LITMIR.BIZ

      Vasily and Svetlana with their father

      Vasily was a satyr, in addition to a drunkard, and the seat of his activities was the family dacha at Zubalovo, 20 miles from Moscow. Drunken orgies were regular. Imagine Vasily and his sidekicks commandeering women and firing pistols at chandeliers. He was not only a little Stalin, he was a little Caligula too. Stalin himself complained that his son had turned the dacha into a “den of iniquity.” (When you have been rebuked by Stalin, morally, you have been rebuked.)

      Vasily was married either four times or three—accounts vary (as I have said in this narrative before). He was definitely married to a daughter of Marshal Timoshenko; he may have been married to a daughter of Molotov, the foreign minister, too. Though he was the dictator’s son, it was no prize to be married to him. “He beat his wives as drunken peasants do in a village,” writes Svetlana. He beat whomever he wanted, “even policemen in the street,” as Svetlana says, for “in those days everything was forgiven him.”

      After the war, he formed and directed air-force sports teams. The sports included hockey, basketball, swimming, and gymnastics. When the athletes performed well, he would reward them, lavishly; when they did not, he would punish them, including by having them jailed. In 1950, the hockey team went down in a plane crash. Vasily covered it up, fearing his father’s wrath.

      Everyone wanted to please or appease Vasily, because he was the czarevitch, so to speak: the crown prince. But it would not last beyond his father’s lifetime. In this sense, he was not the crown prince, not a successor, just the dictator’s spoiled brat. He knew all this, too. He was highly anxious about his future, as well he should have been. According to Montefiore, he told Artyom Sergeyev, “I’ve only got two ways out. The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria, and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?” (These men were deputies under Stalin, who would vie for power in the post-Stalin era.)

      Stalin died on March 5, 1953. By the end of April, Vasily was arrested. He was charged with embezzlement, the utterance of “anti-Soviet statements” (i.e., criticisms of Stalin’s heirs), and myriad other offenses. As Svetlana says, there were “enough charges to put ten men in jail.” Nobody came to Vasily’s defense now. All the sidekicks and hangers-on and flunkies were gone. Vasily was “just an alcoholic,” as Svetlana puts it, whom “nobody needed anymore.” He was sentenced to eight years in prison. They even took away his proud, glorious name, imprisoning him as “Vasily Pavlovich Vasilyev.” (“Vasilyev” had been one of his father’s noms de guerre.)

      As time passed, he appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, the new Number 1. After almost seven years’ imprisonment, he was taken to see Khrushchev. Another Stalin biographer, Dmitri Volkogonov, tells the story, via Alexander Shelepin, who was the head of the KGB at this time. Shelepin says that Vasily “fell to his knees and begged and implored and wept. Khrushchev took him in his arms and was in tears himself, and they talked for a long time about Stalin. After that, it was decided to release Vasily immediately.” This was in January 1960. Vasily went back to his old ways, to the extent he could, hopelessly alcoholic. They exiled him to the (closed) city of Kazan. He died there in March 1962, at the age of 40. The stone of the grave they put him in bore neither the name Stalin nor the name Vasilyev. It said “Dzhugashvili,” just like poor Yakov.

      There is a coda to this story. In 1999, eight years after the end of the Soviet Union, Vasily was partially rehabilitated by the Russian supreme court. The court overturned the 1953 conviction for anti-Soviet statements and reduced the degree of some of the other convictions. Three years later, in 2002, Vasily’s remains were removed from Kazan to Moscow, where they were buried next to those of his mother.

      Vasily was a victim, in a sense, like Stalin’s other children, and like many of the sons and daughters of dictators whom we are surveying. Needless to say, Stalin had millions more victims, unknown to him personally. And Vasily was victimizer as well as victim. What Dmitri Volkogonov says is true: “Vasily’s life was an illustration in miniature of the moral sterility of Stalinism.” He was “fine proof that the abuser of power [Josef Stalin, in this case] corrupts everyone he touches, including his own children. The Caesars, having reached the acme of their power, often left behind them children flawed in body and soul, morally dead while the dictator was still living and revelling in his own immorality.”

      We now get to Svetlana: the most famous of all the “children of monsters,” probably, except for the sons who succeeded their father in “office”—a Duvalier in Haiti, a Kim in North Korea, an Assad in Syria, another Kim in North Korea. Why is Svetlana so famous? There are two main reasons, I think, one more important than the other. The less important reason is this: She defected from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1967. This caused a global sensation. But the more important reason is that she got it all down, and superbly. She wrote up her life in three books. The first two have enduring power, and the third is not without interest.

      Svetlana was born, as you know, in 1926, when her father was firmly entrenched in the Kremlin. What we have said about other dictators and their daughters, we can say about Stalin and Svetlana: He adored her, and she adored him back. Stalin felt more tenderly toward his daughter than he did toward any other human being. Later, she thought she knew why. She often said, “I reminded him of his mother, who had red hair and freckles all over, just like me.” Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Svetlana’s mother, was not the maternal type. She was the Bolshevik type: devoted to Party and work, not to “bourgeois” interests such as family. Svetlana could not remember that her mother had ever hugged, praised, or kissed her. Nadya thought that her husband coddled their daughter.