In this instance Vasili’s intervention seems to have been benevolent, but having Stalin’s children in their charge made school officials very nervous. Vasili complained to his father:
SEPTEMBER 26 [NO YEAR]
Hello Papa,
I live well and go to school and life is fun. I play in my school’s first team of soccer, but each time I go to play there’s a lot of talk about the question that without my father’s permission I can’t play. Write to me whether or not I can play and it will be done as you say.
Vaska Krasny 39
Only Svetlana seemed to have measured the cost to Vasili of his mother’s suicide when he was just eleven. She believed Nadya’s disappearance from their lives completely destroyed her brother. He began drinking at the age of thirteen and, when drunk, often turned his venom against his sister. When his foul language and crude sexual stories became too explicit, Yakov, her half brother, would step in to defend her. She later told several interviewers, “My brother provided me with an early sex education of the dirtiest sort.”40 She did not elaborate, but it is clear that she kept Vasili at a safe distance. She said she discovered she loved her brother only after he died.
However, she was grateful for one thing. Svetlana was often ill in childhood, but her father refused to send her to the hospital, presumably for security reasons. She remembered long lonely days exiled to her room in the care of nurses and her nanny.41 But that changed in her adolescence. Saying she was “fat and sickly,” Vasili pushed her into sports. Soon she joined the ski team and the volleyball team and developed the robust health that would characterize her for the rest of her life.
In 1937 Vasili was finally transferred to Moscow’s Special School No. 2, where he continued to trade on his name, refusing to do his homework, throwing spitballs in class, whistling, singing, and walking out. But at his new school, the administrators tried to coat over his lapses and even allowed him to skip his final exams. The German teacher who tried to give him a failing grade was threatened with dismissal. Even as an exasperated Stalin ordered the keeping of a “secret daybook” on his conduct, higher officials protected him.42 There is also a much darker rumor attached to his name. Vasili may have “provoked the arrest of the parents of a boy who bested him in an athletic competition.”43
In 1938, the seventeen-year-old was sent to the Kachinsk Military Aviation School, where Stalin thought he might find the discipline he needed, but again he demanded and received special privileges. Vasili was learning the power of his father’s name, which would eventually prove his undoing.
Meanwhile, Svetlana dutifully brought home her daybook with a record of her academic work and conduct. Over dinner at the Yellow Palace, her father would examine and sign it, as vigilant parents were required to do. He was proud of her. She was a good little girl. Her indoctrination was clear in the words she recorded as a third grader in a testament celebrating the achievements of Nina Groza, the school administrator: “‘Under your leadership our school has advanced into the ranks of the best schools of the Soviet Union.’ Svetlana Stalina.”44 Svetlana had become one of the little “warriors for communism.”
Until she was sixteen, like many of her fellow students, Svetlana remained an idealistic Communist, unreflectingly accepting Party ideology. In retrospect she would be appalled by how this ideology demanded the censorship of all private thought and led to the mass hypnosis of millions. She called this “the mentality of slaves.” Vasili learned cynically to manipulate the system, which, by its very nature, invited corruption. He understood early that the best way to get ahead was to betray somebody else.
Stalin’s December 21 birthday celebration at Blizhniaia dacha in 1934. Top row, from left: Anna Redens, Dora Khazan (wife of Politburo member Andrey Andreyev), Ekaterina Voroshilova (wife of Soviet military officer Kliment Voroshilov). Middle row, from left: Maria Svandize, Maria Kaganovich (wife of Lazar Kaganovich, the “Wolf of the Kremlin”), Sashiko Svanidze, Stalin, Polina Molotov (wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, a protégé of Stalin), Kliment Voroshilov (“Uncle Voroshilov” to Svetlana). Bottom row, from left: Anna Eliava (wife of George Eliava, a prominent Georgian scientist), Zhenya Alliluyeva (wife of Stalin’s brother-in-law), and Dmitry Manuilsky (a Soviet deputy) and his wife.
(Courtesy of RGASPI [Russian State Archive of Social and Political History], Fund 558, Inventory 11, Doc 1653, p. 23)
On December 6, 1934, two years after the death of her mother, eight-year-old Svetlana found herself at the Hall of Columns attending the lying-in-state of Sergei Kirov. He was one of her favorite “uncles” with whom she’d played the Hostess game. Just days before, the extended Stalin clan had attended a comedy called The Hangover After the Feast at the Maly Theater, and then her father had invited them all back for dinner at Kuntsevo. Uncle Sergei had sent them snetki (smelts) from Leningrad.1 Now Uncle Sergei was dead too. “I didn’t like this thing called Death. I was terrified. . . . I developed a fear of dark places, dark rooms, dark depths,” Svetlana later told a friend.2
On December 1, at 4:30 p.m., Sergei Kirov, secretary of the Leningrad Party organization, was assassinated in the corridor of his office at the Smolny Institute, headquarters of the local Communist Party. Kirov’s assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, had walked brazenly into the building and shot him. According to the initial reports of the NKVD, Nikolaev’s motive was revenge for Kirov’s adulterous relationship with his wife, but it was soon announced that Nikolaev was a member of a counterrevolutionary terrorist organization plotting to overthrow the government. At the end of December, Nikolaev, along with fourteen codefendants, was tried and executed.3
The Kirovs, the Stalins, the Alliluyevs, and the Svanidzes stood together in the austere Hall of Columns. In her private diary, later confiscated by the secret police, Maria Svanidze described the scene:
The Hall was brightly lit, decorated with heavy plush banners, reaching the ceiling. . . . The Hall was high, two stories. In the middle . . . was standing . . . a very simple red-cotton coffin with rushes. . . . [Kirov’s] face was yellow-green, with nose grown sharp, lips tightly closed, with deep lines on the forehead and on the cheeks, with corners of his lips curled down in suffering sadness. A large blue spot from falling could be seen from the left temple to the left cheekbone. Around the coffin were many wreaths with ribbons, inscribed by the organizations. . . . Lights for news-chronicles were around . . . security people and on the stage the orchestra of the Bolshoi was playing all the time. . . . Full lights notwithstanding, it was gloomily dark.
At eleven p.m., the leaders appeared, preceded by Stalin.
Joseph steps up the stage to the coffin, his face is twisted with grief, he kisses the forehead of dead Sergey Mironovitch. All this pierces our souls, we know how close they have been, and everyone in the Hall is sobbing. I can hear through my own sobs the sobbing of men around.4
Maria recorded that immediately after receiving news of Kirov’s death, Nadya’s brother Pavel visited Stalin at his dacha. Sitting with his head in his hands, Stalin cried, “I am quite orphaned now.” Pavel was so moved that he rushed at once to hug and kiss his brother-in-law.
But Stalin was not at his dacha. The scene of Pavel’s tenderness probably occurred several days later. Instead, Stalin was in his Kremlin office. As soon as news of the assassination reached him at five p.m., a much less maudlin Stalin called in his Politburo and Genrikh Yagoda, NKVD chief, to arrange an overnight train to Leningrad. Probably that night he drafted the Law of December 1, “instructing the police and courts to try cases of terrorism without delay, reject appeals, and carry out death sentences immediately upon conviction.”5