My third meeting with Svetlana was so peculiar that I remember it rather well. Before it was 1 PM, I had already arrived at Stalin’s Kuntsevo residence. After a brief discussion, J. Stalin excused himself. “Don’t get bored,” he said and left the room. Some while later he returned freshly shaved in a well-ironed service jacket and trousers. Before we started discussing the issues I came with, there was a knock on the door. The guest turned out to be Svetlana. Stalin greeted her with enthusiasm, kissed her and, while pointing to his jacket, said: “Look how I got dressed up for you, I even had a shave.” Svetlana shook my hand and we all sat round the table.
As some banalities were exchanged, a silence fell. Stalin expected Svetlana to start; however she kept silent.
“I know what you are going to say,” said Stalin finally, “so you still insist on your decision to divorce?”
“Father!” pleaded Svetlana.
As I felt the conversation was to touch on family matters, I got up and asked J. Stalin for permission to go for a walk in the garden.
“No!” cut in Stalin categorically, “you need to be here. It is necessary.” Then he turned to Svetlana and promised to be the first one to spread her news to the world.
I had no other way but to be an unwilling witness to an unpleasant discussion of private matters. I took my seat rather far away; however the host was conversing in such a loud voice that it was impossible to escape hearing it all.
“What’s besetting you? What’s your reason for wanting a divorce?”
“I cannot stand my mother-in-law. I have not managed to adjust to her ways,” mumbled Svetlana.
“And your husband? What is your husband saying?”
“He is supporting his mother in everything.” . . .
“All right, if that’s what you have decided, get a divorce. Such matters cannot be settled by force. Yet I want you to know that I don’t like your attitude to family life.”
That was J. Stalin’s final verdict in this awkward affair. Svetlana, probably satisfied but blushing because of embarrassment, said goodbye and left us.30
In retrospect, Svetlana would say that Zhdanov was very intelligent, cultured, talented in his field, and a wonderful father but that they lived in different universes. He, too, wanted a divorce. He remained friendly toward her and devoted to his daughter, Katya, and would take both of her children on his hiking and archaeology expeditions.31
Stalin gave his twice-divorced daughter permission to leave the Kremlin, assigning her an apartment in the House on the Embankment. Her old nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, came with her, perhaps more of a responsibility now than a help. The apartment, number 179 on the third floor, entrance seven,32 was modest—four rooms with a kitchen—but certainly extreme luxury in comparison with the communal apartments into which most Muscovites were crammed, where several families might share a single room separated by sheets of plywood and where there were always fights over the communal kitchen and toilet and constant reports to the Housing Committee about noisy children being brought up like hooligans.
Svetlana was now twenty-six and in the last year of her MA studies. Her father asked her how she would survive. Having left Zhdanov, she was not entitled to a government dacha or an officially chauffeured car. A new law in 1947 had decreed that relatives of members of the government would no longer be fed and clothed at public expense. She recalled he almost spat at her: “What are you, anyway—a parasite, living off what you’re given? . . . Apartments, dachas, cars—don’t think they’re yours. It doesn’t any of it belong to you.”33
She explained that she didn’t need a dacha or a chauffeur. Her stipend as a graduate student was enough to pay for her and the children’s meals and the apartment. He calmed down. Thinking it a magnificent sum, he passed her several thousand rubles. He didn’t know that the currency had been so devalued that the amount would barely cover living expenses for a few days. Svetlana said nothing.34
However, Stalin offered to buy her a car, but only if she got her driver’s license first. This would become one of her fondest memories. She would always recall the one and only time she took her father out for a drive. His bodyguard sat in the backseat, rifle across his knees. Stalin seemed so pleased to discover that his daughter could drive.35
But, in truth, Stalin and his daughter were growing more distant. On October 28, she wrote to him:
OCTOBER 28, 1952
My Dear Papa,
I very much want to see you. I don’t have any “business,” or “questions” to discuss. I just want to see you. If you would allow me and if this wouldn’t bother you, I should like to ask if I could spend some time at the Blizhniaia [Kuntsevo] dacha—two days of the holidays—the 8th and 9th of November. If it’s possible I will bring my little children, my son and daughter. For us this will be a real holiday.36
Svetlana took the children to visit Stalin’s dacha on November 8. It was the first time he saw the two-and-a-half-year-old Katya and the only time he, Svetlana, and his two grandchildren were together. It was also the twentieth anniversary of Nadya’s death, though this was not mentioned. Svetlana wondered if her father remembered that this was the date on which her mother had committed suicide.
Svetlana looked at her father’s dacha with loathing. His rooms were ugly. In cheap frames on his walls he had huge photographs cut out from the magazine Ogonyok: a little girl with a calf, some children sitting on a bridge. Strangers’ children. Not a single photograph of his own grandchildren. The unchanging rooms—a couch, a table, chairs; a couch, a table, chairs—frightened her. The little party went off well, but Svetlana felt her father’s response to her daughter was indifference. He took one look at Katya and burst out laughing. Svetlana wondered if her father would have liked to be a family again. When she had fantasies of herself and her children living under the same roof with him, she realized that he was accustomed to the freedom of his solitude, which he claimed to have come to appreciate during his long Siberian exiles. “We could never have created a single household, the semblance of a family, a shared existence, even if we both wanted to. He really didn’t want to, I guess.”37
She went alone and without a present to celebrate his seventy-third (seventy-fourth) birthday on December 21. Beria, Malenkov, Bulganin, and Mikoyan were at the birthday party. Khrushchev came in and out. Molotov was unwelcome; Stalin had singled him out for savage humiliation at the Nineteenth Congress that October, and his wife, Polina, had been exiled to Kazakhstan for speaking in Yiddish at an official cocktail reception and declaring recklessly that she was a “daughter of the Jewish people.”38
Stalin was ebullient. The kitchen staff had laid out a Georgian feast. Even with the “poison tests” conducted in the kitchen, Stalin still made sure someone tasted any dish before he ate it. Khrushchev remembered the drill: “Stalin would say, ‘Look, here are the giblets, Nikita. Have you tried them yet?’” Khrushchev would reply, “‘Oh, I forgot.’ I could see he would like to take some himself, but was afraid. I would try them and only then would he start to eat them himself.”39
When Stalin put Russian and Georgian folk songs on the gramophone, everyone had to dance. As Khrushchev described him, “He shuffled around with his arms outstretched. It was evident he had never danced before.” Then Svetlana appeared. Khrushchev recalled:
I don’t know if she’d been summoned or if she came on her own. She found herself in the middle of a flock of people older than she, to put it mildly. As soon as this sober young woman arrived, Stalin made her dance. I could see she was tired. She hardly moved while dancing. She danced for a short time and tried to stop, but her father still insisted. She went over and stood next to the record player, leaning her shoulder against the wall. Stalin came over to her, and I joined them. We stood together. Stalin was lurching about. He said, “Well,