On 6 March 1967, at 7 pm, a taxi pulled up outside the American Embassy in New Delhi. A middle-aged woman got out and rang the bell. She knew that the moment she crossed the threshold of the embassy, there would be no turning back for her and that the full wrath of the Kremlin would be upon her. She was afraid, but she did not hesitate.
The duty marine opened the door and told her that the embassy was already closed. She showed him her Soviet passport. The marine flinched. He took her to the reception area and then called Robert Rayle, the embassy’s second secretary in charge of defectors. When Rayle arrived at the embassy half an hour later, the woman quickly told him, “You may not believe me, but I am Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter.” Rayle apologised, went to the communications room and asked Washington to send him all the information about Stalin’s daughter. An hour later, a reply arrived. “We have no information on her,” the message read. No one in Washington, not the CIA, not the FBI, not the State Department, even knew that Stalin had a daughter.
Then Rayle questioned Svetlana. She told him that she had come to India to scatter the ashes of her “husband” Brajesh Singh in the Ganges River, in accordance with Hindu tradition. She had spent three months in India and wanted to stay, but under pressure from the Kremlin, India refused to extend her visa. So she went to the US embassy to apply for political asylum. She went on to say that although she was staying at the Soviet Embassy, she would not be missed there for a few hours because they were holding a reception for a Soviet military delegation and they were probably all drunk.
Rayle now knew he had to inform the US Ambassador, Chester Bowles. Together, they considered what to do. If the Soviets found out that Svetlana was in the American embassy, they could put pressure on the Indian government and demand her extradition. So at 21.40 they sent another urgent message to Washington with details. It ended with the words: “Unless you inform us otherwise, we will try to get Svetlana on Quantas flight 751 to Rome and then on to New York.” Her Indian papers were in order and she was carrying a Soviet passport, so she could legally leave India. A USB-2 tourist visa was quickly added and Rayle was tasked with getting her out of India.
The Quantas flight landed in New Delhi on time but was delayed in departure due to technical problems. Svetlana and Rayle waited anxiously to see what would happen. If the Soviet Embassy had discovered her disappearance, they would probably have immediately asked the Indian government to find her. Fifteen minutes to three in the morning, the plane finally took off for Rome. Once in the air, Ambassador Bowles received an urgent message from Washington. “Throw this woman out of the embassy and do not give her any help.” The reply was quick: “You are too late, they have already left and are on their way to Rome.” That was all that US Ambassador Bowles could communicate back to Washington.
Big family
Svetlana spent her first years in the Kremlin, where the Stalin family lived in the Poteshnaya Palace, where the Tsarist secret service, the Okhrana, had its offices before the Revolution. The public was convinced that she was living the life of a modern-day princess, but in reality Stalin’s Bolshevik discipline dictated a relatively modest life for his family.
When Svetlana was born on 28 February 1926, she found herself in quite a large household. Her brother Vasily had been born five years before her, and the story was told that her mother, Nadia Aliluyeva, wanted to show Bolshevik modesty, so after dinner she went to the hospital alone and gave birth there. Svetlana’s half-brother, Yakov Dzhugashvili, the child of Stalin’s first wife Ekaterina Kate Svanidze, had already joined the large household in 1921.
Stalin’s relatives were always regular guests in the Kremlin; both the Alluyevs with Nadia’s parents Olga and Sergei, and the Svanidzevs. But almost all of them ended tragically. The Svanidzeys came to Moscow in 1921 as shadows from Stalin’s past. Stalin had married his friend Alyosha Svanidze’s sister Kata in 1906, at a time when he was known as Soso, a local revolutionary agitator in Georgia. Shortly after the birth of her son Yakov, Kato contracted typhoid fever and died. Stalin then disappeared, leaving the care of Yakov to the Svanidze family. The only person who never attended these family reunions in the Kremlin was Stalin’s mother Keke, who refused to leave her beloved Georgia. She lived in a small, modest ground-floor room in the former governor’s palace in Tbilisi.
Svetlana was just six years old when her mother Nadja committed suicide. She had no memory of her face, only the smell of Chanel perfume, which she wore despite Stalin’s disapproval. Overall, Nadja was a woman who was difficult to define. As a 16-year-old girl, she fell in love with the 39-year-old Stalin and, despite her parents’ anger, eloped with him in 1918 to join the revolution. To outsiders she appeared cold, but inside she hid a strong temper.
She did not want to be a shadow in the Kremlin, so after Svetlana’s birth she hired a nanny, Alexandra Bichkova, and devoted herself to her education and to Party work. This nanny stayed with Svetlana for thirty long years, until her death in 1956. Incidentally, all the women in the Kremlin had party duties and could play tennis in their spare time, which Stalin considered to be a remnant of bourgeois life.
Svetlana was her father’s favourite. Many times she ran to him and sat on his knee, and he called her “the little swallow”. For a long time she did not even know that Stalin was Georgian, and when she asked her brother what it was, he told her, “Georgians go around in long Caucasian coats and stab others with daggers.”
As a member of Lenin’s inner circle, Stalin was given the use of a dacha in Zubalov, about 30 kilometres from Moscow. Here the large family spent summers and weekends from 1919 to 1932. The children loved to play in the orchard, watch the poultry and peacocks and ducks in the small pond. Many children of the party elite came here in the summer. Svetlana’s grandparents, the Alilu family, were quite influential in Zubalov, but few noticed how the grandparents had become estranged. They would come out of their rooms and stare at each other in silence during meals, each at their own end of the long table. Sergei was a lukewarm old Bolshevik who was still a believer, Olga was always a sceptic and one of the first to realise the true nature of her son-in-law Stalin.
