Stalin insisted that Hitler would keep to the nonaggression pact the two leaders had signed in 1939. The USSR would not provoke a war. Privately he knew that the Soviet army was not ready—his purges of the armed forces had cut too deeply. Now the front was in anarchy; Russian troops were in flight, and Stalin was to blame. Hitler had disastrously outmaneuvered him.
On June 29, when the Germans encircled four hundred thousand defending Russian troops and took the city of Minsk in Belarus, giving themselves a direct route to Moscow, Stalin climbed into his car waiting outside the Kremlin and turned to his comrades. “Everything’s lost,” he said. “Lenin left us a great legacy, but we, his heirs, have shit it out our asses.”10 Cursing all the way to Kuntsevo, he announced his resignation. For two days, Stalin kept silent in his dacha. There were rumors of a breakdown, but this is unlikely. More convincing is the idea that Stalin was testing his comrades to see whether his leadership would survive the crisis.11
A contingent of frightened ministers, including Beria, Mikoyan, and Molotov, headed to Kuntsevo to ask him to return to work as head of a new “super–war cabinet.” They couldn’t imagine running the war without Stalin. Anastas Mikoyan explained, “The very name of Stalin was a great force for rousing the morale of the people.”12
On July 3, Stalin addressed the nation with his new title, supreme commander, and declared the coming struggle to be the Great Patriotic War. He exhorted the people to “rally round the Party of Lenin and Stalin.” Stalin was something other now, an Idea, no longer just himself. He warned that, in this “merciless struggle,” all “cowards, deserters, panic-mongers” would be ruthlessly crushed.13
Looking back from adulthood, Svetlana would say that her father refused to admit that Hitler had tricked him. “He considered himself infallible . . . his political flair unmatchable.” After the war was over, she recalled his habit of repeatedly saying, “Ech, together with the Germans we would have been invincible!” And then he would add, “So they thought they could fool Stalin? Just look at them, it’s Stalin they tried to fool!” Svetlana was always appalled when her father spoke of himself in the third person, always amazed that it never occurred to him that “he might fool himself.”14
Even as he attempted to control the war disaster, Stalin took measures to protect his daughter. He asked his sister-in-law, Zhenya, to take the family to his dacha in Sochi. “The war will be long,” he told her. “Lots of blood will be shed. . . . Please take Svetlana southwards.”15
Amazingly, Zhenya refused, saying she had to join her husband (she had hastily remarried after Pavel’s death) and to safeguard her own children. Nobody said no to Stalin. He never forgot or forgave a single betrayal, and he could wait years to exact his revenge, as Zhenya would discover.
Stalin next turned to Nadya’s sister, Anna, for help. Threading through the crowds of untold thousands of evacuees desperately trying to leave Moscow, Anna hustled the anxious little troop of Stalin’s relatives aboard a train heading south to the Black Sea. Anna and her own two sons; her parents, Sergei and Olga; Yakov’s wife, Yulia, and their daughter Gulia; and Svetlana and her nanny squeezed together in bewilderment into a private compartment. Even though her school had been practicing war drills for years—she kept a school photo of her class practicing a gas-mask drill in 1935—now Svetlana discovered the real terror of war, and the racking fear for loved ones left behind.
On June 23, one day after the German invasion, Stalin sent his sons, Yakov and Vasili, and his adopted son, Artyom, to the front. Artyom reported rather cryptically in retrospect:
Jacob and me joined the artillery, and Vasili became a pilot. All of us went to the front—from the first day; Stalin telephoned to have us taken there immediately. It was the only privilege we got from him. There remain several letters from Vasili to his father. In one of them from the front, he asked his father to send him money. A snack bar had opened in his detachment and he wanted a new officer’s uniform. His father replied, “1. As far as I know the rations in the air force are quite sufficient. 2. A Special uniform for Stalin’s son is not on the agenda.” Vasili didn’t get the money.16
The family spent the summer in Sochi. Svetlana’s friend Marfa Peshkova had also been evacuated to Sochi and visited Stalin’s dacha one morning. Svetlana came into the room, looking distraught and, as Marfa reported, said, “I had a very strange dream last night. It was as if I saw a large nest in a tree. There was an eagle in the nest with little babies next to it. And suddenly the eagle takes one of the babies and throws it out of the nest. The baby falls and dies.” And then Svetlana cried. “You know, something terrible has happened to Yasha [the family’s pet name for her brother Yakov].” Her last good-bye to him had been over the telephone, just before he left for the front.17
Not long after her dream, Svetlana picked up the phone and heard her father’s voice on the other end. She asked about Yakov, and Stalin replied, “Yasha has been taken prisoner.” Before she had time to respond, he added, “Don’t say anything to his wife for the time being.” Yulia was sitting anxiously on a nearby couch, scrutinizing Svetlana’s face. Svetlana thought her father was being solicitous and so mumbled to Yulia, “He doesn’t know anything himself.”18 She could not bear to tell her the truth.
Svetlana was devastated by her father’s call. In the last few years, she had become very close to her half brother. Though he was nineteen years older, they would study together in the banya at Zubalovo, spreading their blankets among the fragrant birch branches, curled up with their books.
Stalin’s relationship with his older son had always been poor. According to the family, he bullied Yakov relentlessly, calling him soft and worthless. Stalin disapproved of Yakov’s first marriage, and in despair twenty-year-old Yakov had attempted to shoot himself, but the bullet only grazed his chest. Stalin wrote to Nadya from Sochi: “Convey to Yakov from me that he has acted like a hooligan, applying blackmail and I do not have anything else in common with him,”19 and the story circulated that Stalin had laughed and said, “Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight.”20 Yakov left for Leningrad and didn’t see his father again for eight years, but Svetlana always defended him. “Yakov’s gentleness and composure were irritating to my father, who was quick-tempered and impetuous even in his later years.”21
After the tragic death of his first child, Yakov’s marriage ended in divorce. Perhaps to reconcile with his father, he left his career as an engineer and entered the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow in 1935. In 1936, he married Yulia Meltzer. Again Stalin did not approve. According to Svetlana, this was because Yulia was Jewish, and her father “never liked Jews, though he wasn’t as blatant about expressing his hatred for them in those days as he was after the war.”22 Their daughter, Gulia, was born in 1938. Summers until the war, they would come to Zubalovo, where Yakov, still desperate for approval, tried to ingratiate himself with his father.
Yakov with his daughter, Gulia, 1939.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
By early September, Sochi was no longer a safe refuge, and the family returned to Moscow. The ravages of the war were already apparent. From the windows of the Kremlin apartment, Svetlana could see a gaping hole on the corner of the Arsenal Building opposite, where a German bomb had hit. Vasili had been in the apartment and had been thrown from the bed as the windows shattered.23