage was invalid and he was guilty of abuse of a minor. Soon afterwards, Nadezhda started working in Lenin’s secretariat and only later did they both register their marriage, which was not unusual at the time. In the first decade after the revolution, no one attached much importance to the registration of marriage.
Five months after registration, Nadezhda gave birth to her son Vasili. She liked her work in the Secretariat, Lenin entrusted her with secret documents, but she refused to show them to Stalin. Stalin was disappointed and also angry. After all, he had done everything for her. Against his principles, he provided her with a cook and a nurse, gave her a car and provided her with theatre tickets. But she was close to the conflict between Trotsky and Stalin and watched in horror as even her good friends disappeared.
She also knew things about her husband that others did not. Life in the Kremlin made her depressed, she felt she was living in a big office. Everyone around her was already in their forties or fifties, suspicious and obsessed with power struggles. She was getting nervous and had occasional hysterical fits. “You’re schizophrenic!” Stalin would shout at her during arguments. “You are paranoid. You have only enemies everywhere,” she replied just as loudly.
Evenings were particularly difficult, as Stalin often turned them into drinking parties, inviting his closest colleagues. Nadezhda did not drink and was disgusted by drunks. They slept separately, she in the bedroom, he in a small room off the dining room, where he had a well-known red telephone, from which he made calls even late at night. He had not spoken a word to her for days and expected her to be silent too.
As parents, they were both unsuccessful. There were governesses, minions and guards everywhere and this did not contribute to a pleasant family atmosphere. In 1926, the peace was full and Nadezhda fled with her two children to Leningrad, where she wanted to start a new life. Humiliated and furious, Stalin ordered her to return and she did, but the quarrels continued. She wanted to avoid the nightmare atmosphere and so she took a job at the Academy of Industry, where she studied synthetic fibres. She wanted to remain anonymous and asked the security guards not to accompany her to the entrance.
In November 1927, diplomat Adolf Ioffe was killed. He was a Trotsky supporter and at his funeral Nadezhda, Trotsky and Kamenev stood in the front row. When the funeral ceremonies were over, someone from Trotsky’s entourage walked up to the guard of honour and shouted, “Red Guards! Hurrah for Comrade Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army!” There was no reply. Trotsky looked sadly at Nadezhda, bowed his head and left. He knew his time was up.
On 8 November 1932, the Kremlin elite celebrated the anniversary of the revolution. Nadezhda left the reception early and Stalin only a few hours later. The next morning, a housekeeper found her lying in a pool of blood on the floor next to her bed, a small revolver by her side. Terrified, she called for help and the body was placed on the bed. Stalin, who was asleep in the next room, was woken up later.
Murder or suicide? Half-truths began to circulate and refused to go away. One of them was that Stalin killed his wife because she opposed him and was linked to the opposition. Another claimed that she was killed by KGB agents on Stalin’s orders because he had had enough of her jealous scenes. Most probably, however, Nadezhda committed suicide because she could no longer bear living with a brutal dictator. All official reports stated that Nadezhda was in poor health and overworked, and that Stalin was grief-stricken at the funeral, when in fact he was not even there.
Nikita Khrushchev later wrote: “The circumstances of her death are mysterious, but her death was undoubtedly caused by something Stalin did.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, researchers searched the archives, but there was nothing about it in the KGB archives, although there should have been. Some claim that Stalin ordered them not to open an investigation.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
A pearl in the rubbish
“Zemchuzhina” means “pearl” in Russian. But that was also the name of a poor Jewish girl from a Cossack village in Zaporozhye. In 1921, at the age of 19, Paulina Semyonovna Zhemchuzhina was sent to the International Women’s Congress in Moscow. Vyacheslav Molotov, who helped organise it, immediately noticed her and Paulina never returned to Zaporozhye. She soon became one of the most influential women in the Kremlin.
The Molotovs shared a suite with the Stalinists in the Kremlin and no one knew Nadezhda Alliluyeva better than Paulina. She was also the one who, on that fateful November day in 1932, escorted her home from the October Revolution celebrations and comforted her. When Nadezhda’s body was found the next day, the first person they called was her. Many were convinced that this was why Stalin hated her and wondered why he waited until 1949 to order her arrest. He could have got rid of her in the 1930s, because by then the NKVD already had files with the most intimate details of all the inhabitants of the Kremlin. And Paulina Zemchuzhina committed a great crime for the conditions of the time. Her brother was an American capitalist, he left Russia at the beginning of the century and she sometimes corresponded with him. But Paulina never occupied very high positions outside the Kremlin. She was commissioner for the fish industry and eventually director of the state perfume industry.