Stalin was 48 years old when Svetlana was born, but he preferred to spend his holidays without screaming children. He often holidayed with Nadia in Sochi, as the warm baths there helped his rheumatism. So long motorcades full of Party elites often rolled south. The joint holidays of the elite were considered part of Party discipline. Stalin had a deformed hand from childhood and a swimmer’s skin between his toes, so he never bathed. He sat in an armchair and read documents. Svetlana was able to join her family in Sochi when she was five. It was only later that she began to wonder why some of the old acquaintances she kept seeing in Sochi, the “uncles and aunts” as she called them, started to disappear and suddenly were gone. No one told her why.
On 7 November 1932, she and her mother stood under the grandstand and watched the parade in honour of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. It was the first time that a child of six and a half was allowed to watch this event. She looked up to the podium, where Stalin stood among the party officials, and understood that her father was the most important man in the world. Early in the morning, her mother called her to her and gave her final instructions on how to behave. “Never drink wine,” she told her. For Nadia and Stalin always quarrelled when Stalin dipped his finger in the wine goblet and pushed it into the girl’s mouth.
On the morning of 9 November, the babysitter woke the children up unusually early and sent them outside, telling them to play in the dark. An hour later, when they were bundled into a car and driven to the Sokolovo dacha, Svetlana noticed that the entourage was crying.
The new dacha was dark and furnished with dark furniture, and the sun never seemed to shine in. The children knew something had happened and started to wonder where their mother was. Finally Voroshilov came and took them back to Moscow. He cried. Stalin was nowhere to be seen.
Shot in the middle of the night
There are many accounts of what happened the night before at the reception in honour of the revolution. Stalin is said to have quarrelled with Nadia because she refused to toast the destruction of the enemies of the state, and then drunkenly flirted with an actress. After a quarrel with Polina Molotova, Nadia went home, took a revolver and shot herself. No one heard the shot. Polina claimed that she was completely calm when she said goodbye.
Nadja and Stalin had separate bedrooms, and when Stalin came into the dining room in the morning, he was told, “Joseph, Nadja is no longer with us.” According to the story, he was extremely hurt and, when asked how Nadja could have left her two children, he replied, “The children will forget her in a few days, but I will be paralysed for life.”
According to archives and the accounts of her acquaintances, Nadja is said to have suffered from manic depression and many other illnesses, several abortions, which was a kind of contraception in those days, as well as other gynaecological problems. Svetlana believed all this for a long time, but later became convinced that her death was a protest against Stalin’s repressive policies.
Nadia first wanted to leave Stalin in 1926, when Svetlana was only a few months old. After a quarrel with him, she grabbed her two children and a nanny and travelled to Leningrad to live with her parents. Stalin told her he was coming back, and she replied, “I will come back myself. It would cost the country too much if he came looking for me.”
Of course, no one spoke publicly about the suicide of Stalin’s wife, but everyone told the story that her death was the result of an appendectomy. Nadja’s open coffin was placed in the reception hall of the GUM, a huge house with many state offices and a department store, and thousands of people came to say goodbye to her. Svetlana was brought to the coffin so that she could kiss her mother’s cold cheek, but the little girl screamed in terror and ran away. Stalin said goodbye to Nadja in his own way. He approached the coffin and said in exasperation, “She left as an enemy.”
Nadja was buried in the Novodevichi Monastery cemetery. Her son Vasilij attended the funeral, but Svetlana did not. Svetlana’s friend, seven-year-old Marfa Peshkova, granddaughter of the writer Maxim Gorky, visited the little girl playing with dolls after the funeral. The floor of her room was littered with bits of black cloth. “This is my mother’s dress. Mum died and I want my dolls to wear her dress,” she reportedly told her.
Now Svetlana’s life was divided into two halves; the one before her mother’s death, and the one after, when her world changed profoundly. Stalin decided to move out of the Palace of Pleasure because everything still reminded him of Nadia. Nikolai Bukharin offered him his apartment in the Kremlin – the Yellow Palace, which had once been Lenin’s private residence – in exchange for his apartment, and Stalin accepted.
The new flat was narrow and long and full of dark rooms. Svetlana hated it, so she decorated her room with memories of her mother. Stalin had an office upstairs and the Politburo met there. Svetlana’s home was now full of strangers. The building was run by OGPU secret police agents and Stalin was convinced that a semi-military regime was best suited to children. There were no luxuries and no luxuries, but it was also safe from enemies. And they were everywhere.
But Zubal’s has also changed. The gravel paths have been replaced by black asphalt, the small wooden houses where children used to play have been demolished for safety reasons, and the estate has been surrounded by barbed wire. Stalin rarely came there again.
It soon became clear that Stalin would not live long in the Kremlin. Shortly after Nadja’s death, his court architect Miron Merzhanov built him a new dacha in the village of Volinskoye in the Kuntsevo district. It was built in the middle of a forest, with sixteen rooms, painted in camouflage dark green and surrounded by a high wire fence, with floodlights alongside. Stalin moved there in 1934. He usually came to dinner in his apartment in the Kremlin with all the members of his inner circle and sat Svetlana at the table to his right. Sometimes he would ask her about her school grades and sign her assignments. After dinner, he dismissed the children and continued to talk to members of the Politburo until the early hours of the morning. Only then did he go to bed in Kuntsevo.
