Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Svetlana, age eleven, in the uniform scarf of the Soviet youth group Young Pioneers.
F
or Svetlana, these were “years of the steady annihilation of everything my mother had created, of systematic elimination of her very spirit.”
1
The people whom Svetlana had loved and who had made her childhood secure had been taken away, and she didn’t know why. A wall of silence surrounded things
too dangerous to speak of. When Svetlana asked her grandmother what happened to their relatives, Olga said, “It was just something that happened. It was fate.” Her nanny counseled her, “Don’t ask.”
2
The family found ways to paper over the horror and carry on—either through denial or by retreating into consoling myths. Though Stalin had personally told Anna Redens that her husband, Stanislav, had been executed, she always insisted that he’d escaped to Siberia. The family continued to spend weekends at Zubalovo. The young people skied or hiked through the forest, a bodyguard always in tow. Anna’s son Leonid recalled a walk that took place when he was eleven years old with his mother, Svetlana, and her nanny and bodyguard. It was early spring. Svetlana, who was three years older, “carefully, bit by bit, slipped away” from the group, taking Leonid with her. They walked for miles beside a small river. At a particularly precipitous point, he lost his footing and fell in. She pulled him out, then removed her jacket and gave it to him. He remembered her kindness. He also thought of this as the first time he realized that she “wanted to jump out of this trap.” When they got home, she was roundly reprimanded for running away from her bodyguard.
3
At fourteen, Svetlana was anxious to assert her independence. She wrote to her father suggesting that she was no longer a child: “Hello my dear Father, I will not wait for any more orders from you. I am not little in order to be amused by this.”
4
A few weeks later, she wrote again. Oddly, it was as if she’d assumed her mother Nadya’s demanding, coquettish voice. Perhaps this was the only way to get Stalin’s attention.
AUGUST
22, 1940
My dear, dear Papochka,
How do you live? How is your health? Do you miss me
and Vasya [Vasili]? No. Paposchka, I miss you terribly. I keep waiting for you and you keep on not coming. I feel with “my liver” that you are trying to trick me again—I refer to a lack of joy—and there’s no directive and you will not come. Ay, yai, yai …
Now with Geography, it’s a mess again. Because 5 more republics have been added, there’s more territory, more population, and there’s an increased number of industrial spaces but our textbook is taken from 1938, and especially because we have the economic geography of the USSR, there’s lots of stuff missing from the textbook…. There’s a lot of crap in it…. Scenes of Sochi, Matsesta, different resorts, and, in general, these images are not needed by anyone….
Papochka, please write me right away because you will forget after, or you will be busy. And by that time, I myself will come. OK. I kiss you deeply my dear Papochka. Until we see each other again.
Yours,
Svetlana
5
How would Stalin have responded to his lippy fourteen-year-old daughter criticizing her textbook as full of crap? Unsurprisingly, Stalin was a misogynist. On one occasion, Svetlana overheard her father and Vasili discussing women. Vasili said he preferred a woman with conversation. “My father roared with laughter: ‘Look at him, so he wants a woman with ideas! Hah! We have known that kind: herrings with ideas—skin and bones.’ “
6
Was he talking about her mother? The remark cut deeply enough that she never forgot it.
Svetlana was turning into an intelligent young woman. At school she loved literature and valued the exotic. Her favorite
memory of Zubalovo in her teenage years was of the two yurts that sat on the front lawn at the dacha. Her Uncle Alyosha Svanidze, now dead, had brought them back from a trip he’d made to Guangxi in China. As young teenagers, she and her four cousins—Leonid, Alexander, Sergei, and Vladimir—would sit in those strange dwellings and imagine their inhabitants.
The yurts were round wooden structures made of slats, with walls insulated by patterned felt and floors covered with thick felt rugs. In each yurt, a bronze Buddha sat in a wooden box positioned on top of a small red chest. The Buddha’s demure smile and mysterious third eye captivated Svetlana. It was the first icon of a god she had ever seen. A half century later, she could describe those yurts to a friend with precision.
