Recently I bought a book about
Stalin's daughter. It is a book about her tragic life. Imagine a life which took 84 years to live was read by me over a few
days – all 623 pages of it. The author, Rosemary Sullivan, a professor
emeritus, poet and literary critic, did a sterling job documenting her life
from her birth in 1926 to her death in 2011. Some may consider it a long life
but it was hardly a life lived for herself. In fact, after Stalin died in March
1953, his daughter lived a life of a fugitive running away from one place to
another to find peace. But wherever she went, Svetlana Alliluyeva (refusing to adopt her father's name Stalin to
keep the ghosts at bay) could not escape from the hold her father had on her
even after his death. In an interview, she said: "You are Stalin's daughter. Actually you are already dead. Your life is
already finished. You can't live your own life. You can't live any life. You
exist only in reference to a name."
Stalin was a dictator and an
extremely paranoid and cruel one. He ruled by fear and drove everyone who was
ever close to him to their death. His mother once asked him - "Who exactly are you?” - and he proudly
replied that he was like the Russian Tsar. "What a pity," she replied, "you never became a priest." Well, priest or no priest,
Stalin became a force to be reckoned with; one that is even more revered,
gripping, and mysterious than a religious cult.
In one incident, as recalled by
his adopted son, Artyom Sergeev, Stalin scolded his son Vasili (of his second
marriage) for exploiting the Stalin name. Vasili retorted, "But I am Stalin too." Stalin
replied, "No, you're not. 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!" In his
obsession to rule, Stalin had turned himself into a concept, a political idea
that was both absolute and infallible. This is reminiscent of the ironclad rule
of Mao's China when he deferred to communism as an infallible concept and
exploited it with bloodshed and impunity.
After reading a few chapters in the
book about Svetlana’s childhood, I note that Stalin's relationship with her can
be rather endearing. He was playful with her, calling her names like "little butterfly", "little fly" or "little sparrow". He even invented
an imaginary friend for her named Lyolka.
They often exchanged love notes with each other.
But in reality, it was a complex
relationship, layered by Stalin’s need for control and absolute certainty to
rule. Except for Svetlana, he saw almost everyone as a potential threat to him
and he kept his distance from all. As such, Stalin became a “prisoner of his own isolation, an isolation
he had constructed.” For Svetlana, her father was to be pitied and to be
feared.
Many years later, Svetlana wrote this
about her father, “My greatest burden lay
in the need of everyone to tell me “what a great man” my father was: some
accompanied the words with tears, others with hugs and kisses, a few were
satisfied with only stating the fact. I could not avoid the subject or the
confrontations on beaches, in dining rooms, on the streets…They were obsessed
with his name, his image, and, being obsessed, they could not leave me alone.
It was torture for me. I could not tell them how complex were my thoughts about
my father and my relationship with him. Nor could I tell them what they wanted
to hear – so they departed from me in anger. I was continually on edge and
nervous.”
Although Stalin’s first wife died one
year after he married her, his second wife, (Svetlana's mother) killed herself
when Svetlana was only six and a half in November 1932. The night before her
suicide, Stalin was holding a party and she caught him flirting with a film
actress, who was the wife of the Red Army commander. She then refused to raise
her glass to toast to the state and stormed back into her room. "What a fool,” Stalin fumed. A few hours
later, she pressed a small Mauser pistol to her heart and pulled the trigger.
Svetlana recalled that her mother scrambled to the door, seemingly showing deep
remorse for what she had done. But it was too late.
Speculations were rife about why she
killed herself until letters she had written to her sister-in-law surfaced
after Stalin's death in 1953. In one of the letters, she wrote that she "could not live with Stalin anymore. You take
him for someone else. But he is a two-faced Janus. He will step over everybody
in the world, including you."
Initially Stalin was shocked by her
death. He was in a state of "sporadic
fits of rage." However, as mercurial as he was, Svetlana recounted
that "Stalin approached the casket
and, suddenly incensed, shoved it, saying, "She went away as an enemy.""
In the book, the author wrote that "Svetlana
believed her father never visited her mother's grave." "Not even
once," she said. "He couldn't. He thought my mother had left him as
his personal enemy."
