In the anecdotal reports in the multiple memoirs left behind by those present at the party that night, stories coalesce around the following details. Stalin was drunk and was flirting boorishly with Galina, a film actress and the wife of the Red Army commander Alexander Yegorov, by lobbing bread balls at her. Nadya was either disgusted or simply tired of all this. There had been gossip about Stalin’s current dalliance, with a Kremlin hairdresser. Stalin liked to confine his philandering to those from whom discretion could be ensured, and a hairdresser working at the Kremlin would have belonged to the secret police. Nadya had seen it all before and knew these affairs never lasted, though neither she nor anyone else seemed to know how far they went. Years later Stalin’s bodyguard Vlasik made the suggestive comment to Svetlana that her father “was a man after all.”4 That night, Nadya was seen dancing coquettishly with her Georgian godfather, Abel Enukidze, then administrator of the Kremlin complex, a usual stratagem for an angry woman to demonstrate her studied indifference to her husband’s flirtations.
Many accounts claim that it was a political toast that inflamed Nadya. Stalin toasted “the destruction of enemies of the state” and noticed that Nadya did not raise her glass. He shouted across the table, “Hey you, why aren’t you drinking? Have a drink!”5
She replied venomously, “My name is not hey,” before storming out of the room. The revelers could hear her shouting over her shoulder, “Shut up! Shut up!” as she exited. The room fell silent in shock. Not even a wife would dare turn her back on Stalin. Stalin only muttered contemptuously, “What a fool,” and kept on drinking.
Nadya’s close friend Polina Molotov rushed out after her. According to Polina, she and Nadya circled the Kremlin a number of times as Polina reminded her of how much pressure Stalin was under. He was drunk, which was rare: he was just unwinding. Polina said Nadya was “perfectly calm” when they said good night in the early hours of the morning.6
When Nadya returned to the Kremlin apartment, she entered her room and closed the door. After fourteen years of marriage, she and Stalin slept separately. Her room was down a hall off to the right from the dining room. Stalin’s room was to the left of the dining room. The children’s rooms were down another hall, and much farther down that hallway came the servants’ rooms.
Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Nadya took the small Mauser pistol that her brother Pavel had given her as a gift and shot herself in the heart.7
Nobody seems to have heard the shot—certainly not the children and none of the servants. In those days, the guard stood outside at the gate. Stalin, if he was home, seems to have slept through it all.
The housekeeper, Carolina Til, prepared Nadya’s breakfast, as she did every morning. She claimed that when she entered the room, she found Nadya lying on the floor beside her bed in a pool of blood, the little Mauser pistol still in her hand. Til ran to the nursery to wake Svetlana’s nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, and together they went back to Nadya’s room. The two women laid Nadya’s body on the bed. Rather than call Stalin, whose anticipated reaction terrified them, they phoned Nadya’s godfather, Abel Enukidze, and then Polina Molotov. The group waited. Finally Stalin woke and entered the dining room. They turned to him: “Joseph, Nadya is no longer with us.”8
Rumors would later surface that, after the party, Stalin had gone to the Zubalovo dacha with another woman and had arrived home in the wee hours of the morning. He and Nadya quarreled, and he’d shot her. Stalin was a kind of magnet for vengeful myths, but this one is unlikely. More convincing is the relatives’ certainty that Nadya committed suicide, and they were angry: how could she abandon her children like that?
They also claimed Nadya left a bitter and accusatory suicide note for Stalin, though supposedly he destroyed it immediately upon reading it. Pavel’s wife, Zhenya, reported that for the first few days, Stalin was in a state of shock. “He said he didn’t want to go on living either. . . . [Stalin] was in such a state that they were afraid to leave him alone. He had sporadic fits of rage.”9
Nadya and Stalin together at a picnic, from a photo taken in the early 1920s.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
The family needed to believe that he was devastated, and it is possible that he was. He had, in his way, loved Nadya, as his love letters to her attest. Even dictators can be sentimental. But his reaction was cruelly egocentric and focused on himself. Stalin’s sister-in-law, Maria Svanidze, recorded in her private diary the moment when she told Stalin that she blamed Nadya: “How could Nadya have left two children?” He responded, “The children have forgotten her after a few days, but I am left incapacitated for the rest of my life.”10 It is hard to imagine a father saying this of his grieving children, but Stalin’s self-pity seems convincing. Svetlana always believed, more realistically, that her mother’s suicide exacerbated Stalin’s paranoia: No one could ever be trusted; even those closest betrayed.
Why did Nadya, just thirty-one, kill herself? We will never know the truth, but speculations abound. The easiest explanation is that she was mentally ill. Initially, even Svetlana believed this. The historian Simon Sebag Montefiore writes: “[Nadya’s] medical report, preserved by Stalin in his archive, and the testimonies of those who knew her, confirm that Nadya suffered from a serious mental illness, perhaps hereditary manic depression or borderline personality disorder though her daughter called it ‘schizophrenia,’ and a disease of the skull that gave her migraines.” Nadya suffered multiple other ailments. She had had several abortions, a not uncommon form of contraception in those days, which resulted in a number of gynecological problems.11 She retreated to spas and German health resorts, an indulgence, indeed almost a fetish, of most of the Party elite.
But eventually Svetlana came to see her mother’s despair as motivated by her opposition to Stalin’s repressive policies. The question is whether there is any credibility to this idea.
Nikita Khrushchev, her fellow student at the Industrial Academy, claimed Nadya tried to assert her independence from Stalin.12 When she registered at the Academy in 1928, she retained her own name, Alliluyeva, though in truth this was not unusual among Bolshevik wives. She refused to travel to the Academy in a government car and rode the tram; this was why she had a pistol. Her brother Pavel had brought back two Mauser No. 1 pistols from a trip to England, giving one to Nadya and one to Molotov’s wife, Polina. Alexander Alliluyev, Pavel’s son, would later remark, “They took the tram to their school, and there was some real danger at that time in Moscow. Because of that, my father brought those two damned pistols from England. And in regards to this, Stalin said to my father, ‘You couldn’t find another gift?’ The gun had tiny bullets, but they were enough for Nadya to shoot herself in the heart.”13
From her correspondence as a teenager, it is easy to see Nadya as a dogmatic, idealistic young Communist. During the Civil War that raged after the Bolsheviks’ triumph, she seemed able to rationalize the violence as necessary to the survival of the Great Revolution. When, in June 1918, Lenin sent Stalin south to Tsaritsyn (renamed Stalingrad in 1925) with 450 Red Guards to secure food supplies for Moscow and Petrograd, the seventeen-year-old Nadya and her brother Fyodor accompanied him as his assistants. A railway carriage was pulled to a siding, and Stalin used it as his headquarters. They hadn’t yet registered their marriage, but under Bolshevik convention, Nadya was already considered Stalin’s wife.
Immediately Stalin began to purge the city of suspected counterrevolutionaries. When he wrote repeatedly to Lenin demanding sweeping military powers, Nadya typed his letters. When Lenin ordered him to be ever more “ruthless” and “merciless,” Stalin replied, “Be assured that our hand will not tremble.”14
Stalin conducted a campaign of “exemplary terror.” He burned villages to show the consequences of failure to comply with the Red Army’s