7
Svetlana’s fascination with other cultures is implicit here, but her father did not share this curiosity. Stalin detested travel; he had no real interest in other cultures and, once in power, left the Soviet Union only twice—for Allied peace conferences. Svetlana was never permitted to travel outside the frame of Sochi and Moscow. She would be twenty-nine (and her father dead) before she visited Leningrad. Though this was the norm for Soviet citizens, it was a deprivation for a curious young mind.
When Svetlana was fifteen, the yurts disappeared, as did her entire world—in one fell swoop.
World War II came suddenly, though not without warning, to the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, at 4:00 a.m., Stalin, asleep on his couch at his Kuntsevo dacha, was awakened by a phone call from his chief of staff, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, informing him that German planes were bombing Kiev, Vilnius, Sebastopol, Odessa, and other cities. A total of 147 German divisions had crossed the border and were already proceeding at a fierce pace through the Ukraine.
8
For months, Stalin had received reports from British and Soviet intelligence agencies that Hitler was planning to stage an invasion, code-named Operation Barbarossa, on June 22. According to Stepan Mikoyan, Stalin had even been warned again that very midnight. In the presence of Mikoyan’s father and several other Politburo members, Stalin was informed that a defecting German soldier had just been apprehended and was claiming the attack was coming in the morning. But as Mikoyan’s son explained, “Stalin’s attitude to intelligence data reflected his extreme mistrust of people. In his opinion everyone was capable of deceit or treason.” When his agents in the field sent him “alarming reports,” Stalin ordered them recalled and deported to the camps to be “ground into dust.”
9
Stalin insisted that Hitler would keep to the nonaggression pact the two leaders had signed in 1939. The USSR would not
provoke
a war. Privately he knew that the Soviet army was not ready—his purges of the armed forces had cut too deeply. Now the front was in anarchy; Russian troops were in flight, and Stalin was to blame. Hitler had disastrously outmaneuvered him.
On June 29, when the Germans encircled four hundred thousand defending Russian troops and took the city of Minsk in Belarus, giving themselves a direct route to Moscow, Stalin climbed into his car waiting outside the Kremlin and turned to his comrades. “Everything’s lost,” he said. “Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have shit it out our asses.”
10
Cursing all the way to Kuntsevo, he announced his resignation. For two days, Stalin kept silent in his dacha. There were rumors of a breakdown, but this is unlikely. More convincing is the idea that Stalin was testing his comrades to see whether his leadership would survive the crisis.
11
A contingent of frightened ministers, including Beria, Mikoyan, and Molotov, headed to Kuntsevo to ask him to
return to work as head of a new “super–war cabinet.” They couldn’t imagine running the war without Stalin. Anastas Mikoyan explained, “The very name of Stalin was a great force for rousing the morale of the people.”
12
On July 3, Stalin addressed the nation with his new title, supreme commander, and declared the coming struggle to be the Great Patriotic War. He exhorted the people to “rally round the Party of Lenin and Stalin.” Stalin was something
other
now, an Idea, no longer just himself. He warned that, in this “merciless struggle,” all “cowards, deserters, panic-mongers” would be ruthlessly crushed.
13
Looking back from adulthood, Svetlana would say that her father refused to admit that Hitler had tricked him. “He considered himself infallible … his political flair unmatchable.” After the war was over, she recalled his habit of repeatedly saying, “Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible!” And then he would add, “So they thought they could fool Stalin? Just look at them, it’s Stalin they tried to fool!” Svetlana was always appalled when her father spoke of himself in the third person, always amazed that it never occurred to him that “he might fool himself.”
14
Even as he attempted to control the war disaster, Stalin took measures to protect his daughter. He asked his sister-in-law, Zhenya, to take the family to his dacha in Sochi. “The war will be long,” he told her. “Lots of blood will be shed…. Please take Svetlana southwards.”