All the staff at Kuntsev – all members of the OGPU secret service – worked in shifts and were more or less permanent for almost eighteen years. Valentina Istomina was his housekeeper and, according to rumours, his bedmate. Svetlana, who missed her mother very much, tried to win at least some of her father’s attention. Stalin was partly aware that a motherless child needs attention. He affectionately called her “little butterfly” or “little sparrow” and whenever she asked him for something, he would say to her, “Why are you asking? Just give the order and I will make sure it is done.”
Although it was rumoured that the Alilu and Svanidze families were estranged after Nadja’s death, this was not true, as they visited each other regularly and spent the next two or three years with Stalin. It was especially the grandmother and the grandfather, Olga and Sergei Aliluyev, who were the link that kept everyone on good terms. They often travelled to Sochi together and almost always celebrated the New Year in the dacha in Kuntsevo. It even seemed that Stalin was trying to maintain some family ties.
When Svetlana was nine years old, he organised a visit for her, her brother Vasili and her half-brother Yakov to visit their mother Keka in Tbilisi. The visit was not a success. Svetlana was scared to death of Keka. She was sitting straight up in an armchair, dressed in a black dress, surrounded by old women, also dressed in black. She spoke to Svetlana in Georgian. But only Yakov understood Georgian. As soon as Svetlana got the candy from Kek’s bony hand, she thanked him and left.
Stalin did not accompany the children on this visit, and only visited their mother shortly before her death. Keke then asked him, “Joseph, what are you now?” Stalin thought and replied, “Do you remember the Tsar? Well, I am something like the Tsar.” “What a pity you didn’t become a priest.”
Svetlana attended Model School No.25 in the centre of Moscow, together with her brother Vasily, five years older. Every weekday at 7.45 a limousine would drop them off in a nearby square, then they would walk to the school past a large portrait of Lenin and Stalin. Her school years coincided with a growing cult of personality. Portraits of her father hung everywhere. Stalin was convinced that people needed a Tsar to bow down to and in whose name they could live and work.
Model School No 25 was no ordinary school, as it was attended only by the children of the elite; the children of writers, actors, researchers, members of the Comintern, generals and the Party. There were lemon trees and palm trees in the corridors and white tablecloths on the tables in the restaurant. The school had its own library and pupils could participate in various clubs; they could choose from dance, literature, photography, electrical engineering, modelling, radio, chess, shooting, boxing and basketball. The school also had a doctor and a dentist. They regularly visited the Tretyakov Gallery and went on free collective holidays to sanatoriums on the Black Sea.
School No 25 was the “mirror of socialism” and was therefore often visited by journalists, including foreign ones. Other schools around Moscow did not have all this. In the early 1930s, there was not even paper for notebooks, but pencils were rationed and, because there were too few school desks, pupils had to attend lessons in several shifts. When the cold hit, the normal schools were simply closed, as there was no heating.
Svetlana was a model pupil, but this could hardly be said of her brother Vasili. He was most happy to sneak off to a nearby abandoned cemetery and dig up bones with his classmates. When his teachers reminded him not to do it anymore, he told them, “I’ll get better, but remember who I am.” Svetlana was probably the only one who understood the void left in Vasili by his mother’s death. He cursed badly, told obscene jokes and started drinking at the age of thirteen. That was when he took his anger out on Svetlana, so much so that her half-brother Yakov had to step in to protect her. Even when Vasily was transferred to Moscow Special School No 2, things were no better.
In 1938, Vasili was enrolled at the Kachin Military Aviation School, hoping that discipline would bring him to his senses. But he didn’t, as he demanded special privileges and cleverly exploited his father’s name. Svetlana attended her school until she was 16 and accepted the Bolshevik ideology without any objections.
The Great Terror
On 6 December 1934, eight-year-old Svetlana approached the open coffin of Sergei Kirov, Party Secretary of the Leningrad organisation, who had been shot on the steps of the Smolny Institute by Leonid Nikolayev for allegedly sleeping with Kirov’s wife. Immediately afterwards, the story was changed, as Nikolayev was said to be a member of a counter-revolutionary organisation intent on overthrowing Soviet power. Kirov was one of Svetlana’s favourite “uncles” and she loved to play with him.
As soon as Stalin learned of Kirov’s murder, he summoned Genrik Jagoda, the head of the NKVD (the OGPU secret police had been renamed the NKVD in 1934), and handed him a proposal for “a law to combat terrorism, under which sentences would be passed immediately, without the possibility of appeal, and the death penalty would be carried out immediately”. This simplified the methods of investigation. What at first appeared to be a purge within the Party was only the prelude to a massive repression that would involve thousands of innocent people. Mass arrests began in 1935 and 1936 and, at the height of the Great Terror in the seventeen months of 1937 and 1938, 1.7 million people were arrested, more than 700,000 shot and 400,000 deported to Siberia. Thus, in 1938, two million people were already imprisoned in the gulags.
As an 11-year-old girl, Svetlana did not understand what was happening, but she felt the impact of the terror first-hand when she returned from holiday in the summer of 1937. They no longer had a housekeeper at home because she had been dismissed as unreliable. Svetlana’s furniture and all her memories of her mother had disappeared, and when she asked her housekeeper why, she replied that nothing was hers because everything belonged to the state. The old housekeeper was replaced by Lieutenant Nakashidze and given the task of looking after Svetlana, her brother and their friends. In the autumn of 1937 Svetlana also got her own security guard, who accompanied her everywhere she went, to school, the theatre and on trips, and secretly went through her belongings and diary.
