On January 23, 1941 the plenum of the Supreme Court of USSR replaced his death sentence for imprisonment for 15 years. But on August 20th, 1941, the Supreme Court changed its mind and left in power the previous sentence—execution through shooting. At the same day—on personal orders from Beria—A. S. Svanidze was shot.
His wife Maria Onissimovna Svanidze was sentenced on 29 December 1939 to eight years of imprisonment for “hiding the anti-Soviet activities of her husband, for anti-soviet gossip, for criticizing soviet regime and for speaking openly against one of the leaders of CPSU and Soviet Government/Beria.”
On March 3rd, 1942, without any new evidence the Special Commission at NKVD USSR decided to replace imprisonment of Maria Svanidze by execution, which was done the same day. . . .
The sister of A. S. Svanidze, Mariko Svanidze, was sentenced for ten years of imprisonment, but on March 3, 1942, she was shot . . . due to a new decision of the Special Group at NKVD, USSR.39
In 1955, after Stalin’s death, A. I. Mikoyan ordered this special report on the case of Maria and Alexander Svanidze. On January 6, 1956, the military procurator, V. Zhabin, informed Mikoyan that “after protestations from [the] investigating magistrate the case of A. S. Svanidze and M. O. Svanidze was abandoned due to absence of any crime.”40 The phrasing is convoluted. What it meant was that the case against the Svanidzes as traitors continued long after they were executed. But now they could be posthumously “rehabilitated” because they had committed no crime.
The Circle of Secrets and Lies
Svetlana, age eleven, in the uniform scarf of the Soviet youth group Young Pioneers.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
For Svetlana, these were “years of the steady annihilation of everything my mother had created, of systematic elimination of her very spirit.”1 The people whom Svetlana had loved and who had made her childhood secure had been taken away, and she didn’t know why. A wall of silence surrounded things too dangerous to speak of. When Svetlana asked her grandmother what happened to their relatives, Olga said, “It was just something that happened. It was fate.” Her nanny counseled her, “Don’t ask.”2
The family found ways to paper over the horror and carry on—either through denial or by retreating into consoling myths. Though Stalin had personally told Anna Redens that her husband, Stanislav, had been executed, she always insisted that he’d escaped to Siberia. The family continued to spend weekends at Zubalovo. The young people skied or hiked through the forest, a bodyguard always in tow. Anna’s son Leonid recalled a walk that took place when he was eleven years old with his mother, Svetlana, and her nanny and bodyguard. It was early spring. Svetlana, who was three years older, “carefully, bit by bit, slipped away” from the group, taking Leonid with her. They walked for miles beside a small river. At a particularly precipitous point, he lost his footing and fell in. She pulled him out, then removed her jacket and gave it to him. He remembered her kindness. He also thought of this as the first time he realized that she “wanted to jump out of this trap.” When they got home, she was roundly reprimanded for running away from her bodyguard.3
At fourteen, Svetlana was anxious to assert her independence. She wrote to her father suggesting that she was no longer a child: “Hello my dear Father, I will not wait for any more orders from you. I am not little in order to be amused by this.”4 A few weeks later, she wrote again. Oddly, it was as if she’d assumed her mother Nadya’s demanding, coquettish voice. Perhaps this was the only way to get Stalin’s attention.
AUGUST 22, 1940
My dear, dear Papochka,
How do you live? How is your health? Do you miss me and Vasya [Vasili]? No. Paposchka, I miss you terribly. I keep waiting for you and you keep on not coming. I feel with “my liver” that you are trying to trick me again—I refer to a lack of joy—and there’s no directive and you will not come. Ay, yai, yai . . .
Now with Geography, it’s a mess again. Because 5 more republics have been added, there’s more territory, more population, and there’s an increased number of industrial spaces but our textbook is taken from 1938, and especially because we have the economic geography of the USSR, there’s lots of stuff missing from the textbook. . . . There’s a lot of crap in it. . . . Scenes of Sochi, Matsesta, different resorts, and, in general, these images are not needed by anyone. . . .
Papochka, please write me right away because you will forget after, or you will be busy. And by that time, I myself will come. OK. I kiss you deeply my dear Papochka. Until we see each other again.
Yours,
Svetlana 5
How would Stalin have responded to his lippy fourteen-year-old daughter criticizing her textbook as full of crap? Unsurprisingly, Stalin was a misogynist. On one occasion, Svetlana overheard her father and Vasili discussing women. Vasili said he preferred a woman with conversation. “My father roared with laughter: ‘Look at him, so he wants a woman with ideas! Hah! We have known that kind: herrings with ideas—skin and bones.’”6 Was he talking about her mother? The remark cut deeply enough that she never forgot it.
Svetlana was turning into an intelligent young woman. At school she loved literature and valued the exotic. Her favorite memory of Zubalovo in her teenage years was of the two yurts that sat on the front lawn at the dacha. Her Uncle Alyosha Svanidze, now dead, had brought them back from a trip he’d made to Guangxi in China. As young teenagers, she and her four cousins—Leonid, Alexander, Sergei, and Vladimir—would sit in those strange dwellings and imagine their inhabitants.
The yurts were round wooden structures made of slats, with walls insulated by patterned felt and floors covered with thick felt rugs. In each yurt, a bronze Buddha sat in a wooden box positioned on top of a small red chest. The Buddha’s demure smile and mysterious third eye captivated Svetlana. It was the first icon of a god she had ever seen. A half century later, she could describe those yurts to a friend with precision.7
Svetlana’s fascination with other cultures is implicit here, but her father did not share this curiosity. Stalin detested travel; he had no real interest in other cultures and, once in power, left the Soviet Union only twice—for Allied peace conferences. Svetlana was never permitted to travel outside the frame of Sochi and Moscow. She would be twenty-nine (and her father dead) before she visited Leningrad. Though this was the norm for Soviet citizens, it was a deprivation for a curious young mind.
When Svetlana was fifteen, the yurts disappeared, as did her entire world—in one fell swoop.
World War II came suddenly, though not without warning, to the Soviet Union. On June 22, 1941, at 4:00 a.m., Stalin, asleep on his couch at his Kuntsevo dacha, was awakened by a phone call from his chief of staff, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, informing him that German planes were bombing Kiev, Vilnius, Sebastopol, Odessa, and other cities. A total of 147 German divisions had crossed the border and were already proceeding