Kabulov intoned, “Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, on the basis of Article 58 of our law, you are under arrest for having made known in your speeches your anti-Soviet and Counter-revolutionary opinions.”32 No trial was needed. No defense could be mounted. However, instead of the usual ten years for this offense, Kapler was sentenced to only five years in a labor camp.
Kapler’s belongings were confiscated and itemized for his signature. He was not allowed to communicate with his wife, Tatiana Zlatogorova, and certainly not with Svetlana. But Kapler was too famous to merely disappear. The war had released some tongues, especially in the military and at the front, and his arrest was a major scandal.33 Neither his epic films nor the appeals of his more courageous colleagues helped, however. Everyone knew that the cause of his arrest was his indiscreet affair with the daughter of the vozhd.
In retrospect, Kapler would say he knew that the relationship with Svetlana would inevitably end, but he was strangely enthralled. Asked why he didn’t heed the general’s advice, Kapler replied, “Who knows? It was also a question of self-respect.”34 What drew him to Svetlana was what he called “the freedom within her,” her “bold judgements.” In his mind, it was an “innocent enchantment,” not a seduction. He recognized her desperation; he felt he understood her.
Vasili’s son, the theater director Alexander Burdonsky, would later comment that Kapler was an intelligent and charming man:
Yes, he was enamored of Svetlana—when a young girl is looking at you with infatuated eyes—but he did not anticipate the outcome of all this. He had a risk-taking personality. He was ordered not to return to Moscow. He came back. He got kicked in the neck. But, you understand, this was an affair of the century that surpassed the boundaries of accepted norms. Eisenstein dreamed of making a film about it. He even wrote a script—set in a different country. He saw how Kapler suffered and he mixed himself and Kapler because he too was in love with Svetlana. All this can really thrill a man of a particular nature. Even when threats like Stalin come up.35
On March 3, Stalin arrived at the Kremlin apartment just as Svetlana was getting ready for school. Her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, was still in the room. Apoplectic with rage, he demanded that Svetlana hand over her “writer’s” letters. He spat out the word writer. He said he knew the whole story. He was carrying their taped phone conversations in his breast pocket. “Your Kapler is a British spy,” he seethed. “He’s under arrest.” Petrified, Svetlana gave up everything Kapler had given her: letters, photographs, notebooks, and even a draft movie script about the composer Shostakovich, protesting to her father that she loved Kapler.
He turned to her nanny with withering irony, “Oh, she loves him,” and then slapped his daughter across the face. It was the first time he had hit her. “Just look . . . how low she has sunk. . . . Such a war going on and she’s busy the whole time fucking.” Her nanny managed to stammer, “No. No. No. I know her.” Stalin turned to Svetlana. “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool! He’s got women all around him.”36 The irony that he himself had been thirty-nine and Nadya sixteen when he’d fallen in love with her was lost on Stalin.
Svetlana was in such shock that it took her a moment to realize that her father had called Kapler a British spy. She was appalled. She knew what this meant. When she returned from school that night, Stalin was in the dining room reading and tearing up Kapler’s letters. “Writer!” she reported him saying. “He can’t write decent Russian! She couldn’t even find herself a Russian.” Svetlana believed that in her father’s mind, “the fact that Kapler was a Jew was what bothered him most of all.”37 She made no attempt to contact Kapler. She knew she couldn’t even speak to his friends without its being reported to Stalin, and Kapler’s fate would be worse. She now understood that her father “was the state.”38
Kapler was held for a year in solitary confinement at Lubyanka prison before being transferred to Vorkuta in Siberia. For the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi, he recalled the ride in the “black crow,” the prison truck in which he was accompanied by other “deviationists . . . terrorists, Trotskyites, ex–Social Democrats.” Vorkuta was the locus of a prison complex in the coal-mining center in Komi Autonomous Republic. The complex had a reputation for profound brutality and exploitation.
But Kapler’s luck held. The camp director, Mikhail Mal’tsev, who’d been appointed the previous year to turn Vorkuta into a model city, selected him, as the most famous prisoner in the camp, to be the official photographer of the city and prison complex. Kapler was designated one of the zazonniki (prisoners without borders) with permission to live and work outside the prison zone.39 Kapler soon joined the Vorkuta Musical Drama Theater, a prisoners’ collective, where he met the actress Valentina Tokaraskaya, who became his lover. In the Soviet Gulag there were always surreal distinctions that dictated survival or death.
When he’d completed his five-year sentence, Kapler was released and warned that under no circumstance was he to return to Moscow. He decided to go to Kiev, where his parents lived, but not before slipping into Moscow in the hope of seeing his wife. He stayed only two days and made no attempt to meet Svetlana. As he boarded the train for Kiev, plainclothes policemen surrounded him. They hustled him off the train at the next station. He was sentenced to another five years, this time to hard labor at a mine in Inta, also in the Pechora coal-mining basin, where conditions were brutal. Only visits by his lover, Tokaraskaya, with her food parcels kept him alive and sane.
Svetlana’s cousin Vladimir Alliluyev remembered the turmoil at Zubalovo that immediately followed Kapler’s arrest. As he put it, “Everyone was kicked out of there. Everyone got hit on their brains quite harshly.” Stalin ordered Svetlana “banished” from the dacha for “moral depravity.” Vasili was sentenced to ten days in an army prison for degeneracy. Grandfather Sergei and Grandmother Olga were sent to a ministry sanatorium for failing to intervene. The housekeeper, Lieutenant Sasha Nikashidze, who had spied on the lovers and read Kapler’s letters, was fired. Zubalovo was closed.40
When Kapler was shipped off to Siberia, Svetlana knew that her father had ordered it. “It was such obvious and senseless despotism, that for a long time I was unable to recover from the shock.”41 But Kapler’s imprisonment and the discovery of her mother’s suicide had finally “cut the soap-bubbles of illusions. My eyes were opened and I could not any more claim blindness.”42
The House on the Embankment, across the river from the Kremlin in Moscow’s Bersenevka neighborhood, was constructed to house the Soviet elite—and was the first home of the newlyweds Svetlana and Grigori Morozov.
(Courtesy of the author)
After five months of brutal urban warfare that left over one million dead, the Battle of Stalingrad ended in a Russian victory on January 31, 1943, when Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, commander of the German Sixth Army, and his staff surrendered.1 Stalin’s son Yakov Djugashvili, who had been languishing in a POW camp since his capture in 1941, was a valuable hostage. Count Folke Bernadotte of the Red Cross approached the deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers, Vyacheslav Molotov, to offer a prisoner swap: a field marshal for Stalin’s son. Molotov conveyed the offer to Stalin. According to Molotov, Stalin adamantly refused. “All of them are my sons,” Stalin said.2
Since the arrest of Aleksei Kapler in early March, Svetlana had seen little of her father. One morning he called her into his office and told her curtly, “The Germans have proposed that we exchange one of their prisoners for Yasha. They want me to make a deal with them! I won’t do it. War is war.” Her father said nothing further about her brother, but shoved an English document from his correspondence