Some believed Stalin ordered Kirov’s assassination. Kirov was too popular and was in favor of slowing down Stalin’s policy of rapid industrialization. There is little evidence to support this theory, but certainly Kirov’s assassination provided a necessary and important beginning to the subsequent Great Terror, in which hundreds of thousands were swept away in “mass operations.”6
As a consequence of collectivization and dekulakization,* the OGPU (secret police, renamed NKVD in 1934) had already spread its tentacles through every level of society as it hunted for class enemies. Wiretapping, surveillance, pressure on informants, imprisonment in solitary confinement, confessions exacted under torture—all became the norm. Compromising information mutated like a virus, implicating hundreds of thousands.
In 1935 and 1936, as the mass arrests were under way, a collective hysteria took over. At the height of the Great Terror, during “seventeen months in 1937 and 1938 alone, 1.7 million people were arrested, more than 700,000 of them shot, and another 300,000 to 400,000 sent into punishing exile in Siberia, Kazakhstan, and other far-away places.”7
In 1937, on the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, Stalin was reported to have told his close associates at a private banquet:
We will destroy each and every enemy even if he was an old Bolshevik; we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts—threatens the unity of the socialist state.8
By 1938, as a result of the repression carried out by the NKVD, the Gulag prison population had swelled to two million.9
As an eleven-year-old, Svetlana could understand nothing of this, but she personally began to feel the impact of this new climate of terror when she returned from her vacation in Sochi at the end of the summer of 1937. Carolina Til, the German housekeeper who’d been with the family for ten years, had been dismissed as unreliable.10 Lieutenant Alexandra Nakashidze appeared in her place. Nakashidze had totally reorganized Svetlana’s room, removing all the furniture that once belonged to her mother and emptying the cupboard of her childhood mementos, her album of drawings, her clay figurines, and her presents from the aunts. The few cherished things that tied her to her mother—an enameled box with dragons, a tiny glass, and some cups—had vanished.11 When Svetlana asked her nanny to complain about the loss, her nanny replied that there was nothing to do—everything belonged to the state.
Nakashidze worked for the NKVD State Security Forces. A young woman under thirty, she was unskilled as a housekeeper, but housekeeping was not her function. She was meant to get close to Svetlana and her brother Vasili in order to scrutinize their friends and acquaintances.
Starting that fall of 1937, Svetlana was assigned a bodyguard named Ivan Krivenko, a sour, jaundiced-looking man whom she immediately disliked. He followed her everywhere—to school, to the theater, to music lessons. One day she discovered him digging through her schoolbag and reading her diary.12
At school she found herself under a new regimen. She was forbidden to use the common cloakroom and had to hang her coat in a small room next to the school’s office. She was no longer allowed to eat with the other students. Now she ate a lunch, brought from home, in a small screened-off corner of the lunchroom under the scrutiny of an NKVD officer, which left her blushing with embarrassment.
Then there was trouble with Misha, one of her closest friends. Red-haired and freckled like Svetlana, Misha was a passionate reader whom she’d known since she was eight. They both loved to raid their parents’ extensive libraries and discuss the books they found. As eleven-year-olds, they shared a passion for Maupassant and were madly engrossed by Jules Verne and the Indian tales of the American author James Fenimore Cooper. At school they passed each other little love notes on blotting paper, and they phoned back and forth almost every day. Then Misha’s parents, who worked for state publishers, were arrested. Svetlana’s governess took her little love notes to the school principal and insisted that Misha be transferred to another class. Clearly Misha was a dangerous influence, with his “unreliable” parents, and the friendship was terminated. It would be nineteen years before they met again.13
From the early days of the Revolution, Bolshevik ideology had built a tradition of identifying “enemies of the people” and “anti-Soviet elements.” Show trials and the fabrication of evidence had been almost commonplace since the Civil War.14 People were trained to believe in conspiracies against the great Soviet experiment. After the first two great show trials engineered by Stalin in August 1936 and January 1937, in which most of those targeted were from the Old Guard of the Bolshevik Party, Svetlana’s Aunt Maria Svanidze wrote in her secret diary:
March 17, 1937:
My soul is burning with anger, and hatred, their death does not satisfy me. They ought to be tortured, burned alive, for all their wicked deeds. Sellers of the motherland, parasites with the party. And so many of them! Ah, they wanted to ruin our society, they wanted to ruin all victories of revolution, to kill our husbands, our sons. . . .
Endless disappearance of persons with big names, who for years were our heroes, conducted big jobs, were trusted, and many times rewarded—they turned out to be our enemies, traitors of the people, bribed and bought ones. . . . How could we have missed all this?15
Maria Svanidze believed in their guilt until she herself was arrested.
On December 21, Maria and Alexander Svanidze were the first members of Svetlana’s family to be taken away by the NKVD.
According to Anastas Mikoyan, Alexander Svanidze was like a brother to Stalin. He was deputy chair of the board of the State Bank of the USSR in 1937 and had done sensitive work for Stalin in Germany over a number of years. In April, Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, the new head of the NKVD (the former head, Genrikh Yagoda, was awaiting execution), to begin the purge of the staff at the State Bank.
Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev were hosting a housewarming party in their apartment. It was a festive, elegant affair. Maria and Alexander had attended and then returned to their own residence. After midnight, the Svandizes’ son Johnik, named after John Reed, the famous American author of Ten Days That Shook the World, rang Pavel and Zhenya’s bell. “Mama and Papa have been arrested,” he cried. “She was taken away in her beautiful clothes.”16 Alexander’s sister Mariko was also arrested, along with Maria’s brother. Johnik, Svetlana’s longtime playmate at Zubalovo, soon disappeared too.
To Svetlana it was inconceivable that Uncle Alyosha and Aunt Maria were “enemies of the people.” She believed they were “victims of some frightful mix-up, which ‘even Father himself’ could not disentangle.”17 Everyone in the family was frightened and tried to send messages to Stalin through Svetlana. When she conveyed these, Stalin would say, “Why do you repeat everything like an empty drum?” He ordered her to stop “lawyering.”18
Alexander Alliluyev, the son of Pavel and Zhenya, tells the story of how Maria Svanidze managed to smuggle a letter to his mother from prison. The letter was written on a shirt: “Zhenya, you cannot imagine what is going on here. I am sure that Stalin does not know about this. I ask for a favor. Please let him know.” Without telling her husband, Zhenya typed out Maria’s letter and took it to Stalin. Stalin’s reply was cold and measured: “Zhenya, I ask you never to come to me with a letter like this again.”19
That summer of 1938, Uncle Pavel often visited the Kremlin apartment, hoping to plead for the Svanidzes. He would sit dejectedly in either Svetlana’s or Vasili’s room, sighing deeply as he waited for Stalin.20 Pavel’s own son Alexander explained the futility of this:
Stalin’s massive system of informants kept the channels of information flowing. He was systematically eliminating Old Bolsheviks and the higher military echelons as potential rivals. As terrifying as it sounds, people were divided into categories. You could not plead for those about whom Stalin had made personal arrangements.21
Soon