By the middle of April 1943, Yakov was dead. Looking back, Svetlana believed her father had been informed by his intelligence services of his son’s death but kept the knowledge secret.5
In 1945, after the war ended, reports about Yakov began to filter out of Germany slowly. One came from SS Commander Gustav Wegner, head of the battalion guarding the POW camp near Lübeck where Yakov was held. He claimed to have witnessed Yakov’s death. When the prisoners were taking exercise, Yakov crossed the no-man’s-land toward the electrified fence. The sentry shouted, “Halt,” but Yakov kept walking. Just as he reached the fence, he was shot. He collapsed on the first two rows of electrified barbed wire, where his body hung for twenty-four hours, until it was removed to the crematorium.6
Another report came from I. A. Serov, deputy to the minister of internal affairs of the Soviet administration in Germany, who in 1945 was assigned to discover the specifics of Yakov’s fate. Serov added another detail. When the sentry shouted, “Halt,” Yakov ripped open his shirt and yelled, “Shoot, you scum!”7
Stalin failed to save his son, but even Yakov’s family believed he had little choice in rejecting a prisoner exchange. He could not be seen to be protecting his own son when millions of Russian sons were dying. In the first year of the war, two thirds of the three million Soviet POWs, taken largely in the June encirclement in 1941, were dead by the end of December. By the end of the war, at least three million of the five million Soviet POWs had died.8
Svetlana believed her beloved half brother died a “quiet hero. His heroism was as selfless, honorable and unassuming as his whole life had been.”9 And she did not forgive her father. Like many Russians, she felt Stalin had betrayed all his soldiers by the draconian Order 227, announced on July 28, 1942, and known colloquially as “Not a Step Back.” The order included the statement: “Panic-mongers and cowards are to be exterminated on sight.” Penal brigades of deserters were established and sent into the fiercest fighting.10 When Soviet POWs were released from German camps in 1945 and repatriated, many were sent on to Siberian camps with sentences of up to twenty-five years for surrendering to the enemy. “I think that Yakov understood that returning back to our country after the war’s end would not bode well for him,” Svetlana’s friend Stepan Mikoyan remarked pointedly.11
That spring Svetlana graduated from Model School No. 25. Her father summoned her to his Kuntsevo dacha and asked what she intended to study in college. When she replied, “Literature,” he scoffed, “You want to be one of those Bohemians!” and insisted she reenroll in history at Moscow University.12 Sixty-two years later, she wrote to her friend Robert Rayle about this. None of her bitterness toward her father had abated.
My own Father, a very possessive man, and a Dictator of all + everybody + everything . . . did not let me start, as 17 yr. old, my own life and profession . . . he wanted me to become an educated Marxist—to follow him, to be with him, to be a “valid member” of the CPSU (the party). That was his dictatorial love to me . . . everybody obeyed his wishes (during WWII, 1943!) and I began to study Modern History, although I loathed it with all my heart.13*
Svetlana was secretly hoping to be a writer. Olga Rifkina understood her friend’s despair and decided to change her own program. Olga’s mother, then working as a senior reader of American reports at Pravda, suggested that the girls major in the modern history of the United States. Although they had missed the deadline for enrollment, when the head of the department learned that it was Stalin’s daughter who was applying late, he ordered that their applications be accepted.
In the program she undertook, Svetlana was required to be knowledgeable about American geography, history, and economics, for the moment all ideologically acceptable because the United States had become an ally. She wrote essays on Roosevelt’s New Deal, on US-Soviet diplomatic relations in the 1930s, on American trade unions, and on US foreign policy in South America and Europe. She would end up knowing more about the United States than many European and even some American students.
At least initially, social life in college was difficult. Olga Rifkina recalled that people came to lectures to look at Svetlana and her bodyguard, though gradually “they got used to her and treated her with sympathy.”14 Svetlana always claimed that her new university friends separated her from her father. Many of the students’ parents or relatives had gone through the repression of the late 1930s, but she maintained that “it was the same in our family and it changed nothing in their feelings for me.”15 Of course, this was wishful thinking on her part. People may not have dared to speak out against Stalin, but as Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana must often have been viewed with suspicion, while some may have seen her as a quick route to coveted privileges. Friendships could rarely have been as disinterested as she hoped.
Most of the children of the Kremlin elite, the “Kremlin set” as Svetlana called them, sought life outside the fortress. They had a running joke. When they left the Kremlin for a particular destination, they would say: “The subjects have gone to the objects,” imitating the parlance of the secret police.16 Svetlana found ways to slip the noose of scrutiny. With her Alliluyev cousins, she would drive for hours around the Moscow suburbs at night, though her father had not given her permission to drive. Then in December she asked her father to dismiss her bodyguard; it was humiliating to have a “tail.” She was seventeen and a half and wanted to be able to walk down the street by herself. She recalled her father’s response: “To hell with you then. Get killed if you like. It’s no business of mine.”17
Svetlana did not invite her new school friends to the Kremlin, embarrassed that they needed a pass to enter the gates. Olga Rifkina remembered only one occasion when Svetlana invited her home. It was 1944. The last exam at the end of their first year involved assembling a rifle. The university armory room was closed, but Svetlana said she had a rifle at home. Olga remembered passing Stalin’s well-guarded door in the Kremlin apartment. Svetlana’s nanny served them food while they practiced assembling the rifle.18
After that last exam, however, Svetlana began to distance herself from her group. She seemed to be spending her time with a fellow student named Grigori (Grisha) Morozov (the family’s name was actually Moroz, but the family members had changed it to hide their Jewish origins).19 Four years older and a close friend of Vasili, Morozov was someone Svetlana had known from her high school days. They began to date, often going to the theater or cinema.
Svetlana may have gotten rid of her personal bodyguard, but the security forces were still watching her. Soon she received a phone call from General Vlasik, Stalin’s chief of security. The conversation was clipped: “Listen, this young Jew of yours—what is it between you?” She replied, “The Jew?” She was shocked. Nobody openly made ethnic distinctions—yet. It would be a couple of years before anti-Semitism became state policy. She said she knew Grigori Morozov from school. They were dating, that was all.
General Vlasik told her that he knew everything—for instance, he knew that Morozov wanted to get into the new Institute of International Relations but needed a military deferment. “We can help. Do you really want him released from the army?” When she said yes, the general replied, “OK. We’ll do that. We’ll release him.” General Vlasik, too, could decide the fate of people with a phone call.20
Svetlana was not in love with Morozov—she was still pining for Aleksei Kapler—but she was looking for a way out of her Kremlin life. She felt her father now treated her with a kind of contempt, as if she had somehow been “soiled”: “I wasn’t his little girl anymore. I grew up wrong.” Morozov phoned continually. When he eventually proposed, she agreed to marry him. “He was sweet. I was lonely, and he loved me.”21 She said she would ask her father.
Svetlana claimed that when she went to Kuntsevo to get Stalin’s permission, her father said flatly that he did not approve of the marriage