Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Rosemary Sullivan
indication of her status, however, was that Svetlana had her bodyguard, Mikhail Klimov, who had accompanied her in the evacuation to Kuibyshev. Most of the elite children had bodyguards—the Molotov children had three. The bodyguards had their own separate room beside the school cloakroom, where they spent their day. Both Olga and Svetlana played piano, and they often went to the conservatory together to hear music by their favorite composers: Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, or Prokofiev. Klimov would buy the tickets. If there was violin music on the program, he would complain: “We are going to saw the wood again” and sit behind them, shuddering.9 Svetlana claimed to have grown fond of Klimov, but it was disconcerting to have someone always shadowing her.
Both girls were readers. Svetlana had a copy of the 1925 Anthology of Russian Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Together they would read the subversive work of Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Gumilyov, and Sergei Yesenin. While still in grade ten, Olga gave Svetlana a notebook full of her poems. She felt Svetlana was a kindred spirit: she, too, had had her happy childhood shattered by misery; she, too, was deeply attached to her absent mother. In response, Svetlana wrote a poem to Olga:
Through poetry, as if through clear tears, looking
Into her soul, again and again
How can I not understand her, if I too am
Waiting in vain for my dear mother? . . .
To the lovely girl with the eyes of spring
I find I am unable to speak
About myself and about how close and clear
Are her thoughts, her dreams, and her grief.10
Though addressed to Olga, the poem was really an elegy for Nadya, now dead ten years. It spoke to Svetlana’s terrible isolation. Nothing of the pain of loss had healed. Olga slowly came to realize that Svetlana was “essentially an orphan.”11
After her return to Moscow, Svetlana spent much of her time at the Zubalovo dacha while her father, preoccupied with the war, was mostly in his bunker hunkered down with his Politburo. Her brother Vasili also lived at Zubalovo with his wife, Galina. Now twenty-one, Vasili had graduated from the Lipetsk Aviation Institute. In October 1941 he became a captain. By February 1942, he had been promoted to colonel. His friend Stepan Mikoyan, wounded and in the hospital, recalled his surprise when Vasili visited him in Kuibyshev in his colonel’s uniform. According to Mikoyan, Vasili later explained that his father had taken him aside and told him he didn’t want him to fly. Too many sons of the elite had already been lost: Mikoyan’s brother, Khrushchev’s son, the war hero Timur Frunze. Vasili was appointed chief of the Air Force Inspection Command to keep him grounded. He flew only one or, at most, two combat missions. Though Stalin was often strict and rude with Vasili, Stepan Mikoyan believed he actually loved his son. Vasili soon had a grand office in Moscow on Pirogov Street.12
Stalin’s younger son, Vasili, was a colonel of the Red Army Air Force by the time this photo was taken in 1943.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Vasili surrounded himself with fellow pilots and treated them like courtiers. He liked to fete them at Aragvi, his favorite Georgian restaurant, where the food was lavish even when the war was raging and Moscow was still being bombed. An orchestra played the latest dances, and the Russian elite sang into their vodka.13
That fall Vasili turned Zubalovo into a party house; he particularly liked pilots, actors, directors, cameramen, ballet dancers, writers, and famous athletes. Stepan Mikoyan thought he gave these late-night drinking parties in subconscious imitation of his father, who used to summon select members of his Politburo to Kuntsevo and keep them up drinking until four or five a.m.14 Most who came were somehow involved in the war—the pilots were flying bombing missions; the filmmakers were shooting footage at the front, often from inside the trenches or with cameras mounted on tanks; the writers were working as journalists covering the war. The evenings had a Hemingwayesque flamboyance. Everyone came to watch films in the small private cinema at the dacha and to listen to the American jazz tunes that were constantly churning on the record player. There would be long drunken nights with people dancing the fox-trot. For many the hard edge of death framed the moment with an intensity unknown in peacetime.
Vasili insisted that his sister come to the parties. Svetlana mostly watched the bacchanal from the sidelines. Friends who attended, like Marfa Peshkova, noted that she had suddenly turned into an attractive young woman, though she still seemed closed off in her own private torment. Sometimes the parties got out of hand. On one occasion, when Vasili was very drunk, he insisted that his pregnant wife tell a joke. When she refused, he hit her, though luckily she fell back onto a couch. Enraged, Svetlana threw her brother out of the house along with his drunken buddies. Yet the parties continued.15
Svetlana with her friend Stepan Mikoyan, the son of the long-standing Soviet official Anastas Mikoyan, in 1942.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Svetlana assumed that no one noticed her, but she had caught the attention of Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler. The Jewish Kapler, then thirty-eight, was one of the most famous screenwriters in the USSR. He was the author of the epic films Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918, and in 1941 he had been awarded the prestigious Stalin Prize. Kapler was supposedly working with Vasili on a film about air force pilots, though evenings were spent mostly drinking, and the film was never made. Kapler was within the inner sanctum of the head of state—best friends with the dictator’s son, who was wild and outrageous. It was heady stuff. He was obviously a man who loved risk. Though he was married, he and his wife were separated, much to his distress, and he was on his own.
One night the Zubalovo group was invited to a film preview on Gnezdnikovsky Street, and Svetlana found herself talking with Kapler about movies. All those years of watching films in the Kremlin with her father paid off. Kapler was intrigued. Describing his impression of her to a journalist years later, Kapler said that he had been surprised. Svetlana was not like the other girls in Vasili’s retinue. She was not what he expected. He was taken with “her grace and intelligence . . . the way in which she would talk to those around her, and the criticisms she made on various aspects of Soviet life—what I really mean is the freedom within her.”16 Her “judgments” were “bold and her manner unpretentious.” She was not decked out like the other women in their gorgeous outfits, preening for attention. She wore “practical, well-made clothes.”
An undated photograph of a young Aleksei Kapler, probably one of the two hundred photographs stolen from Svetlana’s desk by the KGB agent Victor Louis.
(Public domain)
On November 8, a party was organized at Zubalovo to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. The guests included the famous, like the writer Konstantin Simonov, whom Svetlana admired, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Much to her surprise, Kapler asked her to dance. She felt awkward and clumsy. She was so young. He asked her why she seemed sad and asked about the lovely brooch she was wearing, a decorative touch to her austere outfit. Was it a gift, he wondered? Svetlana explained that it had belonged to her mother and this day was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death, though no one else seemed to remember or care.17 As he held her, she poured out her life. She spoke of her childhood, of the losses she had endured, though she didn’t talk much about her father. Kapler understood that “something seemed to separate them.”18
Charming, daring, knowledgeable, experienced, Kapler was irresistible to an idealistic girl of sixteen. And he seemed to be equally drawn to her. The first film they saw together was Queen Christina (1933), starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, a biopic of the seventeenth-century queen of Sweden, which distorted and absurdly romanticized her life.