She has sometimes had some difficulties in her work. In 1939, she was suspended from the Party because German spies were discovered in her company, trying to get hold of the recipes for Soviet perfumes. This accusation was so ridiculous that she was soon rehabilitated and made director of the knitwear and accessories industry. Meanwhile, her husband Molotov was climbing the political ladder, becoming Stalin’s right-hand man, and in 1937 he helped him profusely in the purges and the organisation of the mock trials, advising him on who deserved the death penalty and who was just going to be sent to the gulag. In 1939 he became Commissar for Foreign Affairs, a post he held until 1949.
Paulina adored Stalin and was always on his side, and Stalin was often a guest in the Molotas’ apartment. When Nadezhda’s death left the First Lady’s post vacant, Paulina seamlessly took it. She even took over the upbringing of Stalin’s daughter Svetlana. Beria found her influence in the Kremlin too great, so he began to carefully gather evidence against her. Paulina was not defending luxury. Everyone in the Kremlin knew when she had passed, because there was always a strong smell of French perfume. She dressed according to the latest Parisian fashions and her wardrobes were full of fur coats.
Her problems began three years after the end of the war. While Ekaterina Voroshilova, Maria Kaganovich and other wives of Jewish origin kept their Judaism to themselves, Paulina proclaimed it freely. She supported the establishment of a Jewish autonomous authority in Crimea and often met with the Israeli ambassador in Moscow, Golda Meir. But at the end of 1948, everything changed. Suddenly, all the leaders of the Jewish community in the Soviet Union found themselves in prison, accused of “cosmopolitanism”.
Paulina was arrested at her workplace, interrogated and released again. She knew what was coming next. She immediately moved away from her husband to her sister and told Molotov: “If the Party demands it, we will divorce.” Throughout the year, she avoided contact with her family, fearing that she would be incriminated. The mighty Molotov, Stalin’s right-hand man, kept quiet and did not dare to ask Stalin to have mercy on her, nor did he approach Beria and beg for mercy. He suffered in silence in the name of Communism, which he believed in, as he believed in his wife’s guilt.
Paulina was arrested shortly afterwards and Molotov later recounted how the C.C.C. discussed her “treachery”. “My knees shook when Stalin read the indictment against her. But there was nothing I could do. She was accused of consorting with Zionists and Golda Meir and of wanting to turn Crimea into an autonomous Jewish republic.” Paulina spent two years in prison and more than three years in the Gulag. The prisoners in Lubyanka heard her calling for help from Molotov and demanding that they bring her diabetes pills.
Whenever Molotov and Beria met, Beria always whispered confidently in Molotov’s ear, “Pauline is still alive.” But Paulina still believed in Stalin unwaveringly. When she was brought before Beria at the beginning of March 1953 and Beria told her that Stalin had died, she became unconscious. The day of Stalin’s funeral, 9 March 1953, was also Molotov’s birthday. Khrushchev and Malenkov asked him what he wanted for a present. “Give me back Pauline,” said Molotov. She was released the next day. She died in May 1970. All those who met Molotov in the last years of his life recounted how faithful he was to the memory of his wife.
Murderer and rapist
The public prosecutor cleared his throat and began to question the prisoner: “Do you admit the criminal charges against you? Have you been associated with a foreign intelligence service? Did you order a list of your mistresses to be written? We have the names of 62 of your women. Have you had syphilis? Did you rape a 14-year-old girl? In your office we found 11 pairs of women’s stockings, 11 pairs of women’s silk panties, women’s sports equipment, women’s blouses, numerous intimate letters and a lot of pornographic material. Is all this yours?”
The defendant’s answers were vague and confused. Who was this prisoner, a medieval madman, a sex obsessive, a leader of rapists? He was the hero and Marshal of the Soviet Union, a member of the Party Politburo and Minister of the Interior, Lavrenti Beria.
Despite the relief of the end of the war, the atmosphere in Moscow was still full of fear. Mothers warned their daughters not to talk to anyone in the streets because Beri’s men were preying on young girls, kidnapping them and taking them to Beri’s villa. Many stories about Beria circulated, and after his death they took on new dimensions. No one suffered more from them than his wife, Nina Teimurazova. As a 16-year-old girl, he lured her onto his train while she was in Abkhazia, kept her imprisoned for days and raped her repeatedly. All this was later recounted by Svetlana Aluluyeva, Stalin’s daughter. It may not have been quite like that, but it was in keeping with Beria’s reputation.
