Stalin's Daughter (20 page)

We could only surmise there must be some minor guilt, something to do with purely personal relationships and loyalty to Stalin. We definitely thought that without Stalin’s knowledge this arrest simply could not have taken place. And so far as he decided on such an extreme thing as to arrest his own close relatives, so, thought we, there must be a reason. It was a cruel step from our point of view. But from his point of view it had to be a legitimate one.
¹²

Zhenya’s second husband, N. V. Molochnikov, a Jewish engineer, was soon arrested. When Zhenya’s sons asked what they were to tell friends about the absence of their mother and stepfather, the NKGB instructed them to say, “Our parents are on a prolonged trip.” “But until what time?” they asked. “Until a special announcement.”
¹³
A number of Kyra’s friends were also arrested.

On January 28, 1948, they came for Svetlana’s aunt Anna, who was Nadya’s older sister and the widow of Stanislav Redens.
Her sons—Vladimir, twelve; and Leonid, nineteen—were in the apartment. Everyone was asleep. A colonel, followed by a number of agents, knocked on the door at 3:00 a.m. They showed Anna the arrest warrant. As she was being taken away, Anna said, “What a strange array of misfortunes come upon our family Alliluyev.” The children sat up with their nanny as the search was under way. In their memory it lasted a day and a night.
¹⁴

Accused of slandering Stalin, Anna Redens was arrested in 1948 and was not released until 1954.

Anna was accused of slandering Stalin. Her interrogators had collected denunciations from family, friends, and acquaintances. However, when they demanded that she sign a confession, her son Vladimir claimed she refused. He said proudly, “When they arrested my mother, they couldn’t get her to sign anything, not even by force. She was stubborn, they couldn’t break her, even by putting her into solitary.”
¹⁵

In 1993, forty-five years later, when the files of former prisoners were opened to families, Vladimir Alliluyev was permitted to examine his mother’s rehabilitation file, P-212.
¹⁶
The final dimension of the tragedy was that Zhenya and Kyra had been forced to sign condemnations of Anna.

The House on the Embankment earned a new nickname: The House of Preliminary Detention. (The Russian acronym DOPR is the same for both.) It was now a ghost house as Zhenya’s and Anna’s children drew together for comfort. Uncle Fyodor, Nadya’s brother, lived in the same complex and visited often. “Everyone was shocked—shocked, depressed, surprised. But we all kept holding together, as we always had done, and even more so now,” recalled Leonid, Anna Alliluyeva’s son.
¹⁷

Svetlana tried to intercede with her father. When she asked him what her aunts and cousin had done wrong, he replied, “They talked a lot. They knew too much and they talked too much. And it helped our enemies.” Everyone was required to shun the families of people who were purged, and they hadn’t done this. When she protested, he threatened: “You yourself make anti-Soviet statements.”
¹⁸

Zhenya’s son Alexander remembered meeting Svetlana on the Stone Bridge that winter. They both understood that it was too dangerous to speak openly. Alexander’s maternal grandmother had warned him: “Do not write to the freckled one.” They met occasionally, surreptitiously, at the skating rink amid the spruce trees.
¹⁹

Grandmother Olga was still living alone in the Kremlin, where she would sit brooding over the fate of her four children. Her older son, Pavel, and her younger daughter, Nadya, were dead. Her second son, Fyodor, was mentally disabled, living a half life as a consequence of trauma suffered in 1918 during the Civil War. And her older daughter, Anna, was in prison. Olga couldn’t comprehend why Stalin put Anna in prison. She
would give Svetlana letters for Stalin, appealing for her daughter’s release, and then would take the letters back. What was the point?

After the arrests, the grandchildren were soon banned from visiting the Kremlin, so Olga would go every weekend to visit them in their apartments in the House on the Embankment. To Olga it was very clear that Stalin was responsible for their mothers’ imprisonment. Zhenya’s son Sergei remembered her visits in those days. “Grandma would refer to the place where our mothers were confined as nothing other than the Gestapo, although she didn’t say it to Stalin’s face. She knew what that word was about! Her dark humour! She knew things; she had no illusions. She was not far from the truth, either, as we all realized later.”
²⁰

Grandfather Sergei had died in 1945. Luckily, he did not live to witness the arrest of his elder daughter, in his memory the child who had once carried live ammunition for the revolutionary cause and refused to wash her hand for a whole day after Lenin had shaken it. But Sergei’s ideals had died long before he did.

Despite Grandmother Olga’s comments, the family chose to focus their anger on Lavrenty Beria. Someone had to be targeting them. It must be Beria carrying tales of their disloyalty and perfidy to Stalin.