15
Amazingly, Zhenya refused, saying she had to join her husband (she had hastily remarried after Pavel’s death) and to safeguard her own children. Nobody said no to Stalin. He never forgot or forgave a single betrayal, and he could wait years to exact his revenge, as Zhenya would discover.
Stalin next turned to Nadya’s sister, Anna, for help. Threading through the crowds of untold thousands of evacuees desperately
trying to leave Moscow, Anna hustled the anxious little troop of Stalin’s relatives aboard a train heading south to the Black Sea. Anna and her own two sons; her parents, Sergei and Olga; Yakov’s wife, Yulia, and their daughter Gulia; and Svetlana and her nanny squeezed together in bewilderment into a private compartment. Even though her school had been practicing war drills for years—she kept a school photo of her class practicing a gas-mask drill in 1935—now Svetlana discovered the real terror of war, and the racking fear for loved ones left behind.
On June 23, one day after the German invasion, Stalin sent his sons, Yakov and Vasili, and his adopted son, Artyom, to the front. Artyom reported rather cryptically in retrospect:
Jacob and me joined the artillery, and Vasili became a pilot. All of us went to the front—from the first day; Stalin telephoned to have us taken there immediately. It was the only privilege we got from him. There remain several letters from Vasili to his father. In one of them from the front, he asked his father to send him money. A snack bar had opened in his detachment and he wanted a new officer’s uniform. His father replied, “1. As far as I know the rations in the air force are quite sufficient. 2. A Special uniform for Stalin’s son is not on the agenda.” Vasili didn’t get the money.
16
The family spent the summer in Sochi. Svetlana’s friend Marfa Peshkova had also been evacuated to Sochi and visited Stalin’s dacha one morning. Svetlana came into the room, looking distraught and, as Marfa reported, said, “I had a very strange dream last night. It was as if I saw a large nest in a tree. There was an eagle in the nest with little babies next to it. And suddenly the eagle takes one of the babies and throws it out of the nest. The baby falls and dies.” And then Svetlana
cried. “You know, something terrible has happened to Yasha [the family’s pet name for her brother Yakov].” Her last goodbye to him had been over the telephone, just before he left for the front.
17
Not long after her dream, Svetlana picked up the phone and heard her father’s voice on the other end. She asked about Yakov, and Stalin replied, “Yasha has been taken prisoner.” Before she had time to respond, he added, “Don’t say anything to his wife for the time being.” Yulia was sitting anxiously on a nearby couch, scrutinizing Svetlana’s face. Svetlana thought her father was being solicitous and so mumbled to Yulia, “He doesn’t know anything himself.”
18
She could not bear to tell her the truth.
Svetlana was devastated by her father’s call. In the last few years, she had become very close to her half brother. Though he was nineteen years older, they would study together in the banya at Zubalovo, spreading their blankets among the fragrant birch branches, curled up with their books.
Stalin’s relationship with his older son had always been poor. According to the family, he bullied Yakov relentlessly, calling him soft and worthless. Stalin disapproved of Yakov’s first marriage, and in despair twenty-year-old Yakov had attempted to shoot himself, but the bullet only grazed his chest. Stalin wrote to Nadya from Sochi: “Convey to Yakov from me that he has acted like a hooligan, applying blackmail and I do not have anything else in common with him,”
19
and the story circulated that Stalin had laughed and said, “Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight.”
20
Yakov left for Leningrad and didn’t see his father again for eight years, but Svetlana always defended him. “Yakov’s gentleness and composure were irritating to my father, who was quick-tempered and impetuous even in his later years.”
21
After the tragic death of his first child, Yakov’s marriage
ended in divorce. Perhaps to reconcile with his father, he left his career as an engineer and entered the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in 1935. In 1936, he married Yulia Meltzer. Again Stalin did not approve. According to Svetlana, this was because Yulia was Jewish, and her father “never liked Jews, though he wasn’t as blatant about expressing his hatred for them in those days as he was after the war.”
22
Their daughter, Gulia, was born in 1938. Summers until the war, they would come to Zubalovo, where Yakov, still desperate for approval, tried to ingratiate himself with his father.