She was no longer allowed to use the general cloakroom at school, but had to leave her belongings in a small room next to the headmaster’s. She was also no longer allowed to eat in the restaurant. She had to bring her lunch from the Kremlin and eat it in a corner separated from the restaurant by a curtain and supervised by an NKVD officer. Her good friend Misha, with whom she read books and exchanged messages secretly, was transferred to another class because his parents had been arrested.
Alexander Svanidze, brother of Stalin’s first wife Kato, and his wife Maria were the first of Svetlana’s family to be taken away by the NKVD in December 1931. Then, slowly, other members of the Svanidze family began to disappear. Svetlana could not believe that they were “enemies of the people” and was convinced that Stalin would save them. Everyone in the family was frightened, they tried to influence Stalin through Svetlana, and Stalin said to Svetlana: “Why are you repeating yourself like an empty drum. Stop being a lawyer.”
Soon afterwards, a purge of the army began. Svetlana’s uncle Pavel Aliluyev was a deputy commander in the tank division. When he returned to his office from a holiday, he saw that most of his comrades in the office had been arrested. He had a heart attack. The NKVD telephoned his wife, Zhenya, and asked her what she had given her husband for breakfast. When Zhenya arrived at the hospital, Pavel was already dead. Everyone stood petrified as she began to tear the clothes off her husband and look for gunshot wounds. Her husband had told her the day before, “If they come looking for me, I will shoot myself.”
The husband of Nadia’s sister Anna, Stanislav Redens, who was for some time head of the Ukrainian secret service and responsible for the purges, has now become a victim himself. He was arrested on 22 November, and Stalin allowed his wife Anna to visit Lefortovo in prison, assuring her that he would let their two children go free if Redens confessed to counter-revolutionary activity. Redens refused the offer, saying that Stalin could not be trusted. He was shot in February 1940. Anna was allowed to keep her beautiful apartment, but was no longer allowed to visit Svetlana and Vasili.
One day, Svetlana’s good friend Galja told her in tears that her father had been arrested. She begged her to help them. During dinner, Svetlana asked Stalin for help in the presence of all the Politburo members. He got angry and said, “The NKVD is never wrong. Don’t ever again be a letterbox for requests from your school friends. Sometimes it is necessary to take action even against those you love.” But Svetlana’s plea helped and Galya’s father returned home.
After her mother’s death, the number of Svetlana’s relatives, who formed a circle centred on her mother Nadja, slowly but steadily began to dwindle. In moments of despair, Svetlana was convinced that if her mother were still alive, she too would have become Stalin’s victim. Stalin had never done anything to save her relatives and could therefore always deny that he was conducting a purge. If anyone had accused him of doing so, he could always have said: ‘I am not doing this. This is happening to my family too.”
At 14, Svetlana was still a girl, and a girl without a mother, and almost always without a father. She missed her father, of course, and sometimes wrote him letters full of innocent childlike love. “My dear, dear papoose, how are you? Are you well? Do you miss me and Vasili? I miss you very much. I am waiting for you, but you never come. I feel in my heart that you want to deceive me again… I kiss you, my dear papoose… Until we see each other again. Svetlana.”
But slowly she started to grow up and become an intelligent girl. She loved literature, was influenced by books about foreign cultures, and wanted to travel. Stalin, however, hated travelling. After coming to power, he left his homeland only twice – for conferences with the Allies. Svetlana was never allowed to travel outside Moscow and Sochi. She was already 29 years old and her father dead when she was able to visit Leningrad for the first time. Although this was normal for Soviet citizens, her young mind saw it as a great deficit.
War
World War II came suddenly and without warning. At four in the morning on the twenty-second of June 1941, Stalin was awakened by a telephone call in Kuntsevo. Marshal Zhukov told him that the Germans were attacking from the front. On the twenty-ninth of June they had taken Minsk and the road to Moscow was open. Stalin turned to his closest colleagues and said to them, “All is lost, Lenin has left us a great country and we have fucked it up.” And he shut himself in his dacha. The terrified ministers asked him to take over the war cabinet. They could not imagine how they could run the war without him.
Despite his attempts to wage war, Stalin asked his sister-in-law, Zhenya Aliluyeva, to take Svetlana to Sochi. Zhenya refused, saying that she had to look after her children. No one had ever said no to Stalin and he could not forget it. For years he waited for revenge. The next day, Nadja’s sister Anna helped him and took the group of relatives south by train in the general chaos. Stalin immediately sent his sons Yakov and Vasily to the front.
Soon afterwards, he called Svetlana and told her that Jakov was a German prisoner. He asked her not to mention this to Julia, Yakov’s second wife. “I don’t think Yulia is honest. We will have to see how she is.” Svetlana did not understand what this meant and why Yulia should not be honest. Soon after, she found out, because Yulia was arrested and imprisoned in Lubyanka. In August, Stalin issued Order 270, condemning all those who surrendered to the enemy as traitors to the Fatherland. He ordered the wives of captured officers to be arrested and imprisoned. Yakov was a prisoner and a traitor and Julia had to be arrested. Stalin’s son was no exception. Yulia was only released in 1943, and that without any explanation. Her five-year-old daughter never knew her mother, who had changed so much.
