Even as the playing field of atomic war was being leveled, suspicions between the two countries had grown exponentially since 1946. In 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act establishing the Central Intelligence Agency. By early 1948, the CIA had already helped to swing an election in Italy away from the Communists.4 Now the deadly game of international intelligence gathering was afoot.
The CIA spied on its own citizens in a domestic campaign of fear. Beginning as early as 1945, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began hunting for Soviet spies and Communist sympathizers. Senator Joseph McCarthy created paranoia with his reckless Red Scare propaganda, and his sensationalized public hearings targeted thousands of Americans. But Stalin went much further. He turned his secret police, the MGB (Ministry of State Security), even more murderously against his own people. To instill and then control through fear had always been his strategy, and as he had learned from the earliest days, he had to keep the fear going. His solution was to engineer a campaign of ideological purification that became known as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign. All contacts with the West and Western culture were declared subversive. To be seen engaging in any conversation or transaction with any foreigners was forbidden; to seek to marry a foreigner was a crime. Foreign travel was restricted to high Party officials or those accompanied by “handlers.” A shroud of silence blanketed the country. No one dared to express criticism of the Great Stalin, who had won the war. As Sergei Pavlovich Alliluyev put it, “It was not done by anyone. It just wasn’t accepted, nor was it possible.”5
By late 1947, the new wave of repression hit the Stalin family. At five p.m. on December 10, Zhenya, Pavel Alliluyev’s widow, now forty-nine and remarried, was at home in her apartment in the House on the Embankment. She was busy with her dressmaker, sewing a new dress to celebrate the New Year. Zhenya’s married daughter Kyra, twenty-seven, was visiting and was in the dining room rehearsing Chekhov’s The Proposal with her theater friends. Zhenya’s sons—Sergei, nineteen; and Alexander, sixteen—were also there, as was her frail mother, who lived with them. The doorbell rang. Kyra answered it. Two military men, Colonel Maslennikov and Major Gordeyev, stood at the door. “Is Eugenia Aleksandrovna at home?” they asked. “Yes, come in,” Kyra replied and went back to rehearsing the play. Then Kyra heard her mother say, “Prison and bad luck are two things that you can’t avoid.”6
They took Zhenya away in what she was wearing. Hastily kissing her children good-bye, she told them not to worry since she “had no guilt of any sort.” Other agents arrived; their search of the flat lasted well into the night. As they tapped the potted plants, Kyra asked, “What are you looking for? An underground passage into the Kremlin?” But irony was never a good idea with the NKGB. Anyone who came to the flat that evening was ordered to sit and wait. The agents took away all family photos with Stalin and Svetlana and Vasili in them, as well as all autographed books.7
Transported to Vladimir Prison, Zhenya was accused of spying; of poisoning her husband, Pavel, who had died of a heart attack nine years earlier; and of interactions with foreigners. She was kept in solitary confinement. Her children were not permitted to contact her.
Zhenya confessed to all the accusations. She later told her daughter, “You sign anything there, just to be left alone and not tortured!” In prison, bombarded by the screams of victims begging for death, she swallowed glass. She lived, but suffered the consequences in stomach problems for the rest of her life.8
The nighttime arrest had been so surreal that the fear kicked in only later. Alexander Alliluyev remembered that his brother Sergei would lie in bed, waiting breathlessly to hear whether the elevator stopped on their floor. Rustlings or other sounds on the staircase would cause him to tremble. A few weeks later, at about six in the evening, the elevator did stop. Kyra was visiting, as, of course, the secret police knew. She was sitting reading War and Peace. When she answered the knock on the door, it was the commandants again. Her brothers stood behind her to protect her. As the agents read Kyra the arrest warrant, her grandmother cried. “Grandmother, don’t humiliate yourself, don’t cry, you mustn’t,” Kyra remembered saying.9
Kyra was taken to a waiting car. As they drove across Moscow and she watched the streets disappear behind her, she wondered if she would ever see her city again. The journey across the nocturnal city took place in oppressive silence until the heavy gates of the Lubyanka prison swung open and the car drove into the courtyard. She remained stoic until they took everything from her and put her in a cell. Then she wept.
Her interrogator accused her of spreading rumors about Nadya’s suicide. She was dumbfounded. She didn’t know that Nadya had committed suicide. She had always believed the story about appendicitis. “I belonged to the kind of family where it wasn’t accepted to talk more than necessary. There was no gossip. . . . They needed something to accuse us of, so that was what they pinned on me: I was supposed to have talked to everybody.”10
She was kept in solitary confinement for six months. Her salvation was her memory. It was vital to hold on to the belief that a real world still existed outside the walls of that madhouse. She visualized all the movies and musicals she knew. She was permitted to read. She paced her cell, asking herself what she had done. She had always been a good Pioneer, a good Komsomolka. She could not understand. It had to be Lavrenty Beria, who had always had it in for her family.
My only clue was that I was a relative of Stalin and I knew that Beria was bound to say something to Stalin that he would believe. My mother was very outspoken, she was freedom-loving, she was forthright with Stalin and equally truthful with Beria. He had evidently taken a dislike to her from the moment they set eyes on each other. I realized that all this had to be instigated by Beria. Stalin by this time was deeply under his influence.11
People advised Kyra to write to Stalin from prison, but she refused. It was better not to remind Stalin of her existence. But so twisted was her (and indeed most people’s) logic in this climate of fear that she could still rationalize, indeed justify, Stalin’s motives. Her brother Alexander explained:
We could only surmise there must be some minor guilt, something to do with purely personal relationships and loyalty to Stalin. We definitely thought that without Stalin’s knowledge this arrest simply could not have taken place. And so far as he decided on such an extreme thing as to arrest his own close relatives, so, thought we, there must be a reason. It was a cruel step from our point of view. But from his point of view it had to be a legitimate one.12
Zhenya’s second husband, N. V. Molochnikov, a Jewish engineer, was soon arrested. When Zhenya’s sons asked what they were to tell friends about the absence of their mother and stepfather, the NKGB instructed them to say, “Our parents are on a prolonged trip.” “But until what time?” they asked. “Until a special announcement.”13 A number of Kyra’s friends were also arrested.
On January 28, 1948, they came for Svetlana’s aunt Anna, who was Nadya’s older sister and the widow of Stanislav Redens. Her sons—Vladimir, twelve; and Leonid, nineteen—were in the apartment. Everyone was asleep. A colonel, followed by a number of agents, knocked on the door at 3:00 a.m. They showed Anna the arrest warrant. As she was being taken away, Anna said, “What a strange array of misfortunes come upon our family Alliluyev.” The children sat up with their nanny as the search was under way. In their memory it lasted a day and a night.14
Accused of slandering Stalin, Anna Redens was arrested in 1948 and was not released until 1954.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Anna was accused of slandering Stalin. Her interrogators had collected denunciations from family, friends, and acquaintances. However, when they demanded that she sign a confession, her son Vladimir