A Cursed Family - The Fate of Stalin's Circle

A CURSED FAMILY:The Fate Of Stalin’s Circle

In classical mythology the god Saturn, fearing that he would be supplanted by his childen, devoured them one by one as they were born. It is a horrifying story, graphically illustrated by the artist Goya. The fate of most of Stalin’s family circle at his hands was equally terrible. This is the story of that family and the curse that came with being one of Stalin’s circle.. onn the last page and may be useful for reference It concludes with a brief account of how, many years later, the author’s own life and that of Stalin’s daughter nearly intersected. (There is a family tree at the end which readers may find helpful to distinguish between the different family members mentioned in this article).

Stalin died on 5th March 1953. One of those at his bedside was his only daughter, 27 year-old Svetlana Alliluyeva. Her eyewitness account of his final moments is chilling:

The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed like the last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry and full of fear of death and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors standing over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can't forget and don't understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he was pointing to something up above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh 1.

He died as he had lived, a curse to all he touched. For members of his immediate family that curse had been unleashed with terrible effect over many of the precedingyears. One wife had committed suicide; of his three children, one attempted suicide and later died in a POW camp as a result of a second suicide attempt, one, with three marriages already behind him, was well on the way 1 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend (London: Penguin Books, London 1968), p.17

© Giles Udy 2008 - [email protected] Please do not copy or redistribute this document.

to death from alcohol poisoning, and the third had seen two marriages fail, her teenage sweetheart consigned to the gulag for ten years after being accused of spying forthe British, and the father of her first husband suffer asimilar fate, this time as a Zionist conspirator. Of Stalin’s six brothers- and sisters-in-law, four, with their spouses, had either been imprisoned or shot; one other had been driven insane by the horror and bloodshed he had witnessed in the civil war (possibly by atrocitiesin which Stalin personally took a hand)2.

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Stalin had known both families of in-laws, the Alliluyevs and the Svanidzes, before the Revolution. Evenafter the deaths of his wives Nadya Alliluyev and Kato (as Yekaterina Svanidze was known), their siblings and spouses remained part of his immediate circle, being frequent visitors to the Stalin dacha, neighbours in Moscow, and regular company for picnics and parties. One became his mistress for a while. The tragedy of their fall from grace was thus all the more incomprehensible tothem and, in at least one case, a significant factor which pushed them over the edge into insanity.

Stalin married for the first time in 1904. His firstwife, Yekaterina Svanidze, was a devout believer who persuaded the young revolutionary to abandon his atheist principles and agree to a church wedding. Their only son Yakov (‘Yasha’) was given a biblical name. He was only two months old when his mother died of typhoid. His father gone, Yasha was raised by his maternal uncle Alexander (‘Alyosha’) and his wife Maria. All three woulddie tragically and prematurely.

Yasha remained in the care of his Georgian relativesin Tiflis until the 1920s, when Alyosha and Maria broughthim to Moscow to complete his education. There he fell inlove with fellow student and secretly married her. Stalinwas furious, not least by the discovery that his son’s new wife, Zoya, was the daughter of a priest, someone whowould have been despised by every good Communist. Alreadymaking no effort to disguise his contempt for Yasha, Stalin forced him to leave her. When their baby daughter 2 See Family Trees at end of the chapter


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died in 1929 the heartbreak became too much. Yasha tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. Stalin’s only response was to mock him for not even being able to shoot straight.

In the mid-thirties, Yasha entered military academy.He married for a second time in 1938. His second wife wasa Jewish Ukrainian, Yulia Meltser, herself no stranger totragedy – her previous husband had been an NKVD officer who had vanished in the purges. Yasha graduated in May 1941, just six weeks before the outbreak of war with Germany and he was captured by the Germans a month into the war. Stalin had declared it to be a crime for a Soviet soldier to be taken alive; during war he refused to acknowledge Russian POWs in German hands, depriving them of access to the basic provision of Red Cross food parcels and thereby condemning tens of thousands to deathfrom starvation. Many of those who survived the war were repatriated directly to gulag camps to serve out sentences for their ‘crime’ of surrender.

Stalin was offered an opportunity to exchange Yasha for a high-ranking German general. He refused, reportedlysaying, ‘I have no son Yakov’. Instead he imprisoned Yulia and her mother for inciting Yakov to be deliberately captured in order to blacken the family name. Their daughter, his first grandchild, was sent to astate orphanage for children of ‘enemies of the people’, where she would have stayed if Stalin’s daughter Svetlanahad not personally intervened to persuade her father to let relatives take care of her instead. Yulia remained inprison a further two years.

Yakov’s incarceration was also only to last two years. The full details only became known after the war when Stalin received the report of the interrogation of the SS officer in command of Yakov’s prisoner of war camp:

Late in 1943 the prisoners were taking their exercise - Djugashvili [Yakov’s Georgian surname3] wouldn't go with them, andasked to see the commandant of the camp... An SS man went to the phone to call the commandant. While he was telephoning the

3 ‘Stalin’ (‘Man of steel’) was a revolutionary pseudonym, a common feature among the early Bolsheviks. His real name was Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Djugashvili.