Stalin and Yakov never got on well. Stalin considered his son unreliable and soft. He opposed both his first marriage and his second, and 21-year-old Yakov wanted to shoot himself. The Germans captured him near Vitebsk in July 1941 and, after the defeat at Stalingrad, tried to replace him with Field Marshal Paulus of Germany. Stalin did not agree to the swap. Yakov was shot or committed suicide. For a long time Svetlana did not know what fate had befallen her half-brother.
When the south of the country was no longer safe, the family was transported by train to Kuybyshev, near the Urals. While millions starved in Russia’s besieged cities, life in Kuybyshev was almost normal. Concerts were held and Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony premiered, and reports from the front could be seen during film screenings. It was here that Svetlana learned of the tragic news that had shattered her life.
Stalin asked her to improve her English, as the English and the Americans were finally Soviet allies, so she could read Life, Time, Fortune and newspapers. One day she read an article about her father in one of them, saying that it was common knowledge that ‘Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, committed suicide on the night of 7 November 1932’. Svetlana ran to her grandmother and asked her if this was true, and she confirmed it. Her adored mother had shot herself and only she knew nothing about it. So her mother betrayed her. Svetlana’s anger turned against her father. She knew how cruel he could be, even brutal.
Now some mysterious things suddenly became clear to her. “I almost went crazy and something inside me broke. I was no longer ready to accept some things without question.” She didn’t know which was more terrible, that her father was to blame for her mother’s death, or that her mother didn’t love her enough not to kill herself. She began to doubt.
In the summer of 1942, Svetlana and the others were allowed to return to Moscow, but she did not see her father until October, when she was summoned to Kuntsevo for a dinner in honour of British Prime Minister Churchill. Svetlana did not know why she had been invited, as Stalin had forbidden her contact with foreigners. She was introduced to Churchill and when Churchill saw that she was a redhead, he confided in her that he had once been a redhead himself. “Now look at me!” he finished. Stalin then gestured to her to go away. Perhaps he wanted to show Churchill that he was a good father.
Svetlana was still a good student, she loved to read Schiller, Goethe, Gorky and Chekhov, but especially Dostoyevsky and Yesenin, and she grew up reading them. Stalin was visibly displeased that she was turning into a woman. If she wore a skirt that only reached to her knees, or short stockings instead of long ones, he would growl: “What’s that, you’re walking around naked.” He ordered a dress to be made for her that would cover her whole legs.
In the spring of 1942, a new pupil, Olga Rifkina, arrived in Svetlana’s class. She grew up in a poor Jewish family and soon became Svetlana’s friend. Her parents’ elite pupils immediately let her know that she was poor. The only person who considered her her equal was Svetlana Stalin. That autumn, her brother Vasily was promoted to colonel and air inspector. This kept Stalin from fighting at the front. Vasily took advantage of this and in the autumn turned Zubalova into a dacha for the parties of his friends, mostly airmen returning from the front. They watched films, listened to jazz, danced the foxtrot and, of course, drank.
Vasily demanded that Svetlana attend parties, as she had turned into an attractive young woman. She came, but always kept more to herself. She was convinced that hardly anyone noticed her, but Alexei Yakovlevich Kapler did. He was of Jewish origin, 38 years old, one of the most famous scriptwriters in the Soviet Union and a winner of the prestigious Stalin Prize. He was supposed to have worked with Vasily on a film about military pilots, although it was never made. He was married but separated from his wife. As the best friend of the dictator’s wild and violent son, he was accepted into the inner circle of the children of the Soviet elite. One day, after a film screening, Svetlana started talking to him about the films and Kapler was surprised by her frank statements. On 8 November, there was a reception in Zubalov in honour of the anniversary of the October Revolution and Kapler asked Svetlana to dance. She was embarrassed, but they danced.
Seductive, knowledgeable and experienced, Kapler was the ideal for a 16-year-old girl. He brought her books that had been banned, including a Russian translation of Hemingway’s Komu zvoni (For Whom the Bell Tolls), which tells, among other things, the story of a Russian commissar who organised the Trotskyist purges during the Spanish Civil War. They met in secret. He would wait for her outside the school, then they would walk through the darkened streets, sit for hours in the cold Tretyakov Gallery and go to the Bolshoi Theatre. Mikhail Klimov, Svetlana’s security guard, always walked a few steps behind them. He was frightened because he knew that this relationship was dangerous and that Svetlana’s phone was being tapped and her letters were being opened.
Of course, their romantic relationship could not remain hidden. One day in February, Kapler’s phone rang and the gruff voice of an assistant in Stalin’s security department told him that they knew everything and that it was best for him to get out of Moscow. Kapler simply replied, “To hell with you.” He was preparing to go to Tashkent to film a patriotic film when a man approached him, showed him a security badge and ordered him to get into a car parked on the pavement. Kapler asked where they were going and was told, “Lubyanka.” In the front seat he saw General Nikolai Vlasika, head of Stalin’s security service, and knew he was doomed. He was accused of consorting with foreigners, which was true, because he knew all the foreign correspondents in Moscow, and also of spying for the British.
But instead of the usual ten years, he was sentenced without trial to just five years in a labour camp. His property was confiscated and he was banned from contact with his wife and, of course, Svetlana. He was too well known to simply disappear. The war had loosened many tongues, especially at the front, and a scandal broke out. But all this did not help, because everyone knew that the cause of his problems was his affair with the dictator’s daughter.