Nina was said to be a beautiful woman with thick golden hair, a beautiful complexion and a wonderful figure. She was known as a good, kind and desperately unhappy woman. In 1990, Nina Teimurazovna was 86 years old and lived in a small apartment. In an interview she denied that Beria had kidnapped her. She was only 16 years old, she wanted to have a home and move away from her relatives, she explained.
Before Beria was shot, he confessed to all his “morally depraved actions”. He also organised shorthand courses for young beautiful girls in what some described as Beria’s harem. He would stop outside a girls’ college in a car with tinted windows, watch them with binoculars and pick his victims. He often chose actresses and dancers to entertain and invited them to his dacha. Few dared to resist his invitation. He invited the singer Zoya Fyodorovna, who had just given birth and was still breastfeeding, to his dacha and forced himself on her. She begged him to leave her alone, as her milk was flowing and she had to breastfeed her baby. Berija was furious and pushed her away with a curse. Soon after, she was arrested.
Even today, some people still remember the temperamental beauty Tatyana Okunevskaya , who was the fantasy of many Russian men. She was already making films before the war and after the war she played the lead role in Night Over Belgrade, a film about Yugoslav partisans. But her real life, hidden behind a glittering film career, was completely different. In 1945, she and her second husband Gorbatov were invited to a reception at the Yugoslav embassy and the ambassador invited them to Belgrade for the premiere of Night Over Belgrade. She was received with full honours and they travelled all over Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Macedonia.
At a concert for Marshal Tito and his entourage, she sang the song “In the fight Slavs, the dawn is breaking before us” and received a standing ovation. The next day, Tito invited her to lunch and she was the only woman seated among the members of the General Staff. Also when Tito visited Moscow, he met her at the embassy and danced with her for a long time. But soon everything changed. She had too much freedom for the conditions of the time. Tito was now “an enemy of the people” and there was talk of her brief affair with the Yugoslav ambassador.
The real disaster started with an invitation to a private concert for leaders in the Kremlin. Beria himself, an ugly fat man with an unhealthy complexion, came looking for her in his car. Instead of going to the Kremlin, he took her to his dacha and raped her. Shortly afterwards, Tatyana Okunevskaya was arrested. During her interrogation, she was asked about Tito and whether she believed in God. In the end, she was accused of consorting with foreigners, glorifying bourgeois life and criticising the Party. She was held in solitary confinement for 13 months and then spent several years in a camp, chopping down trees. She was released only after Beri’s death. She had a hard time getting used to her freedom. Her films were no longer screened and her marriage was annulled. She was convinced that her husband did not want to intervene for her.
In 1953, after Beria’s death, Nina Teimorazovna was arrested, imprisoned in solitary confinement in Butyrki prison for a year and interrogated every day. The interrogator demanded that she testify against her husband. She refused. She replied that she would say neither bad nor good things about him. She also refused to say anything bad about Stalin. She died in 1991.
Nina Petrovna’s kitchen
After the political thaw that followed Stalin’s death, people were most pleasantly surprised by Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva. They were not used to a friendly, smiling woman standing right behind the leader. No one stood behind Stalin. He was surrounded by emptiness, and only then did the Politburo members and the security guards take their turn. They called her “Mummy Nina”. And they said, “What a nice woman, full of kindness.”
During her husband’s visit to America, she made a very good impression on her interlocutors, and above all, she softened her husband’s sometimes eccentric behaviour. The Americans saw the Soviet housewife’s friendly smile in her black skirt and white blouse and her trim figure. Her whole appearance spoke of living on home-made jam, bread and potatoes. They judged that the “evil empire” was ruled by an eccentric man and his country wife and believed that it was possible to get along with this couple. Naturally, rumours spread around Moscow that Nikita was a slipper and under Nina’s influence, and that just because her sister Maria was married to the writer Michael Sholokhov, he was declared the best writer in the country.