Beria was a Mingrelian from Western Georgia. The family believed he had sought the death of Anna’s husband, Stanislav Redens, in 1938 because Redens knew secrets about his past.
²¹
Ten years later, they still believed he was out to destroy them. But however much Beria might have inflamed Stalin’s paranoia, Stalin was always in control. Rather than looking into the utter blackness and the erasure of all trust that locating the blame squarely on Stalin would have involved, the family held to their illusions. Zhenya’s son Sergei Alliluyev admitted that it made things easier. It was “simpler to explain everything this
way.” Alexander Alliluyev said, “It is a natural protection.” To repress a terrible idea “keeps one from going completely mad, from losing one’s mind.”
²²

Looking back, Sergei would add, “What was so terrible for the country in the thirties and the forties is that when they started arresting people here and people there, people began to get used to this, as if this were normal.
That
is what was so horrible! Everybody believed that this was what had to be.”
²³

In the meantime, Stalin was bent on a larger campaign, which took all his attention. The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign was evolving into the gradual and methodical elimination of Jewish influence on the country’s social, political, and cultural life.

Stalin was particularly incensed by the Jewish Antifascist Committee (JAC), created in 1942 and headed by Solomon Mikhoels, the director of Moscow’s State Jewish Theater. Then it had served as a good propaganda tool to gain the support of American Jews and tens of millions of dollars in financial aid, but now it was evidencing “bourgeois nationalism” in seeking to promote Jewish national and cultural identity.
²⁴

On the night of January 12, 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was killed. Svetlana claimed to have been a witness to the murder. She overheard her father on the phone:

One day, in father’s dacha, during one of my rare meetings with him, I entered his room when he was speaking to someone on the telephone. Something was being reported to him and he was listening. Then, as a summary of the conversation, he said: “Well, it’s an automobile accident.” I remember so well the way he said it: not a question but an answer, an assertion. He wasn’t asking; he was suggesting: “an automobile accident.” When he got through,
he greeted me; and a little later he said: “Mikhoels was killed in an automobile accident.”

When Svetlana went to her classes at the university the next day, a friend, whose father worked with the Jewish Theater, was weeping. The newspapers were reporting that Solomon Mikhoels died in an “automobile accident.” But Svetlana knew otherwise.

[Mikhoels] had been murdered and there had been no accident. “Automobile accident” was the official version, the cover-up suggested by my father when the black deed had been reported to him. My head began to throb. I knew all too well my father’s obsession with “Zionist” plots around every corner. It was not difficult to guess why this particular crime had been reported directly to him.
²⁵

Mikhoels had been sent to the town of Minsk in Belarus to review a play that was being considered for the Stalin Prize. He checked in at his hotel. The next morning, street workers discovered his battered body dumped in a snowdrift. There was no investigation, no effort to explain why Mikhoels might have been outside his hotel in the middle of the night or how such a deadly car crash could have occurred on a quiet back street in the city of Minsk.
²⁶
In an elaborately staged public funeral, Mikhoels’s body lay in state at Moscow’s State Jewish Theater for a full day as mourners filed past. But many remained unimpressed by the sham ceremonial send-off of one of the Soviet Union’s most famous directors and actors.

Ironically, for strategic reasons, Stalin’s was one of the first governments to recognize the state of Israel, in May 1948, and that fall he welcomed Golda Meir, the Israeli ambassador to the USSR. Stalin was hoping that the new Jewish state would
take a pro-Soviet stance, but when Israel leaned toward America, he was furious. Thousands had greeted Golda Meir that May when she attended a synagogue in Moscow on Rosh Hashanah.
²⁷
It was clear to Stalin that Russian Jews who enthusiastically supported Israel were dangerous Zionists. They had friends and family ties in the United States. If war with America broke out, they would betray the USSR.

Articles began to appear in
Pravda
and
Kultura i zhizn
in 1948 accusing literary, music, and theater critics, most of whom were Jewish, of “ideological sabotage.” They were branded as “rootless cosmopolitans.” They were “persons without identity,” and “passportless wanderers.”
²⁸
Jews were disloyal by definition. Jews resisted the Soviet project of complete assimilation of national ethnicities. They identified themselves as Jews. In 1952, twelve members of the JAC would be executed.

Unwittingly, Svetlana played a minor role in this intrigue. Knowing he was a target, Solomon Mikhoels had, months before his murder, sought information about Svetlana and Grigori Morozov, hoping that the Jewish Morozov might intercede with his father-in-law to cool the virulent anti-Semitic campaign that was emerging in Moscow. This unforgivable approach to his own family confirmed Stalin’s resolve to eliminate Mikhoels. The crime was specific: “Mikhoels conspired with American and Zionist intelligence circles to gather information about the leader of the Soviet government.”
²⁹

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.”