On 3 March, Stalin came to the Kremlin and demanded letters from Svetlana’s “lover”. He showed her tape recordings of their conversations. “We arrested him. Kapler is a British spy!” he shouted, spitting on the floor. Then he slapped her. It was the first time he had ever slapped her. He turned to the terrified governess and said, “Just look how low she has fallen. There’s a war going on outside and all she thinks about is sex.” Svetlana knew what it meant to be accused of being a British spy. When she returned home from school, Stalin was waiting for her again, tearing up Kapler’s letters: “She can’t even write Russian well yet. She hasn’t been able to find a Russian yet.”
Kapler was imprisoned in solitary confinement for a year before being sent to a camp in Vorkuta, Siberia. But he was lucky, because the director of the mines complex appointed him as the official photographer. He was able to move freely outside the camp, attending a theatre group, where he met the actress Valentina Tokaraskaya and became her lover. After serving his sentence, the authorities forbade him to return to Moscow, so he decided to settle in Kiev, but before that he wanted to visit his wife in Moscow. But he underestimated the Soviet secret service. He was arrested on the train to Moscow and resentenced to five years in the Pechora labour camp, considered the cruellest in the gulag system.
Immediately after Kapler’s first arrest, changes also took place in Zubalov. The security police banned all those who took part in drunkenness, and Stalin also banned Svetlana for “moral depravity”. Zubalov remained closed for some time.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Twice marriage, twice divorce
Svetlana was already 17 years old and one day she told Stalin that she no longer needed a security guard. Stalin looked at her and said, “To hell with you. Let them kill you if you want. It’s none of my business.” In the last year of school, she began to see Grigory Moroz more often (his real surname was Moroz, but his parents had already changed it to hide their Jewish origins). He was four years older than her and a friend of Vasili’s. She thought she had got rid of the security guard, but the secret police were still watching her. One day General Vlasik, the head of Stalin’s security service, called her on the phone and asked, “What have you got with this young Jew?” She was surprised, because up to that time no one had ever labelled anyone by their ethnic origin. “Nothing, I know him from school and we meet.”
Finally, Morozov proposed marriage. “He was kind. I was lonely and he loved me.” But Stalin quickly put her off: “I don’t approve of the marriage because Morozov is a Jew. The Zionists set you up.” In the end, however, he said, “Screw you. Do what you want.” But even though he did not prevent the marriage, he never wanted to meet Morozov. Because it was wartime, there was no wedding ceremony.
The couple stayed in a riverside house. It was a huge complex of 506 apartments on the Moskva River opposite the Kremlin, reserved for the party elite. It housed a theatre, special shops and a dispensary, with security guards at the entrances. Eighteen-year-old Svetlana soon became pregnant and Stalin decided that Zubalovo would have to be reopened, as pregnant women needed the country air. Svetlana and Morozov’s only child, Joseph, was born two weeks after the end of the war. Svetlana now had less and less contact with her father. When she telephoned him, he told her he had no time and put the phone down. The couple continued their studies and the child lived in Zubalov with two foster children.
According to the story, Morozov was a nice young man and the marriage started well. However, in December 1945, after a year and a half of marriage, the relationship between the couple cooled down. There were probably several reasons. Relatives and friends came to Morozov in droves, demanding numerous favours and positions, and Svetlana, who was still unaccustomed to public speaking, felt alienated. She also had several miscarriages, which left her physically very exhausted. She decided to return to the Kremlin and take little Joseph with her. The marriage broke down in 1947. One day, Morozov was simply not allowed to enter the riverside house anymore. They took away the couple’s passports – every Soviet citizen had to have a passport with his or her name on it – and gave them new ones, which no longer had the couple’s name on them. It was as if the marriage had never taken place. Stalin was satisfied with the divorce.
Repression again
The end of the World War gave citizens hope that repression at home would ease. The Soviet Union had won the war, millions had died, and those who remained alive were convinced that they deserved a better, and above all freer, life. But the Cold War followed, and Stalin was convinced that he had to speak out even more forcefully to keep the Bolsheviks in power. He saw the solution in an ideological anti-cosmopolitan campaign. All contact with foreigners and foreign culture was considered an act of subversion, marriage to a foreigner was almost a criminal offence, foreign travel was only allowed for high-ranking Party officials, and reading foreign literature was forbidden.
In 1947, a wave of repression swept through Stalin’s family. In December, Zhenya, the widow of Pavel Aliluyev, was arrested. “Prison and bad luck are two things that cannot be avoided”, she told her daughter Kyra before being taken away. She was accused of spying and poisoning her husband. The daughter was arrested a few weeks later. She was allegedly spreading rumours that Nadia, Stalin’s wife, had committed suicide. Kyra was surprised, believing that Nadja had died after an appendectomy.
In January 1948, they came for Svetlana’s aunt Anna, Nadja Alilu’s sister. She was supposed to be Stalin’s wife. Everyone was afraid of the night hours, because the police only made arrests at night. The ringing of the bell at night made everyone’s skin crawl. The arrests did not want to end, and the more closely you were related to Stalin, the more likely you were to end up in Lubyanka. Svetlana went to her father several times and asked him to do something. He replied, “They talked too much. They knew too much and they talked too much. This helped our enemies. You were also making anti-Soviet statements.”