Born in a small Ukrainian village, Nina Khrushcheva could boast only a modest education. In the summer of 1922, she was sent to Donetsk to spread the ideas of political economy and it was there that she met Nikita Khrushchev and married him in 1924. This was Nikita’s second marriage, his first wife having died of typhoid fever in 1918. In 1927 they moved to Moscow, and there began the steep rise of Nikita’s Ukrainian career. It soon became clear to those who immersed themselves in the lifestyle of the elite in the Kremlin that the party machine would not function without the privileges – adequate housing, food, clothes and servants – that enabled it to live well.
The short memoirs of Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva are the only written and publicly available testimony of a woman who lived in the Kremlin. It contains no clues or interpretations of what happened in the country, it reveals no derailments of Kremlin life, no descriptions of any of her acquaintances. Why? Because life in the Kremlin was part of a complex system of privileges that must not be revealed. She obviously wrote the memoirs for her daughter, but they read as if they were written for the Party. All the personal details of those who were in the Kremlin are omitted, the only exception being the description of a reception at Molotov’s dacha.
When Molotov was appointed Commissioner for Foreign Affairs, a special dacha was built for him. He organised a reception for party officials and their wives, attended by Nina Khrushcheva. At the reception, Valeria Malenkova spoke aloud about her scientific work, but her words were met with disapproval by those present, both men and women. It was clear that the time had come when something radical had changed in the Soviet Union. Previously, Kremlin women had been deeply involved in both the revolution and the building of socialism, as they were all fully employed. But now the time has come to return home and to the kitchen. The reward for their dedicated work was privilege and they had no cause to grumble.
The year 1937 had passed, the “enemies of the people” were no more, and a woman in the Kremlin could now be a wife and nothing but a wife. Working for the Party became secondary for Kremlin women. And Nina Petrovna Khrushcheva embodied this ideal. Alexei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law and editor of Izvestia, later wrote: “Life was divided into two parts; that before Stalin’s death and that after it. When Stalin died, the Kremlin court seemed to dissolve.”
Khrushchev was also the first to move out of the Kremlin and into the Lenin Hills. The Soviet citizens, of course, knew nothing about this, and the newspapers did not report it, because it was Khrushchev’s personal decision. This, however, allowed the Kremlin to become open to the public.
Problems with Galina
After the death of her husband, Viktoria Petrovna Brezhnev stayed in their large Moscow apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Her husband, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, could have chosen something else as First Secretary of the Party, but he did not want to. The third floor, where the family lived, was specially adapted for him. During the perestroika, much was said about the Brezhnev family, and the newspapers reported the arrest of Yuri Kurbanov, the third husband of Brezhnev’s daughter Galina. Articles about him could fill a book, and he was accused of debauchery, drunkenness and abuse of office. What was Viktoria Brezhneva’s reaction to this? She calmly accepted everything, because she was used to such things.
Her husband, Leonid, was tall and elegant in his youth and always laughing. It was rumoured that he liked to run after women and that he had many affairs. Victoria knew everything, but thought it best to say nothing and wait for the affairs to end. Most of the gossip came from her daughter Galina anyway. She was a typical product of what was called the “stagnation period”, an alcoholic with a much younger husband and a great lover of diamonds. Some were given to her as a gift for mediating with her father, others came into her hands from confiscated property from smugglers and criminals. She once travelled around Georgia and visited the museum in Zugzidi. There was a diadem of Queen Tamara of Georgia on display. She asked the manager to give it to her. The terrified manager called the First Secretary of the Georgian Party, Edvard Shevardnadze, who called Brezhnev and explained his daughter’s request. Brezhnev remained silent for a while, then said, “Send Galina home.”
During perestroika, Galina was arrested and her apartment searched, and millions of roubles, gold and foreign currency were discovered. Of course, she was drunk at the time too, and she was pushing alcohol on the investigators. From then on, she did not appear in public anymore. At Brezhnev’s funeral in November 1982, two security guards stood close by her side. The whole country was in front of the television as the funeral was broadcast live, so everyone saw Brezhnev’s successor Yuri Andropov embrace the widow and turn his back on Galina.
In the short period of Andropov’s rule, the investigations continued and extended to her circle of friends. Former Interior Minister Shchelokov was also accused, and was so hurt by the accusations that one day in 1984 he dressed in a general’s uniform, took a revolver and shot himself in the head. Andropov died, followed by Chernenko, who also died shortly afterwards, and was succeeded by Gorbachev, at which time Brezhnev’s son Yuri was also arrested. It seemed that the tangle of criminal acts would never be unwound.
