The shock of this revelation was heart-stopping. Svetlana rushed to her grandmother, article in hand, and demanded to know if her mother had committed suicide and why this had been hidden from her. Olga replied that, yes, it was true. Nadya had had a small gun. It had been a gift from Pavel. Olga kept repeating, “Who would have thought it?”
Marfa Peshkova remembered Svetlana showing her the magazine with the article. “I remember this very well. She showed me this photograph. It was a photograph of her mother lying in the coffin. She had never seen this. And somewhere . . . she did not know for sure about the death of her mother. It was rumored then that she died from appendicitis, from a failed operation or something like that. For her it was a shock.”31
When Svetlana had read the article, she hadn’t wanted to believe it, but her grandmother had confirmed it. Her mother had killed herself. Only she, her daughter, seemed not to know. Her anger at her mother’s betrayal of her must have been profound. And she turned that anger on her father. She knew how he could be. She had seen him become mean, even brutal. She was certain it was his cruelty that had caused her mother to commit suicide. Now she began to switch her allegiance to the memory of her mother, but like all orphans of suicides, she would need decades to forgive Nadya for abandoning her.
Things that had been mysterious before suddenly became clear. When her father had said to her over the phone, “Don’t say anything to Yulia for the time being,” it hadn’t been solicitude he was expressing. It was suspicion. The idea of Yulia and Yakov betraying their country was inconceivable. Svetlana began the slow process of realizing that her father was capable of condemning innocent people to prison and even to death.
She would look back and say, “The whole thing nearly drove me out of my mind. Something in me was destroyed. I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father and defer to his opinions without question.”32 This is the voice of an adult, but certainly Svetlana’s adolescent confusion must have been overwhelming. Which was more devastating: her belief that her father was responsible for her mother’s death or her discovery that her mother had not loved her enough not to kill herself?
Everywhere—at home, at school—her father was called the wise, truthful leader. Stalin’s name was linked to winning the war. He was the great Stalin. Only he could save Russia. To doubt him was an act of blasphemy. But Svetlana had begun to doubt.
Svetlana, age sixteen.
(Meryle Secrest Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Courtesy of Chrese Evans)
By January 1942, the Red Army had driven the Wehrmacht from Moscow’s gates. The skeletal remains of German tanks lay like burned husks outside the city. Hitler had drastically miscalculated both Russian wiliness in tactical defense and the brutality of the Russian winter. It is estimated that one million Russians, both military and civilian, died, but Stalin won the battle for Moscow. In June Svetlana and her retinue were given permission to return to Moscow. The previous autumn, a fire had almost destroyed the Zubalovo dacha; the family moved into the surviving wing. By October an ugly new house, painted camouflage green, was built in the shell.
Svetlana did not see her father until August, when she was summoned to his Kuntsevo dacha to attend a dinner for Churchill. The British prime minister had flown to Moscow for a consultation about Allied strategy. The news Churchill was bringing was not good. There would be no Allied second front to distract Hitler from his assault on the USSR for a good while yet.
Svetlana had no idea why she was summoned to this dinner. Her father forbade any interaction with foreigners, and she was never included in diplomatic circles. When he introduced her to Churchill and said she was a redhead, Churchill remarked that he too had been a redhead but, waving his cigar over his bald pate, said, “Look at me now.” She was too shy to respond. Very soon, her father kissed her and told her to run along. Reflecting on this strange moment much later, she concluded that her father had been performing for Churchill, demonstrating what a charming domestic life he had.1
Svetlana was still a schoolgirl in the tenth grade. She was reading Schiller, Goethe, Gorky, Chekhov, and the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin. She loved Dostoyevsky, even though her father had banned his books. Slowly she was growing into an independent-minded young woman. But according to her friend Marfa Peshkova, Stalin was becoming more and more disapproving of his teenage daughter. If she wore a skirt above her knees, wore shorts, or wore socks instead of stockings, he would rage: “What’s this! Are you going around naked?” He ordered her to wear sharovary (baggy pants tight at the ankles) and had a dress made for her that covered her legs.2 His reprimands often brought Svetlana to tears, but she was stubborn and staged her rebellion shrewdly. She heightened the hem of her dress slowly until it was back above her knees. She knew her father was too busy to notice.
In the autumn of 1942, a new student, Olga Rifkina, entered Model School No. 25. Olga had an unusual background for this elite school. She was from a poor Jewish family living in a one-bedroom communal apartment shared with two other families. Her mother kept them all going by working as a journalist for Pravda. The year 1941 had been terrible. That June the government had issued a directive for the evacuation from Moscow of all children under the age of three. Olga and her mother, grandmother, and baby brother Grisha left for Penz. When they returned to Moscow in May 1942, Olga had missed a year of school.3 Model School No. 25 had special placement for such children. She was enrolled and sent to live with her grandmother.
Olga’s memories of the school were mostly unhappy. While the teachers never singled out students who were poor, the other children made her aware of her inferiority. She would look back and say, “Only one person, who seemingly had the most reason to preen, . . . was a true ‘personality’ not tied to her position. This was Svetlana Stalina.”4 Olga remarked in an interview:
I really did like Svetlana very much right away. . . . She was a particularly humble person. And even shy. And she had a lot of charm and femininity. She attracted my attention. I always looked admiringly at her. And our friendship survived all our lives. Until the last day.5
Soon the two girls became deskmates. After school they would take long walks along the Moskva River, though these walks were often interrupted when Svetlana would suddenly say, “I can’t be late. My Papa is coming. I haven’t seen him in two weeks.” Olga had the impression that, like most people, Svetlana thought of her father as the “great, big Stalin, but not exactly a father.”6
Because of the food shortages caused by the war, most people, including Olga’s family, often went hungry. Olga recalled that, after coming home from school, she would eat a bowl of soup and then, with a glass of kakavella (a drink made from boiled cocoa pods), do her homework. When there was no food for the evening, her grandmother would tell her to go to bed while she still wasn’t hungry; otherwise she’d never be able to sleep. Olga remarked, “Svetlana, of course, could not imagine any of this. At the time she was artificially isolated from regular life. . . . She never had to buy anything, she could barely tell the denominations of money apart.”7
At school, Svetlana did not parade as Stalin’s daughter. She often complained that the other students looked on her as if she were an “insider” and had access to secret information. But she assured Olga, “I don’t know anything, nor do I really care.” She hated the teacher who made her write out lists of all the things that carried her father’s name: the mountain in Perm, Stalingrad on the Volga, the ZiS car (Zavod imeni Stalina, Factory in the Name of Stalin). Olga recalled: “Poor Svetlana. She wanted so much to be equal with everyone else. I remember once she stepped on a young man’s foot and he called her a ‘ginger cow’—she