In the autumn of 1949, Stalin proposed to Svetlana, who was still living in the Kremlin, to marry Yuri Zhdanov, the son of the late state ideologue and responsible for leading the anti-Cosmopolitan campaign. “My father always wanted our families to be united by marriage,” Stalin used to say. Svetlana, fed up with her loneliness and constant quarrels with her father, agreed. “The boy has a future and he loves you,” her father told her. He did not come to the wedding, but he organised a wedding trip to the Black Sea.
It ended badly. Svetlana loved the sea, he hated it and liked climbing mountains, and Svetlana was afraid of heights. Soon the marriage turned out to be a fiasco. Svetlana was pregnant again and almost always ill, and spent the spring of 1950 in hospital. Her daughter Katja was born two months premature. The marriage then lasted only a good year. Svetlana and Yuri’s mother did not tolerate each other, and her husband Yuri was usually on his mother’s side. Stalin nodded and allowed them to divorce.
Svetlana moved to a house on the riverbank. At the age of twenty-six, she was twice divorced and financially dependent. She no longer had the right to a dacha, a chauffeur-driven car, free food and free clothes. On 21 December 1952, she attended Stalin’s 73rd birthday celebrations without her children. Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin and Mikoyan were already there, Khrushchev arrived later, and Molotov was unwelcome. She danced with her father. She was visibly tired and could hardly move while dancing, and Stalin, drunk, was forcing her to dance some more. Then, in mid-January 1953, another affair broke out with doctors who allegedly wanted to murder important people from public life by giving them the wrong treatment. Of course, the main point was that all the doctors were of Jewish descent. Blood would flow again, Svetlana was sure.
Then Stalin died. On the second of March, Svetlana received a call from her French course at the Academy of Sciences, telling her that a car would take her to Kuntsevo. She felt dizzy. For several days she tried to speak to her father, but Kuntsevo kept telling her not to come and not to phone. The previous day, Stalin was found semi-conscious on the ground. The Politburo members were informed, and only after hesitation did they decide that doctors should be called. By then, 12 hours had passed since Stalin had fallen and nine since he had lost consciousness.
Svetlana was greeted on arrival by a tearful Khrushchev and Bulganin. Stalin died on 5 March at 9.50 and then everyone dispersed. Svetlana was left alone and started to cry. Those who hated him had to hide their relief at his death. It was not safe to express anything but lasting devotion to their departed leader. For who knows what regime will succeed him.
After Stalin’s death, the first to return were the Gulag inhabitants, almost one million of them. Anna Aliluyeva returned in the spring of 1954, completely changed and mentally unbalanced. She did not recognise anyone anymore. Kyra had returned before that, and others came slowly, if they survived. By then, Khrushchev was already in power. Vasily never recovered from his father’s death. He wandered around the bars, drinking and causing disorder.
Svetlana continued to live with her two children in an apartment in a riverside house. Her ex-wife and her husband visited her, but otherwise she lived her life. She washed clothes, cooked, sewed and cooked in the stove, doing the things that servants had done for her before. The government granted her a pension of 200 roubles, plus a hundred roubles for each child, and also gave her the use of a small dacha in Zhukovka, near Moscow. She was advised not to tell anyone about Stalin. Sometimes she had to sell some gold and coats to cover all her expenses. In 1954 she successfully defended her dissertation in literature. But she was terribly lonely. How she would have loved to talk to someone who saw her as more than just Stalin’s daughter.
In 1954, at the Congress of Soviet Writers in the Kremlin, she met just such a man. “Hello, how are you?” she heard a voice behind her, and when she turned around, she was surprised to see Aleksei Kapler. He was released from the camp shortly after Stalin’s death and returned to Moscow with his new wife, Valentina Tokaraskaya. Together they survived the camp, helped each other to survive and even got married.
Svetlana and Kapler left the Congress hand in hand and walked for hours through the streets of Moscow. The old passion was rekindled, they were lovers again and spent pleasant weeks in the Crimea. For him, it was just an adventure, and he told Svetlana so. He didn’t want to leave his wife, but Svetlana didn’t believe he was serious. Then one evening she went to the theatre where Kapler’s wife was playing, went into her dressing room and told her that she and her husband were lovers. Valentina just laughed and told her that she knew, because her husband had never been faithful to any woman.
One afternoon in February 1956, Svetlana received a telephone call from Anastas Mikoyan, Vice-Chairman of the Council of Ministers, inviting her to his home on Lenin Hill and telling her that Nikita Khrushchev was going to speak about her father at the 20th Party Congress. He took her to the library, gave her a copy of the speech and asked her to read it in peace. She slowly read through the speech, in which Stalin was accused of crimes against his own people and of a cult of personality. She knew that all this was true, but the scale of the horrors for which her father was responsible shocked her. She closed in on herself and did not seek contact with others.
In 1956 she was employed as a junior researcher at the Gorky Institute of Literature. There, too, Khrushchev’s speech had to be read out in public at a collective meeting. She sat quietly among her colleagues and when the reading was over, she sobbed. In September 1957, she changed her name from Svetlana Stalin to Svetlana Aliluyeva.
Twenty letters to a friend
In the 1960s, Moscow became a city that hosted music, film and dance festivals and international congresses, attracted foreign students and even had some nightlife. The few who managed to read the banned foreign edition of Doctor Zhivago talked about it quietly with acquaintances. But behind the veneer of cosmopolitanism, the secret police were still in control. It was then that Svetlana converted to the Christian faith and was secretly baptised in the Orthodox Church. She had several reasons for this, one of which was her brother’s death. Vasily was a drunkard who caused scandals in Moscow restaurants and then disappeared. The family discovered him in Lefortovo prison, from where he was soon released because he was too ill. He died in March 1962, aged 41. He left four wives and several children.
