The first tragedy was that of the clever but fragile Fyodor. During the Civil War, he was recruited into special forces being trained by Kamo. The psychotic former bank robber was obsessed with tests of loyalty under fire. To this end, he devised a plan to simulate his unit’s capture by enemy Whites. “At night he would seize the comrades and lead them out to be shot. If any began to beg for mercy and turn traitor, he would shoot them… ‘That way,’ said Kamo, ‘you could be absolutely sure they wouldn’t let you down.’” One revealed himself—and was shot on the spot. Then came the ultimate test: he cut open the chest and tore out the heart. “Here,” he told Fyodor, “is the heart of your officer!”
Fyodor lost his mind. “He sat in silence for a number of years in hospital,” said his niece Svetlana. “Slowly speech came back and he became a human being again.” He never worked, but he outlived Stalin.
The marriage to Nadya was at first quite happy. Members of the Alliluyev family moved into Stalin’s apartment and his country house, Zubalovo, ironically the former home of a Baku oil baron. Nadya seemed content to be a housewife and mother but soon craved a serious career. The pressure of Stalin’s personality, the political stress of the war on the peasantry, the strain of raising two children and studying for a degree, as well as her manic jealousy of his habitual flirting, broke Nadya. Suffering from depression, she committed suicide in November 1932.
Stalin’s parents-in-law, Sergei and Olga, lived on in the Kremlin and the dacha even as he decimated their family. After Nadya’s death, a heartbroken Stalin became close to Zhenya Alliluyeva, the wife of Pavel, and this may have led to an affair. If so, it was over by the time Stalin unleashed the Great Terror.
Stanislas Redens was arrested and shot despite the pleas of his wife, Anna. Pavel Alliluyev died in suspicious circumstances. After the Second World War, Stalin’s sisters-in-law Anna and Zhenya irritated him by interfering in family and political matters, and becoming too close to various Jews under investigation. With Stalin’s permission, Anna wrote her memoirs, but they turned out to be characteristically tactless, especially about his stiff arm. He ordered the arrest of the two women. When they were released on his death, both were convinced that Stalin had freed them, refusing to believe that he himself had been responsible for their misery. Anna lost her mind in jail, but she lived until 1964.{254}
Stalin’s other family, the Svanidzes, were just as unfortunate. His son Yakov did not see his father again until 1921 when his uncle, Alyosha Svanidze, and Kamo’s sister brought him to Moscow. He moved into Stalin’s and Nadya’s household, but his slow Georgian ways infuriated his father. When Yakov bungled a suicide, more of a cry for help, Stalin laughed that “he could not even shoot straight.”
Alyosha Svanidze, who married a beautiful Jewish soprano, remained an intimate friend. He and Soso were “like brothers.” He served abroad, then returned in the early 1930s as Deputy Chairman of the Soviet State Bank. After Nadya’s suicide, the Svanidzes, including Kato’s sisters, became even closer to Stalin: Mariko worked in Moscow as Abel Yenukidze’s secretary, while Sashiko Svanidze Monoselidze frequently stayed with Stalin.
Alyosha’s wife, Maria, and his sister Sashiko competed with the Alliluyev women, Anna and Zhenya, to care for Stalin. In the early 1930s, they virtually lived with him, but their competition irked the dictator.
In 1935, Sashiko’s husband, Monoselidze, asked Stalin for financial help, and he replied:
I’ve given 5,000 roubles to Sasha [Sashiko]. For the moment this will be enough for both of you. I have no more money or I’d send it. These are royalties I get for my speeches and articles… But this should remain between ourselves (you, me and Sasha). No one else should get to know about it, otherwise my other relatives and acquaintances will begin to pursue me and will never leave me alone. So this is how it must be.
Misha! Live happily a thousand years! Give my greetings to our friends!
