Stalin's Daughter (17 page)

Yes, he was enamored of Svetlana—when a young girl is looking at you with infatuated eyes—but he did not anticipate the outcome of all this. He had a risk-taking personality. He was ordered not to return to Moscow. He came back. He got kicked in the neck. But, you understand, this was an affair of the century that surpassed the boundaries of accepted norms. Eisenstein dreamed of making a film about it. He even wrote a script—set in a different country. He saw how Kapler suffered and he mixed himself and Kapler because he too was in love with Svetlana. All this can really thrill a man of a particular nature. Even when threats like Stalin come up.
³⁵

On March 3, Stalin arrived at the Kremlin apartment just as Svetlana was getting ready for school. Her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, was still in the room. Apoplectic with rage, he demanded that Svetlana hand over her “writer’s” letters. He spat
out the word
writer.
He said he knew the whole story. He was carrying their taped phone conversations in his breast pocket. “Your Kapler is a British spy,” he seethed. “He’s under arrest.” Petrified, Svetlana gave up everything Kapler had given her: letters, photographs, notebooks, and even a draft movie script about the composer Shostakovich, protesting to her father that she loved Kapler.

He turned to her nanny with withering irony, “Oh, she loves him,” and then slapped his daughter across the face. It was the first time he had hit her. “Just look … how low she has sunk…. Such a war going on and she’s busy the whole time fucking.” Her nanny managed to stammer, “No. No. No. I know her.” Stalin turned to Svetlana. “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool! He’s got women all around him.”
³⁶
The irony that he himself had been thirty-nine and Nadya sixteen when he’d fallen in love with her was lost on Stalin.

Svetlana was in such shock that it took her a moment to realize that her father had called Kapler a British spy. She was appalled. She knew what this meant. When she returned from school that night, Stalin was in the dining room reading and tearing up Kapler’s letters. “Writer!” she reported him saying. “He can’t write decent Russian! She couldn’t even find herself a Russian.” Svetlana believed that in her father’s mind, “the fact that Kapler was a Jew was what bothered him most of all.”
³⁷
She made no attempt to contact Kapler. She knew she couldn’t even speak to his friends without its being reported to Stalin, and Kapler’s fate would be worse. She now understood that her father “
was
the state.”
³⁸

Kapler was held for a year in solitary confinement at Lubyanka prison before being transferred to Vorkuta in Siberia. For the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, he recalled the ride in the “black crow,” the prison truck in which he was accompanied by other “deviationists … terrorists, Trotskyites, ex–Social Democrats.”
Vorkuta was the locus of a prison complex in the coal-mining center in Komi Autonomous Republic. The complex had a reputation for profound brutality and exploitation.

But Kapler’s luck held. The camp director, Mikhail Mal’tsev, who’d been appointed the previous year to turn Vorkuta into a model city, selected him, as the most famous prisoner in the camp, to be the official photographer of the city and prison complex. Kapler was designated one of the
zazonniki
(prisoners without borders) with permission to live and work outside the prison zone.
³⁹
Kapler soon joined the Vorkuta Musical Drama Theater, a prisoners’ collective, where he met the actress Valentina Tokaraskaya, who became his lover. In the Soviet Gulag there were always surreal distinctions that dictated survival or death.

When he’d completed his five-year sentence, Kapler was released and warned that under no circumstance was he to return to Moscow. He decided to go to Kiev, where his parents lived, but not before slipping into Moscow in the hope of seeing his wife. He stayed only two days and made no attempt to meet Svetlana. As he boarded the train for Kiev, plainclothes policemen surrounded him. They hustled him off the train at the next station. He was sentenced to another five years, this time to hard labor at a mine in Inta, also in the Pechora coal-mining basin, where conditions were brutal. Only visits by his lover, Tokaraskaya, with her food parcels kept him alive and sane.

Svetlana’s cousin Vladimir Alliluyev remembered the turmoil at Zubalovo that immediately followed Kapler’s arrest. As he put it, “Everyone was kicked out of there. Everyone got hit on their brains quite harshly.” Stalin ordered Svetlana “banished” from the dacha for “moral depravity.” Vasili was sentenced to ten days in an army prison for degeneracy. Grandfather Sergei and Grandmother Olga were sent to a ministry sanatorium for failing to intervene. The housekeeper, Lieutenant Sasha Nikashidze,
who had spied on the lovers and read Kapler’s letters, was fired. Zubalovo was closed.
⁴⁰

When Kapler was shipped off to Siberia, Svetlana knew that her father had ordered it. “It was such obvious and senseless despotism, that for a long time I was unable to recover from the shock.”
⁴¹
But Kapler’s imprisonment and the discovery of her mother’s suicide had finally “cut the soap-bubbles of illusions. My eyes were opened and I could not any more claim blindness.”
⁴²

Chapter 7
A Jewish Wedding

The House on the Embankment, across the river from the Kremlin in Moscow’s Bersenevka neighborhood, was constructed to house the Soviet elite—and was the first home of the newlyweds Svetlana and Grigori Morozov.