In the same year, Svetlana met her cousin Ivan Svanidze again after 25 years, whose parents she adored but whom Stalin had shot in 1942. He showed her the letters his parents had written to him from prison, convinced that he was being cared for by his relatives. But the relatives did not dare to take care of him, as they would have risked imprisonment. Under Stalin, the children of ‘enemies of the people’ ended up in orphanages behind barbed wire. Ivan spent several years there before being deported to Kazakhstan to work in the mines. He returned to Moscow, broken and ill, in 1956, enrolled in university and obtained his PhD. He never wanted to see his relatives again.
Thus two kindred spirits, both victims of Stalin, met. Svetlana and Ivan were then married in the Orthodox Church at the end of 1962. The marriage was doomed to fail, as Ivan was at his wit’s end, and lasted less than a year.
In 1962, Svetlana was visited by the French writer and publisher Emmanuel de la Vigerie, who was writing a book on Stalin and wanted to check some information. Immediately after this visit, Anastas Mikoyan called Svetlana and told her that although it was not forbidden to receive foreigners, it was better “not to do it”. Finally, he asked her if she might be keeping a diary. Svetlana denied it, but he knew she was lying. Twenty Letters to a Friend was actually her book, about people she had loved and lost. It was not a book that one would have expected from Stalin’s daughter. It did not reveal any state secrets, it did not have political aims, and Svetlana did not want it to be published abroad.
In October 1963, Svetlana was admitted to hospital in Kuntsevo for sinus problems. Hospitals have changed a lot since Stalin’s death. Every year, foreign Communist Parties received invitations to send their members to Moscow for treatment. So Svetlana noticed a small, stooped and grey-haired Indian man in the hospital who particularly interested her. She had read a lot about Gandhi and wanted to know more about him. She approached Brajesh Singh and spoke to him in English. They then talked for hours. Singh had lived in London for a long time, had become a Communist, had married and divorced there. He came to Moscow because of chronic lung problems.
Svetlana was glad that he didn’t care that she was Stalin’s daughter. He was 53 and Svetlana was 37. After treatment, they were both sent to Sochi for rehabilitation. There they walked by the sea and ignored the disapproving looks of the other patients. But Singh’s visa expired and he had to return to India. He promised to try to get a work visa and work in Moscow as a translator. But it took 16 months before he set foot on Moscow soil again. He was noticeably old and very ill, but Svetlana was happy again and proposed to him that they get married. But in October 1964 Khrushchev was deposed and the political climate changed for the worse. The ice age of Leonid Brezhnev had begun. Svetlana was summoned to the Kremlin. She was received by Alexei Kosygin, who chaired the Council of Ministers. “What have you cooked? You young, healthy woman, sportswoman, couldn’t you find someone here. I mean, someone young and strong. What are you going to do with this old and sick Hindu. We are all strongly against, strongly against.” Svetlana was outraged and desperate.
Then, in the autumn of 1965, there was the Andrej Sinjavski and Jurij Daniel affair, when they were arrested as dissidents for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. Their novels about the realities of Soviet life were published in the West under a pseudonym. Svetlana was breathless. So has it all started again? It was grotesque and bad. Singh immediately suggested to her that she should get her book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, published abroad. At any moment they could search her flat.
He, too, sensed that something was changing. His Indian friends stopped visiting him, his relatives also avoided contact with him and his health was deteriorating. He was again admitted to the hospital in Kuntsevo. Here, too, changes took place. All foreigners were moved to a separate block and visitors needed a special pass to visit. Svetlana began to spend her days by his side. When he was strong enough, they would sit in the park and hold hands. Singh wanted to die in India and Svetlana wanted to accompany him, but she was not allowed to go abroad.
One day Singh told her that he knew he would die that day. He dreamt that a white bull was pulling a chariot, which in India means that death is coming. He died peacefully and, unlike Stalin, quickly. Svetlana thought that everyone dies the way they deserve. She called his friends to recite verses from the Bhagavad Gita beside the body. Then the body was taken to the crematorium.
Something broke inside her. She knew she had to fulfil Singh’s last wish and scatter his ashes on the Ganges River. She was surprised how quickly she was granted permission to travel to India, but on the condition that the Indian government guaranteed that she would not contact the media. On 19 December 1966, she boarded a plane for New Delhi, determined never to return.
The US authorities were not impressed by her asylum application. When she arrived in New York in April 1967, she held a press conference, at which she said that she intended to publish a book entitled Twenty Letters to a Friend . Her years in America were not the happiest. She missed her two children who remained in the Soviet Union and had no contact with them. Some acquaintances claimed that she had financial problems, others that she had made a lot of money from her book. In 1970 she married William Peterson, who was a member of a group of architects closely associated with the work of the late but even more famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
In 1971, she gave birth to a daughter, Olga, and took the name Lana Peters. But the marriage did not last long. She became an American citizen in 1978, returned to the Soviet Union with her daughter in 1984, lived in England and then in America again. Her last years were spent in southern Wisconsin. She died on 22 November 2011 due to complications from treatment for bowel cancer. Thus ended the wanderings of the Princess of Crete, who never found peace.