And yet, nothing has ever been heard of Viktoria Brezhnev. It was as if she did not exist. She was training to be a nurse and at a dance at her school in 1935 she met Leonid Brezhnev, a student of agronomy in Kursk. She was always quiet, you could say unsociable, and she did not change even when Leonid was steadily climbing up the Party ladder. She always liked to be at home and avoided travelling. Receptions, including those on Women’s Day, were a real torment for her. She didn’t want to be seen in public, and she didn’t like it when Leonid invited guests, even though Gromiko, Ustinov and Andropov often came to visit. When she didn’t like something, she kept her mouth shut.
She had no interest in politics, but loved cooking, pickles and pies. Even though she had an extra 400 roubles to spend on food for special needs, she did not throw anything away. She mended her husband’s shirts and made her daughter’s dresses without any need. She was not an easy person to live with. She had no good friends, only acquaintances. She died quietly and unnoticed in Moscow in 1995.
Two that seem not to have existed
Brezhnev was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, head of the infamous KGB, and the people were convinced that they were once again being led by a firm hand. Of course, he could not be compared with Beria, because dissidents were no longer shot, but only sent to psychiatric institutions. Very little was known about him, and it was said that he was educated and that he collected icons and liked poetry. If Andropov was an enigma, his wife, Tatyana Filipovna, was a complete mystery. You could read virtually nothing about her in the newspapers, her face did not appear on television screens and people only saw her for the first time when she stood weeping at her husband’s grave.
Governments and first party secretaries may change, but Anna Dmitrievna Chernenko, who was for a short time First Lady of the Soviet Union, remained Director of the University of Culture. Her white-haired husband, Konstantin Chernenko, was asthmatic and in poor health, and the First Secretary of the Party for only a year. He died in 1985. Anna strongly opposed his election as First Secretary, as she considered him to be in too poor health. When the famous red telephone was installed in their bedroom, it was mounted on the side of the bed and it was always she who answered the calls. There are no photographs of them anywhere.
First Lady of perestroika
When Mikhail Gorbachev, with his perestroika and his wife Raisa, took the Soviet Union on a slightly different path, opinions in the country were sharply divided. Many were convinced that it was high time the country got a real First Lady, a bright, elegant and smart one, someone of whom the citizens could be proud. Others accused her of vulgarity, of usurping her husband’s popularity and publicity, of dressing like a queen at state expense, of rushing to the fore instead of staying in the background. But millions of Russians turned on the television to see her smile, her beautiful figure and her latest fashionable dresses.
Like her husband, Raisa was a child of her time. Born into a poor family, she graduated with honours and was able to take advantage of the thaw that followed Stalin’s death. Of course, it was not to everyone’s taste. Many men were offended by the fact that the First Secretary took his wife everywhere with him and had her as his equal, instead of sitting at home in front of the television. Raisa also upset women because they felt that it was easy to be young and stylish if you didn’t have to work and queue for groceries. People liked to pursue her, but felt somehow deprived when she was not accompanying her husband.
Raisa Maksimovna Tatarenko was born in Siberia into a peasant family. Her mother ploughed the fields and the girl was ploughing by the time she was ten years old. Her parents were denounced as ‘kulaks’ in the 1930s and the family tasted all the consequences that follow such an accusation. But Raisa managed to enrol at Lomonosov University in Moscow and study philosophy. There she met Gorbachev at a dance. After her marriage in 1953, she lived the life of a rural nomenklatura for more than twenty years, which was not easy for someone with an independent mind. Arrogance towards subordinates is often combined with a desire to please those in power and, according to Rais, she was not far from such behaviour.
In 1978 the Gorbachevs moved to Moscow and when Mikhail became First Secretary of the Party, everyone expected Raisa to take over the tradition that had been in place since Stalin’s time; no public life. That is why her presence in the Kremlin was a sensation. But she had to learn everything; to sit properly at receptions, to dress properly, to talk about appropriate things when meeting Reagan, Bush, Thatcher and the Queen of England. On the Russia trips, of course, the topics of conversation were different; jobs, pensions, schools, children and so on.
When her autobiography was published, she again became the subject of slander. “I’m afraid we won’t last four years,” she used to say. But Raisa had more influence on Russian politics than any other woman in the Kremlin before her, including Nadezhda Krupskaya. Her meteoric appearance in the skies of the Soviet Union did not lose its glamour even after August 1991, when she was no longer First Lady. But her age was short. She contracted leukaemia and died in 1999, aged just 67.