With her mother gone, Svetlana admitted
in the book that her father "became
final, unquestioned authority for me in everything." But this was to
be short-lived as a series of tragic events would doom their relationship
permanently. These events would lead her to confessed these words of utter
disappointment: "I had no feeling
left for my father, and after every meeting I was in a hurry to get away."
The first casualty of Stalin's reign
of terror in Svetlana's family circle was the persecution of her maternal
uncles and aunts, that is, her mother's siblings. They were arrested at the
slightest of suspicion and imprisoned for years.
Her uncle Pavel once told his wife
Zhenya that "if they come after me,
I will shoot myself." Soon after, Pavel died of a heart attack due to
the terror Stalin had instilled in him. Zhenya rushed to the hospital and
practically ripped off her husband's clothes to check for bullet wound. Zhenya
was later accused of spying and poisoning her husband and was kept in solitary
confinement for six months. In prison, she tried to commit suicide by
swallowing glass.
Another of Svetlana's relative,
Stanislav Redens, was arrested and executed on 12 February 1940. An execution
order approved by Stalin. Eight years later, in 1948, his wife, Anna, was
arrested for slander and imprisoned for 6 years. Prison changed Anna forever
and 10 years after she was released, Svetlana recounted bitterly how her aunt
died: "After six years in prison she
was afraid of locked doors. She had ended up in hospital, very disturbed,
talking all the time. She would walk the corridors at night talking to herself.
One night a stupid nurse decided that she should not walk in the corridor, so
she locked her into her room, even though it was known that she couldn't stand
locked doors. In the morning, they found her dead."
Even Stalin's first wife's brother
and his wife were imprisoned and executed by Stalin in 1941 and 1942. This
would be relevant to Svetlana because her third marriage was to Ivan, their
tormented son – suffering the same fate of his parents under Stalin. More will
be revealed about her tragic marriages later. For now, let’s continue with
Stalin’s oppressive rule.
On one occasion, in 1940, Svetlana
noticed her classmate, Galya, and best friend was crying and Galya told her
that Stalin had arrested her father. She begged for Svetlana to plead with
Stalin on her behalf. Svetlana agreed to intervene. Initially Stalin dismissed
her plea but Svetlana cried, "But I
love Galya." A few days later, Galya's father was released. On another
occasion, Svetlana had to plead for her beloved nanny's life and Stalin again
relented. It was then that Svetlana understood how her father's word was all
that stood in the way of whether one lives or dies.
But it was the death of her half
brother that was one of the most heartbreaking events in her life. His name was
Yakov and here's a little background.
Stalin married his first wife, Kato,
in 1906, and she died one year later. The couple had a son, Yakov, born in 1907.
Stalin married Svetlana's mother in 1918 when she was only 16 and he was 39.
Vasili was then born in 1921 and Svetlana was born in 1926. Among the three
children of Stalin from the two marriages, namely, Yakov, Vasili and Svetlana,
Yakov was repeatedly bullied by Stalin. He called Yakov "soft" and "worthless".
Stalin also disapproved of his first
marriage. When Yakov remarried after the
divorce and the death of his first child, Stalin had his second wife arrested
for a year and a half. When she was released, even her own daughter could not
recognize her. She never forgave Stalin for what he did.
In despair, Yakov tried to kill
himself but the bullet grazed his chest. He lived on, desperately seeking his
father's approval. Later, when Stalin went to war with Hitler, Yakov joined the
light artillery regiment as a commander but was arrested as a POW. In 1943, the
Germans proposed a prisoner swap, that is, Stalin's son, Yakov, for Field
Marshal Friedrich Paulus. But Stalin refused the exchange, dismissing it
saying, "All of them are my sons."
Whether he meant that or he was just using it as a convenient excuse to get rid
of Yakov was unclear. But what is clear was that Stalin had issued an Order
called Order 270 which condemned “all who
surrendered or were captured as traitors to the Motherland." Based on
this Order, and if the prisoner exchange were carried out, Yakov would return
to the Soviet Union not as a war hero but a war traitor. For that, he faced
imprisonment or execution. Either way, his fate was sealed by his father.
Yakov then languished in prison as a
POW and he died under mysterious circumstances. Some reports claimed that he was
shot. Others claimed that he had committed suicide…..
** To be cont’d – PART II
– tomorrow night **