Yours
Soso
19 February 1935
P.S. If you meet my mother, give her my greetings
Sashiko died of cancer in 1936, but her sister Mariko was arrested in the case against her boss, Yenukidze. The next year, Stalin ordered the arrest of Alyosha Svanidze and his wife. He told the NKVD to demand that Alyosha confess to being a German spy in return for his life. Alyosha refused defiantly. “Such aristocratic pride,” said Stalin. Alyosha, his wife, Maria, and his sister Mariko were executed in 1941 as the Germans advanced. During the Terror, Stalin liked to excuse the arrest of other leading families: “What can I do? My own family is in jail!”
Stalin’s son Yakov, by Kato Svanidze, married during the 1930s and had a daughter, Galina, who is still alive. During the German invasion, he was captured by the Nazis. His father believed he had betrayed him and had his wife arrested. But Yakov committed suicide without breaking. Afterwards, Stalin regretfully admitted the boy had been “a real man.”{255}
As for the women in his life, their fates are often mysterious, but they received little favour when their lover became the Soviet leader.
“Glamourpuss,” the schoolgirl Pelageya Onufrieva, became a teacher, but in 1917 left her profession and married a mechanic named Fomin. Her father and brothers were targeted as kulaks during Stalin’s war on the peasantry in the early 1930s, and were exiled to Siberia. In 1937, her husband was arrested and held as a potential saboteur. As a result her son lost a scholarship to study at Leningrad University, whereupon she wrote to Stalin. The scholarship was restored. However, her husband was again arrested in 1947 and sentenced to ten years in prison as an Enemy of the People.
When she was interviewed in 1944 about the Leader, a secret policeman demanded the postcards and book given by Stalin. “But my life has been hard and nomadic,” she retorted, “I had a big family and I couldn’t keep everything, but I kept the book. So it’s a shame to give it to you because it’s my only memory, not so much of Stalin but of the man named Josef. That’s what I called him. I would say we were friends. The book’s precious to me and you can take it when I’m dead.” The apparatchik confiscated the book.
Ludmilla Stal worked for many years in the Central Committee, was decorated and helped edit Stalin’s works, dying before the Second World War. Tatiana Slavatinskaya prospered in the CC Secret Department, becoming a member of the Central Control Commission. But in 1937 her son-in-law, a general, was shot, her daughter and son arrested and exiled for eight years. She and her grandchildren were expelled from the House on the Embankment, where many of the elite lived. One grandson, Yury Trifonov, the writer, chronicled the experience in his novella House on the Embankment.
As far as we know, Stalin met up with only one of his girlfriends.[186] “In 1925,” recalls his companion in Solvychegodsk, Tatiana Sukhova, “I moved to Moscow and wanted to see Comrade Stalin very much. I wrote to him. I was very surprised to hear his voice on the phone that very evening.” Next day they met at his office on Old Square: “We talked about my work, our mutual friends and Solvychegodsk.”
In 1929, when Stalin was taking the waters in Matsesta, in the south, Sukhova, a teacher, contacted him again. “Three young men in white suits came and collected me” and took her to his villa, where she was welcomed by Nadya Alliluyeva and Stalin. They reminisced over supper. Nadya asked her about young Stalin in exile: “I described his appearance and said that Comrade Stalin was never parted from his white hood.” Nadya laughed, “saying she never imagined he was such a dandy!” Then Stalin proudly showed her his tomatoes in his vegetable garden and took her to a firing-range beside the house, where he hit a bull’s-eye with a rifle. He let her fire a “small English Montecristo” pistol—but she missed. “How will you defend yourself?” Stalin asked her. When she told him that she was badly treated at her resthouse, he muttered, “They must be reprimanded.”
186
Sukhova’s later memoirs are unpublished. Natasha Kirtava and Alvasi Talakvadze became Party workers in Batumi and lived into old age, revered for their early association with Stalin. Stefania Petrovskaya, his fiancée in Baku, remained a Party member and was implicated in the Slepkov Case of 1932–33. Slepkov himself was spared in 1932, then shot in 1937, but her fate is unknown. Serafima Khoroshenina, Stalin’s partner in Vologda, was alive in the 1930s and recorded her memoirs, but her fate is likewise unknown.