Most visitors to the Kremlin apartment were regime officials. Stalin had no surviving siblings, and his father was deceased. Keke, his mother, lived alone in Tiflis; Nadya, in letters, expressed regret that Keke could not come to Moscow because of the severe climate. The one surviving letter from Keke to her son, from the 1920s, has her wishing him complete annihilation of his enemies.308 Eighteen of Stalin’s letters to her (in Georgian) have survived, containing a word about his health and the children and wishes for her health and long life, all brief and signed “Your Soso.”309 They invariably included an apology for their rarity (“I, of course, am guilty”).310 Stalin had nothing to do with his mother’s or father’s relations. Relatives from both of Stalin’s marriages would stop by the Kremlin apartment: Alexander Svanidze (the brother of Stalin’s deceased first wife, Kato) and his wife, Maria, a former opera singer from a well-off Jewish family; Kato’s sisters, Mariko and Sashiko; Nadya’s father, Sergei Alliluyev, and mother, Olga; Nadya’s brothers, Fyodor and Pavel, and the latter’s fetching wife, Yevgeniya (Zhenya); and Nadya’s sister Anna, who had married Redens (they lived in Kharkov).311 Several of them lived at the Zubalovo dacha complex, where the Stalins had a dacha that they had remodeled, adding a balcony to the second floor and an outdoor bathhouse. He planted an orchard, and raised pheasants, guinea fowl, and ducks, and liked to lie down on the warm tiled stove in the kitchen to alleviate the pain in his joints.312 He also liked to wind up the player piano or gramophone and sing. While Kirov, Voroshilov, and even Molotov danced, he watched.313
Nadya made occasional use of her husband’s position, but she refused to play the smiling wife of the leader, an opportunity other Kremlin wives would have killed for.314 “We spoke among ourselves, and many times to Nadya, that she was not a match for him,” recalled Galina Serebryakova, the spouse of a regime official. “He needed a different wife!”315 She attended the Industrial Academy under her maiden name, Alliluyeva, and it remains unclear whether her fellow students knew she was Stalin’s wife.316 (Nadya belonged to the party, and Nikita Khrushchev, the academy’s party secretary, learned her husband’s identity.) The effects of her exposure to the student milieu—young women in the city selling themselves to make ends meet; students with ties to the famine-stricken countryside—remain difficult to gauge. She kept an emotional distance.317 She dressed simply: a white blouse, navy blue skirt below the knee, low-heeled shoes, little jewelry, no perfume. “There was nothing striking about her,” recalled Irina Gogua, who worked in the Kremlin. “In Iosif’s presence she seemed plain; it was obvious that she was tense.”318 Svetlana would later try to recollect moments of tenderness, or even attention, from her mother but could not.319 “A woman of very strong character,” Karl Pauker, the head of regime bodyguards, was said to have told a Kremlin doctor. “She is like a flint. The Master is very rough with her, but even he is afraid of her sometimes. Especially when the smile disappears from her face.”320
Nadya was diagnosed with a defective heart valve, angina, and general exhaustion and suffered from migraines, evidently from a cranial impairment that the best doctors could not alleviate. (Some observers thought she had clinical depression or schizophrenia.)321 Regime intimates witnessed shouting matches between her and Stalin, laced with his obscenities. But there were episodes of affection, too. “Once, after a party at the Industrial Academy, where Nadezhda was studying, she returned home severely ill from having drunk some wine, and she felt badly,” Vladimir Alliluyev, the son of Anna and Stanisław Redens, recalled. “Stalin laid her down, comforted her, and Nadezhda said, ‘Anyway, you love me a little bit.’”322
