Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Rosemary Sullivan
In late 1948, Joseph Morozov, the father of Svetlana’s ex-husband, was arrested. When Svetlana discovered this and went to her father to appeal for the old man’s release, Stalin was furious. “That first husband of yours was thrown your way by the Zionists,” he again told her. “‘Papa,’ I tried to object, ‘the younger ones couldn’t care less about Zionism.’ ‘No! You don’t understand,’ was the sharp answer. ‘The entire older generation is contaminated with Zionism and now they’re teaching the young people too.’”30
But when it came to her family, her father’s motives were personal.
Trying to defend her aunt Zhenya, Svetlana wrote her father a strange letter on December 1, 1945:
Papochka
In regards to Zhenya and now that the conversation about her has started. It seems to me that these types of doubts came to you because she remarried very quickly and the reason for this she shared with me a little bit. I didn’t ask her myself. I will definitely tell you when you come. If you have doubts like this in another person it is undignified, terrifying, and awkward. In addition it [the problem] is probably not in Zhenya and in her family struggles, but the principal question is—remember that a considerable amount was said about me. And who were they? They can go to hell.
Svetanka 31
We will never be privy to that conversation, but Svetlana seemed to believe that her father was still angry with Zhenya for her hasty remarriage after her husband Pavel’s death in 1938. Rumors circulated, of course, that Zhenya had quickly married to avoid Stalin’s unwanted attentions. She and Stalin had been close. More convincing, however, is the idea that Zhenya’s unseemly haste made her unreliable in Stalin’s eyes. Svetlana assured her father that all was gossip and she could explain.
But it may have been more than this. Stalin was now carefully guarding his reputation, and the aunts “talked too much.” Looking back, Svetlana would conclude, “There is no doubt that [my father] remembered how close they [the aunts] had been to all that happened in our family, that they knew everything about Mamma’s suicide and the letter she had written before her death.”
Svetlana also remembered Zhenya’s description of her father at the outbreak of war in 1941. “‘I had never seen Joseph so crushed and in such confusion,’ was the way she described it. . . . ‘I was even more frightened when I found he was almost in a panic himself.’” Svetlana was certain that her father recalled this. She added with rancor, “He didn’t want others to know about it. And so Yevgenia [Zhenya] Alliluyeva got ten years of solitary confinement.”32 Could the reason for Zhenya’s imprisonment be as simple as the fact that she had seen Stalin in a moment of weakness?
It seems entirely possible that Stalin’s imprisonment of Anna was an act of personal revenge, however. He called Anna “an unprincipled fool . . . this sort of goodness is worse than any wickedness.”33 During the final years of the war, Anna had helped her father, Sergei, to write his memoirs. His carefully self-censored book was published under the title Proydenny put’ (A Traveled Path) in 1946, the year after his death. Meanwhile, Anna had decided to write her own memoirs. When she submitted the manuscript of Reminiscences for official vetting, it was heavily edited by a journalist named Nina Bam and ended safely with the triumph of the Bolsheviks in 1917. It seemed a harmless, moving, personal memoir, but family members were terrified. They begged her not to publish the book. Anna only laughed and said she was working on volume two.
When Reminiscences came out in 1946, it was praised,34 but the family had been right to warn her. In May 1947, a savage review appeared in Pravda, written by Pyotr Fedoseyev and titled “Irresponsible Thinking.” The attack was shocking. Fedoseyev dismissed “memoirs by small people about grand figures with whom they were somehow connected.” Gorky was quoted as lamenting Tolstoy’s experience: “How large, how clingy was the cloud of flies that surrounded the famous writer, and how annoying were some of these parasites who were feeding off his spirit.” Anna was a parasite feeding off Stalin and claiming family intimacy. Official hagiography and encomiums were mandatory, but it was forbidden to write intimately of Stalin. He did not want personal stories obscuring the icon.
But the reviewer, Fedoseyev, had a larger point to make:
It is especially intolerable when authors of such kind attempt to write a memoir about the development of the Bolshevik Party, about the life and the struggle of its outstanding participants. V. Lenin said that the Bolshevik Party was the intelligence, honor, and conscience of our epoch. The history of the Bolshevik Party and the biographies of its leaders embody the historical experience of the struggle for freedom of the proletariat against the capitalist enslavement, for the creation of the fairest, freest way of life on earth. The great achievement of the Bolsheviks and their leaders serves as a source of inspiration for millions of people in their struggle for the complete victory of communist society. During the lessons about the history of the party and its leaders, millions of working people learn how to live and struggle for the interests of society, for the free, joyful, truly human life.
In order to protect the “free, joyful, truly human life” that Soviet society supposedly was, Anna was sentenced to ten years. It is hard to credit, but a large portion of the Soviet population, bombarded by propaganda and cut off from the rest of the world, believed this version of their lives.
The real error of Anna’s memoir, however, was that she didn’t place Stalin at the center of the story. Her portrait of the Revolution was wrong:
The decisive speech made by Comrade Stalin against Lenin’s appearance at the court tribunal against the counterrevolutionaries convinced Lenin to go underground and hide from the provisional government. The short biography of I. V. Stalin expressly states the significance of Stalin’s stance at this time. “Stalin saved Lenin’s precious life for the party, for the people, and for all humanity by decisively taking a stance against Lenin’s appearance at the tribunal and by resisting the suggestions made by the traitors Kamenev, Rukov, and Trotsky” (Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin: Short Biography p. 63). This is the real truth in regard to the question that A. Alliluyeva distorted and twisted in her pseudo-memoirs.35
The reviewer concludes that Anna was “a narcissist,” “an opportunist,” “a self-advertiser” hoping to receive large royalties. Readers were advised to consult the “scientifically constructed” Short Biography of Stalin (written, of course, under Stalin’s supervision) for the truth. Svetlana could see her father’s stock phrases threading the review.36
In retrospect, Svetlana would explain thus: “My father needed . . . to throw out of history, once and for all, those who had been in his way, those who had actually founded and created the Party and had brought about the Revolution.”37 What Anna did wrong was to speak of Stalin as a human being. In his mind, he was already a historical personage.
No such review could have appeared without Stalin’s prior vetting. Anna’s arrest occurred almost a year after the review was published, but this was characteristic of Stalin’s methods. In order to obscure his involvement, he waited patiently for revenge against enemies. The book was banned and Anna disappeared.
Svetlana had seen little of her father during this torturous time, but in early November 1948, while he was on vacation in the south, he summoned her to visit him at his dacha. When she arrived, he seemed angry with her. He called her to the dinner table and “bawled me out,” as she put it, “and called me a ‘parasite’ in front of everyone. He told me ‘no good had come’ of me yet. Everyone was silent and embarrassed.”38 She, too, remained silent. Her father was terrifyingly changeable. The very next day “he suddenly started talking to me for the first time about my mother and the way she died.” It was in fact November 8, the anniversary of Nadya’s death. “I was at a loss,” she recalled. “I had no idea what to say—I was afraid of the subject.”
Stalin was still looking for culprits. “What a miserable little pistol it was,” he remarked. “It was nothing but a toy. Pavlusha brought it to her. A fine thing to give anybody!” Then he remembered how