LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

to him, in writing. Then he would respond, “I obey.” He had a habitual sign-off in his notes to her: “From Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.”

      You can imagine how Setanka felt about her father: He was not only her own adored father—and it’s natural for little girls to adore their fathers—he was the king of the whole wide world. In a memoir, she says that she never heard her father’s name except with such words as “great” and “wise” attached to it. This was true at home, at school, and everywhere else. The atmosphere at home was “official, even quasi-military,” she says. Home was run by the secret police, to a considerable extent. But Svetlana was not unduly stifled.

      She was a bookish child, even an intellectual one. She loved literature, foreign languages, music. She had fine tutors. She went to school with other Kremlin children. In this period, her life was probably as happy and normal as possible, under the circumstances.

      Nonetheless, there were shadows. With some regularity, her schoolmates would simply disappear. They would be there one day, and not the next. Their fathers had fallen from favor, being arrested, imprisoned, or killed. Sometimes, a schoolmate would give Svetlana a note to pass to her father. It had been written by the schoolmate’s desperate mother, whose husband had been dragged away in the night. Could Comrade Stalin do something? The dictator got sick of these notes, telling his daughter not to serve as a “post-office box.”

      Worse, much worse, her own relatives disappeared: her aunts, uncles, and cousins. These were members of Nadya’s family. Stalin had taken her suicide, quite naturally, as a gross insult and betrayal. He punished her family for it. He also punished the family of his first wife, Kato. Those relatives were killed or imprisoned too. Why? It’s usually foolish to ask such questions about Stalin: but he probably wanted to erase signs of the past. Svetlana writes that it was hard to think of her beloved aunts and uncles as “enemies of the people,” as the official propaganda had it. “I could only assume that they must have become the victims of some frightful mix-up, which ‘even Father himself’ could not disentangle.” There would come a time, an awful time, when she realized it was all his doing. And he had an explanation for her: “They knew too much. They babbled a lot. It played into the hands of our enemies.”

      You and I can do our best to slip into the skin of such people as Svetlana Stalina. To be in sympathy with them. But it takes a very big imagination to slip into the skin of a girl whose adored relatives, after her mother’s death, were killed by her own adored father.

      She was 16 when she found out about her mother—about the way she died. With her gift for languages, and her curiosity about the world, she liked to read English and American magazines. They were available to someone in her privileged position. “One day,” she writes, “I came across an article about my father. It mentioned, not as news but as a fact well known to everyone, that his wife, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, had killed herself on the night of November 8, 1932.” She did not want to believe it, but she could. And “something in me was destroyed.”

      Something else happened when she was 16: She fell in love, with someone who was all wrong. He was 40, married, a playboy, and Jewish. (In her memoirs, Svetlana doesn’t mention that he was married, or a playboy, but Simon Sebag Montefiore does.) The love interest was a prominent screenwriter named Alexei Kapler. They met when he was a guest at one of Vasily’s notorious parties at Zubalovo. But the romance that ensued between the screenwriter and the schoolgirl was “innocent enough,” writes Svetlana (believably). They went to art exhibitions, the movies, the theater, and the opera. He introduced her to books, including novels by Hemingway, which were extremely hard to obtain. They kissed and sighed. Svetlana basked in the intellectual company and the romance.

      Kapler was arrested on March 2, 1943. The next morning, as Svetlana was getting ready for school, Stalin did something he had never done before: show up at her quarters unexpectedly. He was in a volcanic rage. “Your Kapler is a British spy!” he said. Svetlana protested that she loved him. And here is how she describes what happened next: “‘Love!’ screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me across the face, twice.” He also said that a war was on, and all his daughter could do was . . . Here he used what Svetlana describes as a “coarse peasant word.”

      Her nanny, who was present, tried to protect her charge, crying that the accusation was untrue. Stalin dismissed this. Then he said to his daughter, “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool. He’s got women all around him!” With that, he left. Svetlana was devastated—“utterly broken,” she says. Her father’s words made her doubt that Kapler had ever loved her at all. Or that anyone could.

      In a daze, she went on to school. When she came home, her father summoned her. She found him tearing up the letters and photos that Kapler had sent her. He muttered, “‘Writer’! He can’t write decent Russian!” Why, his daughter “couldn’t even find herself a Russian!” Apparently, says Svetlana, “the fact that Kapler was a Jew” was what bothered her father the most.

      He sent him to the Gulag—to Vorkuta, for five years. (A normal person might, for once, sympathize with Stalin.) As Montefiore says, the amorous 40-year-old screenwriter was lucky he wasn’t shot. His five years were relatively easy—he was allowed to work in the theater. After his release, though, he broke parole, returning to Moscow, which was off-limits to him. He was rearrested and sentenced to another five years—this time, in a mine. When he was at last out, he and Svetlana had a brief affair, according to Montefiore. And that was that.

      After Stalin’s confrontation with Svetlana that morning before school—March 3, 1943—nothing was ever the same between father and daughter. He lived ten more years, plus two days, but Svetlana hardly saw him. One might say she knew him only until she was 16. As she would write, “He loved me while I was still a child, a schoolgirl—I amused him.” But when she became an adolescent, with some of the problems that often attend that stage, she was less amusing.

      Svetlana proceeded to Moscow University. She wanted to study literature, her bent and passion. But Stalin still cared enough about her life to disallow it. “You want to be one of those Bohemians!” he said. He told her to study history instead, after which she could do whatever she desired. That is exactly what she did. At the university, she concentrated on U.S. history, for the Soviet Union’s alliance with America had generated interest in that country, and enthusiasm for it.

      Before long, she received a marriage proposal from a fellow student, Grigory Morozov. She had been madly in love with a Kremlin prince: Sergo Beria, son of one of the most monstrous of Stalin’s sub-monsters, Lavrenti Beria. She had known Sergo since childhood, but their relationship did not blossom as she hoped. So smitten was she by him, she even tried to upend his marriage. (She leaves this vexing business out of her books, but others do not.) In the mid-1990s, Sergo Beria was interviewed by Andrew Higgins of the London Independent. Little Beria criticized Svetlana because she had turned against her father. He himself venerated Stalin, as he did his own father.

      Anyway, this Morozov proposed to Svetlana. He, like the banished Kapler, was Jewish. In one of her books, Svetlana writes, “I was drawn to kind, gentle, intellectual people. It so happened, independent of any choice on my part, that these lovely people, who treated me with such warmth, both at school and at the university, were often Jews.” She went to her father with Morozov’s proposal. It was May, and they were sitting outside, on a splendid day. For a long time, Stalin just stared at the trees, saying nothing. Suddenly, he said, “Yes, it’s spring. To hell with you. Do as you like.” He set one condition on the marriage: that the groom and husband never set foot in his house. Indeed, Stalin never met his son-in-law.

      The next year, 1945, the Morozovs had a child, Josef. Was he named after Stalin? Of course. But he was named after his other grandfather too. (This other grandfather would be arrested a few years later.) Eventually, little Josef met his maternal grandfather, the Red Czar. Svetlana writes, “I’ll never forget how scared I was” the first time her father saw her son. The child “was about three and 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

Скачать книгу