Nadya rarely revealed the stress of their almost parallel lives. “Altogether, we have terribly little free time, both Iosif and I,” she had written to Keke. “You have probably heard that I have gone back to school (in my old age). I do not find studying in itself difficult. But it is pretty difficult trying to fit it in with duties at home. . . . Still, I am not complaining, and so far I am coping with it all quite successfully. Iosif has promised to write to you himself. As far as his health is concerned, I can say that I marvel at his strength and his energy. Only a really healthy man could stand the amount of work he gets through.”323
In November 1932, Nadya was weeks from graduation and facing exams.324 On November 7, Svetlana, Vasily, and Artyom watched the Revolution Day parade on Red Square. Nadya marched with the Industrial Academy delegates. “It was cold, and Stalin was on the Mausoleum, as always, in an overcoat,” recalled Khrushchev, who marched with her. When the wind gusted, she said to him, “Look at mine: he did not bring his scarf, he’ll catch a cold and again be sick.”325 After joining her children, according to Artyom, Nadya complained of a headache and went home early. The children were taken to the Sokolovka dacha, another state facility used by the family, where they could ski. On November 8, Stalin was in his office between 2:30 and 8:05 p.m., which resulted in a menacing circular to Ukrainian officials that cut off all consumer goods until grain flowed again, and a telegram to the Kazakh leadership accusing it of providing low harvest numbers aimed at “deceiving the state.”326
Nadya was in the apartment, preparing for the customary holiday banquet that evening in the Voroshilov residence in the Grand Kremlin Palace.327 She put on an unusually stylish (for her) black dress of fabric imported from Berlin, with embroidered red roses, and placed a red tea rose in her dark hair. She was thirty-one years old; her husband was turning fifty-four.328 Stalin, it seems, sat across from her and drank more than usual. Some witnesses say he flirted with Galina Yegorova, the thirty-four-year-old actress wife of his military crony Alexander Yegorov. There had been much talk of dalliances (a hairdresser; a pretty woman who worked in protocol).329 Voroshilov tried to ease the tension, but an eruption occurred. Stalin threw something at Nadya (a bread crust, an orange peel, a cigarette butt).330 She stormed out. Molotov’s wife, Pearl Karpovskaya, known as Polina Zhemchuzhina, followed her. Witnesses mostly cite Stalin’s rudeness; Molotov faulted Nadya. “Alliluyeva was already something of a psychopath at that time,” he would recall. “She left the gathering with my wife. They took a walk on the Kremlin grounds. It was late at night, and she complained to my wife: ‘I do not like this, I do not like that. . . .’ She spoke about the young female barber Stalin saw. It was all simple: Stalin had drunk a little too much, he made some jokes. Nothing special, but it had an effect on her.”331
On the morning of November 9, Karolina Til found Nadya in a pool of blood in her room, near a small toy-sized pistol. (It fit into a lady’s handbag; her brother Pavel had brought it from Germany as a gift.) When Stalin emerged from his room into the dining room, Til evidently told him, “Nadya is no longer with us.”332
Nadya had shot herself in the heart.333 A call came in to the Sokolovka dacha to prepare the children for return to Moscow; apparently, Voroshilov went to pick up Vasily and Artyom and tried to talk to Svetlana, who was six and a half, but he kept breaking down in tears. Svetlana appears to have remained behind with her nanny.334 Nadya’s open casket was placed upstairs in a nonpublic section of the State Department Store (GUM), across from the Kremlin on Red Square, where the central executive committee presidium, run by Yenukidze, had offices. “Early morning for the ceremony of bidding farewell, we climbed the second floor of GUM,” Artyom recalled. “Vasily and I climbed the stairs ahead of Stalin. He moved in silence. He was glum. I remember: as soon as Iosif Vissarionovich approached the casket, he began simply to cry, he broke down in tears. . . . Vasily literally hung on to him and said, ‘Papa, don’t cry, Papa, don’t.’”335 Molotov recalled, “I had never seen Stalin weeping before, but as he stood there by the coffin, tears ran down his cheeks. She loved Stalin very much—that is a fact. . . . He went up to [the coffin] and said, ‘I did not take enough care of you.’”336