The Green Hat, published in 1924, was a potboiler romance, probably acceptable in Bolshevik circles because it satirized the British upper class. Nadya had been in charge of Stalin’s library and of ordering his books. It is doubtful that Stalin read The Green Hat, but she must have discussed it with him. In the novel, the aristocratic high-minded heroine, betrayed by her lover, commits suicide as a gesture of her contempt for approval from her elite circle. A book did not kill Nadya, but Stalin believed it had an influence on her decision to commit suicide. This similarity paints a portrait of Nadya as a young woman with an icily unbendable pride and a strange sense of idealism.40 In cultural circles in the 1920s, multiple suicides, especially those of the poets Mayakovsky and Yesenin, had made a kind of romanticized cult of suicide. Of course this was only among the intelligentsia. Ordinarily, suicide was looked on as treason against the collective.
Svetlana found the whole conversation with her father utterly painful. She felt he was looking for anything but the real reason for her mother’s suicide—he refused to look at the things that made Nadya’s life with him so unbearable. And she was suddenly frightened. Her father seemed to be speaking to her as an adult for the first time, asking for her trust. “But I’d rather have fallen through the ground than have had that kind of trust.”
That November Svetlana returned with her father to Moscow by train. When the train stopped at the various stations, they’d descend for a stroll. There were no other passengers on the train, and the platforms had been cleared. Stalin strolled to the front engine, chatted with the engineer and the few railway workers who had security clearance, and then got back on the train, seeming not to notice that the whole thing was a “sinister, sad, depressing sight,” as Svetlana saw it. Her father was a prisoner of his own isolation, an isolation he had constructed. Before the train pulled into the Moscow station, it was diverted to a siding, and the two passengers descended. General Vlasik and the bodyguards were there to greet them, puffing and fussing as Stalin cursed them.41
Father and daughter parted, each dissatisfied with the other. It was impossible to be with her father. He had sacrificed everything human in him to the pursuit of power. After seeing him, she always needed days to recover her equilibrium. “I had no feeling left for my father, and after every meeting I was in a hurry to get away.”42 This, however, was not entirely true. Svetlana could never wholly repudiate her father. His black shadow always remained over her, impossible to exorcise. There was the father to be pitied and there was the dictator. She would always believe that in some part of him, the father loved her.
Everything Silent, as Before a Storm
Svetlana with her first two children, Joseph and Katya, in 1953.
(Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
By 1949, Svetlana was living in the otherwise empty Kremlin apartment again. As he had done for years, her father lived at his Kuntsevo dacha. Ivan Borodachev, a commandant of State Security, ran the Kremlin household with rigor. He kept a list of any books Svetlana took from her father’s library to the dining room table to read and crossed them off when she returned them to the shelves. After the war, Stalin had initiated a regimen of having all of his food tested. Special doctors chemically analyzed every scrap of food that came from the kitchen. All foodstuffs came with official seals: NO POISONOUS ELEMENTS FOUND. From time to time, “Dr. Dyakov would appear in our Kremlin apartment with his test tubes and take samples of the air in our rooms.” Svetlana commented drily, “Inasmuch as . . . the servants who cleaned the rooms remained alive, everything must have been in order.”1
Svetlana was now a divorced woman with a four-year-old son. Her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, was taking care of Joseph at the Zubalovo dacha. That spring Stalin visited the dacha to meet his grandson for the first time. Svetlana was terrified at the prospect of her father’s visit. Because he had refused to meet Grigori Morozov, she was worried he would reject their child as well. “I’ll never forget how scared I was,” she said in retrospect. Joseph “was very appealing, a little Greek- or Georgian-looking, with huge, shiny Jewish eyes and long lashes. I was sure my father wouldn’t approve. I didn’t see how he possibly could.”2
Yet Stalin responded warmly to the child, playing with him for half an hour in the woods. Her father even praised young Joseph: “He’s a good-looking boy—he’s got nice eyes”—affectionate words from a truculent man who offered little praise. Stalin would see his grandson only twice more. Ironically, Joseph would remember his grandfather with love; he always kept a photograph of Stalin on his desk.
Svetlana graduated from Moscow University in June 1949 with a major in modern history. She immediately entered the masters program in Russian literature. This time her father was indifferent to her passion for “those Bohemians!”
If Svetlana’s version of herself was that she was passive and vulnerable, this was not always how others saw her. Her cousin Vladimir called her character “harsh and unbalanced,” though she was “courageous and independent, with her own principles, in line with the traditions of Alliluyevs,” as he put it.3 Her friend Stepan Mikoyan felt her shyness was half camouflage. “Svetlana was very shy and quiet when everything was quiet; and when she was against something, she was very strong.”4
Candide Charkviani, by now first secretary of the Communist Party of Georgia, who had first encountered Svetlana as a child, remembered meeting her again on Lake Ritsa, where Stalin was vacationing. Svetlana had come to visit. They had been cooped up in the dacha for days until the rain finally lifted, and they set out for a walk, led by Major General Alexander Poskrebyshev, Stalin’s trusted private secretary.
Suddenly Svetlana veered off the paved road and headed toward the raging river. A large log formed a bridge to the other side and Svetlana was determined to cross. She told the others, “Don’t worry . . . nothing is going to happen to me.” “We found ourselves in an awkward position, a woman perched on stilt-like heels was clearly challenging us to cross the wildly gushing river.” Poskrebyshev stood his ground, but Charkviani followed, then was disgusted to discover that all Svetlana wanted was to pick a cluster of frozen flowers on the other bank. She skipped back across the log in her spike heels, while he crawled along the log, terrified of the river raging below. It clearly amused Svetlana to challenge her father’s comrades.5
Charkviani’s version of Svetlana was that she was stubborn and could stand up to her father. A few evenings later at the dacha, in the presence of guests who included Molotov and Mikoyan, Svetlana told her father she wanted to leave for Moscow. Stalin didn’t want to let her go. Charkviani recalled the conversation. Apparently Stalin replied,
“Why rush? Stay for some ten more days. You are not in a stranger’s house, are you? Could it be so very boring here?”
“Father, I have urgent business to look to, please let me go.”
“Let’s stop discussing this, you will stay here, with me.”
We all thought that was the final decision. Yet for Svetlana, Stalin’s words were not final. . . . Throughout the whole evening, as the ongoing conversation permitted, she would start repeating her request.
Finally Stalin lost patience:
“All right, if that’s what you want—go. I cannot make you stay by force,” he said to his capricious daughter and she happily went to her room, probably to pack her bags.
When we left the dining room, Mikoyan noted: “She has taken after her father; whatever she puts into her heart, she definitely has to do it.”6
But her rebellions were