A
fter five months of brutal urban warfare that left over one million dead, the Battle of Stalingrad ended in a Russian victory on January 31, 1943, when Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, commander of the German Sixth Army, and his staff surrendered.
¹
Stalin’s son Yakov Djugashvili, who had been languishing in a POW camp since his capture in 1941, was
a valuable hostage. Count Folke Bernadotte of the Red Cross approached the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov, to offer a prisoner swap: a field marshal for Stalin’s son. Molotov conveyed the offer to Stalin. According to Molotov, Stalin adamantly refused. “All of them are my sons,” Stalin said.
²

Since the arrest of Aleksei Kapler in early March, Svetlana had seen little of her father. One morning he called her into his office and told her curtly, “The Germans have proposed that we exchange one of their prisoners for Yasha. They want me to make a deal with them! I won’t do it. War is war.” Her father said nothing further about her brother, but shoved an English document from his correspondence with Roosevelt at her, barking, “Translate! Here you have been studying all this English. Can you translate anything?”
³
Then the audience was over. It seems out of character for Stalin to involve his daughter in a state secret, but if her account of this moment is accurate, her father’s delivery of the news was brutal. In her mind, he was “washing his hands” of his son.
⁴

By the middle of April 1943, Yakov was dead. Looking back, Svetlana believed her father had been informed by his intelligence services of his son’s death but kept the knowledge secret.
⁵

In 1945, after the war ended, reports about Yakov began to filter out of Germany slowly. One came from SS Commander Gustav Wegner, head of the battalion guarding the POW camp near Lübeck where Yakov was held. He claimed to have witnessed Yakov’s death. When the prisoners were taking exercise, Yakov crossed the no-man’s-land toward the electrified fence. The sentry shouted, “Halt,” but Yakov kept walking. Just as he reached the fence, he was shot. He collapsed on the first two rows of electrified barbed wire, where his body hung for twenty-four hours, until it was removed to the crematorium.
⁶

Another report came from I. A. Serov, deputy to the minister
of internal affairs of the Soviet administration in Germany, who in 1945 was assigned to discover the specifics of Yakov’s fate. Serov added another detail. When the sentry shouted, “Halt,” Yakov ripped open his shirt and yelled, “Shoot, you scum!”
⁷

Stalin failed to save his son, but even Yakov’s family believed he had little choice in rejecting a prisoner exchange. He could not be seen to be protecting his own son when millions of Russian sons were dying. In the first year of the war, two thirds of the three million Soviet POWs, taken largely in the June encirclement in 1941, were dead by the end of December. By the end of the war, at least three million of the five million Soviet POWs had died.
⁸

Svetlana believed her beloved half brother died a “quiet hero. His heroism was as selfless, honorable and unassuming as his whole life had been.”
⁹
And she did not forgive her father. Like many Russians, she felt Stalin had betrayed all his soldiers by the draconian Order 227, announced on July 28, 1942, and known colloquially as “Not a Step Back.” The order included the statement: “Panic-mongers and cowards are to be exterminated on sight.” Penal brigades of deserters were established and sent into the fiercest fighting.
¹⁰
When Soviet POWs were released from German camps in 1945 and repatriated, many were sent on to Siberian camps with sentences of up to twenty-five years for surrendering to the enemy. “I think that Yakov understood that returning back to our country after the war’s end would not bode well for him,” Svetlana’s friend Stepan Mikoyan remarked pointedly.
¹¹

That spring Svetlana graduated from Model School No. 25. Her father summoned her to his Kuntsevo dacha and asked what she intended to study in college. When she replied, “Literature,” he scoffed, “You want to be one of those Bohemians!” and insisted she reenroll in history at Moscow University.
¹²
Sixty-two years later, she wrote to her friend Robert Rayle about this. None of her bitterness toward her father had abated.

My own Father, a very possessive man, and a Dictator of all + everybody + everything … did not let me start, as 17 yr. old, my own life and profession … he wanted me to become an educated Marxist—to follow him, to be with him, to be a “valid member” of the CPSU (the party). That was his dictatorial love to me … everybody obeyed his wishes (during WWII, 1943!) and I began to study Modern History, although I loathed it with all my heart.
^13
*

Svetlana was secretly hoping to be a writer. Olga Rifkina understood her friend’s despair and decided to change her own program. Olga’s mother, then working as a senior reader of American reports at
Pravda
, suggested that the girls major in the modern history of the United States. Although they had missed the deadline for enrollment, when the head of the department learned that it was Stalin’s daughter who was applying late, he ordered that their applications be accepted.

In the program she undertook, Svetlana was required to be knowledgeable about American geography, history, and economics, for the moment all ideologically acceptable because the United States had become an ally. She wrote essays on Roosevelt’s New Deal, on US-Soviet diplomatic relations in the 1930s, on American trade unions, and on US foreign policy in South America and Europe. She would end up knowing more about the United States than many European and even some American students.

At least initially, social life in college was difficult. Olga Rifkina recalled that people came to lectures to look at Svetlana and her bodyguard, though gradually “they got used to her and treated her with sympathy.”
¹⁴
Svetlana always claimed that her new university friends separated her from her father. Many of the students’ parents or relatives had gone through the repression of the late 1930s, but she maintained that “it was the same in our family and it changed nothing in their feelings for me.”
¹⁵
Of course, this was wishful thinking on her part. People may not have dared to speak out against Stalin, but as Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana must often have been viewed with suspicion, while some may have seen her as a quick route to coveted privileges. Friendships could rarely have been as disinterested as she hoped.

Most of the children of the Kremlin elite, the “Kremlin set” as Svetlana called them, sought life outside the fortress. They had a running joke. When they left the Kremlin for a particular destination, they would say: “The subjects have gone to the objects,” imitating the parlance of the secret police.
¹⁶
Svetlana found ways to slip the noose of scrutiny. With her Alliluyev cousins, she would drive for hours around the Moscow suburbs at night, though her father had not given her permission to drive. Then in December she asked her father to dismiss her bodyguard; it was humiliating to have a “tail.” She was seventeen and a half and wanted to be able to walk down the street by herself. She recalled her father’s response: “To hell with you then. Get killed if you like. It’s no business of mine.”
¹⁷