Consoling a friend who was going through a divorce, Svetlana reflected:
I was never used to a family life, and for that reason it was easy to break it. But still I felt lonely afterwards, and made many mistakes, trying immediately to find some substitute for the lost companionship . . . how young and stupid I have been!40
Grigori and Svetlana’s marriage ended in 1947. Divorce in the Soviet Union was not particularly complicated. It involved a two-stage procedure: the couple submitted an application to a district court, and within a month they would be divorced. But for poor Morozov, divorce was even simpler. One day Morozov was not allowed back into the House on the Embankment. Svetlana’s brother Vasili had taken the matter in hand. When a couple married in the Soviet Union, the wife’s Soviet passport—all Soviet citizens were required to hold passports—was stamped and included the husband’s name. A new stamp indicated a divorce. Vasili took Morozov’s and Svetlana’s passports and had them returned to their virgin state by simply removing the original stamps. It was as if the marriage had never occurred.
Stalin was pleased with the divorce. He had built a new dacha at Kholodnaya Rechka, north of Gagra on the Abkhazian coast, and now ordered a small dacha constructed for Svetlana nearby. She visited. It was the first time father and daughter had been together for any extended period in a long time.
Stalin kept his usual schedule—waking at 11:00 a.m. and dining at 10:00 p.m. Svetlana remembered Andrei Zhdanov, Lavrenty Beria, and Georgy Malenkov coming over from their nearby government dachas. As usual, the meal would last until 4 a.m. For Svetlana, dinner with her father had always been an ordeal. As a teenager, she had often been the butt of Stalin’s jokes. If he noticed she’d slipped away after some coarse joke, he would shout, “Comrade Hostess! Why have you left us poor unenlightened creatures without giving us some orientation? Now we don’t know where to go! Lead us! Show us the way!” That joke, a parody of the slogan “Comrade Stalin Leads the Way,” went on for years.41 But now the collective dinners at his dacha merely appalled her. Stalin, as usual, forced his comrades through endless toasts—it was said he liked to get them drunk to see what they might reveal in unguarded moments—and the dinners would end with the bodyguards carrying home their charges “dead drunk,” many, as Svetlana remembered, “having lain for some time in a bathroom, vomiting.”42
When she and her father were alone, it was difficult to find subjects to talk about, other than the food they were eating or the botanical details of nearby plants. She was careful not to talk about people, in case she might mistakenly say something about someone that might arouse her father’s suspicions. She never knew what to say or, more important, what not to say. It was easiest when she read to him.
Dejected by the whole ordeal, Svetlana returned to Moscow after three weeks, but as soon as she was back in the Kremlin apartment with her son Joseph, she felt she was again trapped inside a sarcophagus. She grew desperate. Given her psychological history, Svetlana did not know how to be alone. Alone, she felt totally exposed. She thought she would be safe if only she could entwine her life in another, but then, once she had achieved this, she would feel suffocated, a pattern that would take her decades to break, if she ever succeeded.
Now she thought of Sergo Beria, the son of Lavrenty Beria, as a potential partner.
She and Sergo had been children together, watching cartoons in the Kremlin and going to Model School No. 25. Sergo Beria and her close friend Marfa Peshkova had just gotten engaged that year. She confronted Marfa, saying that Marfa should have known that she, Svetlana, had always been in love with Beria. And ended their friendship. This was childish, petulant, and high-handed, the action of a princess in the Kremlin. She would look back with regret and say that she had thus lost two friends, Sergo and Marfa.43 Focused only on her own need, Svetlana seemed incapable of thinking rationally or pragmatically about what it would mean to have Lavrenty Beria as her father-in-law. Sergo’s mother, Nina, had already warned her son against such a union, certain that Stalin would think Beria was worming his way into power and would turn against them all.44 The twenty-one-year-old Svetlana seemed willfully naive about the perfidy of the closed political circle she lived inside.
After Marfa and Sergo Beria were married, Stalin called the young man to his dacha. Sergo described the encounter in his memoir. Though Beria is not always a reliable witness, the conversation has a certain plausibility. Allegedly Stalin said:
“Do you know your wife’s family? . . .” He then told me what he thought of that family: “Gorky himself was not bad in his way. But what a lot of anti-Soviet people he had around him. . . . I regard this marriage as a disloyal act on your part. Not disloyal to me but to the Soviet State. . . . I see your marriage as a move to establish links with the oppositionist Russian intelligentsia.” This idea had never even crossed my mind. My wife was pretty, plump like a quail, but not very intelligent and with a rather weak character, as I was to discover later. Stalin went on, . . . “It must be your father who urged you into this marriage, so as to infiltrate the Russian intelligentsia.”45
Two things are obvious from this conversation: the degree to which Stalin meddled in the private lives of his political allies and their minions and the fact that Svetlana had had a lucky escape. Had she succeeded in marrying Sergo Beria, her life would have been impossible. Sergo’s contempt for his wife is unpleasant, but the rivalry between Stalin and Sergo’s father, Lavrenty Beria, would have made her life a living hell. However, when driven by need, Svetlana seemed to lose the instinct for self-preservation.
The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign
By the end of the 1940s, Stalin had turned on many of the relatives who had celebrated his birthday with him in 1934. Top row, left: Anna Redens was arrested in 1948 (her husband, Stanislav, had been executed in 1940). Middle row: Maria Svanidze (left) was executed in 1942; although Sashiko Svanidze (third from left) survived, her sister Mariko was executed in 1942; Polina Molotov (at Stalin’s left) was arrested in 1948. Bottom row, second from left: Zhenya Alliluyeva was arrested in 1947.
(Courtesy of RGASPI [Russian State Archive of Social and Political History], Fund 558, Inventory 11, Doc 1653, p. 23)
After the war, everyone in the Soviet Union expected an easing of restrictions. The Great Patriotic War had been won at immense cost and through heroic sacrifice. So much reconstruction had to be undertaken. Surely now the long-promised era of socialist plenty was at hand. Instead, a new wave of repression was about to begin. With the cult of personality he’d fostered, Stalin had consolidated his power and assumed the template of the dictator. His adopted son, Artyom Sergeev, remembered an incident during which he heard Stalin upbraiding his son Vasili for exploiting the Stalin name.
“But I am a Stalin too,” Vasili had said.
“No, you’re not,” replied Stalin. “You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no not even me!”1
Power, its preservation and execution, had filled the vacuum of a human being. Stalin was an idea now, infallible. And he was still fighting a war. Propaganda made it clear that the Soviet Union had enemies out to destroy it.
It was Winston Churchill who inserted the term Iron Curtain into the public imagination. On March 5, 1946, in a gymnasium at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Churchill declaimed: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”2 Americans, who still thought of Stalin as Uncle Joe, believed Churchill was meddling. But their attitude would soon change.
Within a year after the end of World War II, the Cold War was under way, dividing the world into capitalist and communist spheres. In the background loomed the terrifying