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following happened: Djugashvili was walking around, and absent-mindedly crossed the no-go area and went toward the (electrified)fence. The sentry shouted ‘halt!’ Djugashvili kept straight on. The sentry shouted ‘I'll Shoot!’ and the sentry fired at his headand killed him.... As the shot was fired Djugashvili simultaneously seized the high-tension wire and immediately collapsed on to the first two rows of barbed wire. He hung in that position for 24 hours, after which his body was taken away to the crematorium.4

Although it happened in a German camp, and it was years before the story was confirmed, the parallels wouldnot have been lost to the millions of ‘zeks’ (the colloquial name for Russian prisoners) Yasha’s father hadcondemned to the gulag. Inside each perimeter fence, marked off by a low wire, lay the ‘forbidden zone’. One step inside this would draw immediate fire from guards inthe watchtowers. For those who could bear their sufferingno longer, it was way out of their misery. For others, anaccidental step too far could be fatal. It was no different for Yasha. It was a tragic irony that Stalin's son would perish in the same way as many of victims.

Yakov’s wife and daughter, Gulia, survived both the war and the Stalin era. Gulia married a Palestinian Communist in 1969. Their only child was born severely handicapped, mentally retarded and deaf.

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Ten years after his first wife Kato’s death, Stalin's second marriage began in a manner more in keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the times. He was travelling on an armoured train in the company of two children of his old revolutionary comrade and fellow Georgian, SergeiAlliluyev. Fyodor Alliluyev was 20; his young sister Nadezhda (‘Nadya’) was just 17. Stalin was 39, and had known her since she was a child. There is an apocryphal story that he once saved her from drowning as a baby. It is probably untrue but the families had been friends for many years, first meeting in 1904.

The brutal military expedition on which Stalin, Nadya, his new young secretary, and her brother were

4 Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin (New York: Doubleday, 1996) p.478


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embarked was intended to reassert Bolshevik control over a rebellious countryside. It was in the midst of this bloodshed that romance flourished. There was no ceremony.Stalin returned to Moscow with Nadya as his wife.

For Fyodor Alliluyev, Nadya’s brother, the outcome was far less happy: something happened to him around thistime which so disturbed him that he remained mentally unbalanced for the rest of his life. Family legend has itthat he lost his mind after becoming the victim of a something that was either a macabre practical joke or a test of loyalty. A revolutionary leader posing as a Whitepartisan ‘captured’ him, took him over to a pile of dead bodies, and placed the bloody heart which had been gougedout of one of the corpses into his hands, and told him torenounce Bolshevism or die the same way. The true nature of the prank was only revealed to him after he had been prepared for a mock execution. By that time his sanity had gone. Whether this was what really happened, or he was unhinged by the horror of the carnage that his futurebrother-in-law caused during that trip, will never be known. Ironically, insanity probably saved him; every other member of his generation of the family suffered either imprisonment or violent death.

Over the course of 14 years Nadya's relationship with Stalin gradually deteriorated. It became common knowledge in the family. In 1926 she left Stalin and tookthe children to live with her father in Leningrad but Stalin eventually persuaded her to return to him in Moscow. Encouraged by Bukharin, she went back to study. By the autumn of 1932, she was studying chemical engineering at the Industrial Academy. Some of her fellowstudents were from the Ukraine and they had told her of the mass starvation which had arisen from the enforced collectivisation taking place there. Horrified, she confronted her husband about what she has heard. Her fellow-students were rounded up and vanished.

November 8th 1932 was the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution and Stalin and Nadya went to a banquet hosted by Kliment Voroshilov, the former metal worker whowas later to become one of the most incompetent Marshals of the Soviet Union. That and the fact that Nadya was dead the following morning are the only facts beyond


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dispute. There are many versions of what happened in the hours between the two. The most commonly reported one is that Stalin humiliated Nadya, either by something he said, by throwing bread at her, or flirting with another woman at the party. She walked out in disgust. She then had a lengthy conversation with the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov (later Soviet Foreign Minister) after which she went home and shot herself with a small pistol which her brother Pavel had brought back for her from a recent tripto Germany.

Other versions of the story suggest that Stalin killed her himself; also that she left a letter deeply critical of him which he destroyed; that he was away fromhome that evening with another woman and that this pushedher to suicide; that he actually was with her but a subsequent story was deliberately circulated prove that he was elsewhere, and so on. One interesting, if less salacious, theory (which has some documentary support 5) is that she was due to have abdominal surgery for possible cancer and that her fear over the outcome of this fatally contributed to her depression .

The official story was that she died suddenly of acute appendicitis. The real story was hushed up and those who might to been able to report on what really happened were removed, one at least disappearing into thecamps6. Although it was strongly rumoured at the time among the Moscow foreign press corps, Svetlana or did notdiscover the truth of her mother's suicide until she readabout it in a copy of the Illustrated London News during the war almost ten years later.

There is no doubt that Stalin took the death of his second wife badly, although it is not certain that this was because he loved her or because he was humiliated that she had done this to him. Another family story is that she left him a long letter that was both politicallyand personally deeply critical and that he was furious asa result of this.

There had to be scapegoats. Bukharin had first encouraged her to study at the Industrial Academy where she had been exposed to people and ideas which had

5 Radzinsky, p.2926 Radzinsky, p.291ff


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disillusioned her about her husband’s political leadership. Pavel Svanidze had brought back the pistol asa present from Germany. In Ukraine, there was no let-up in the punitive grain requisitions and millions died fromstarvation. Perhaps many who perished that year were alsothe unwitting victims of a dictator’s wounded pride.

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Nadya's two children, Vasili and Svetlana were born in 1921 and 1926. Drink finally destroyed Vasili at the age of 41, but not before he had been the cause of suffering and misery to many of those who were unfortunate enough to come in contact with him. The first of his three marriages (a fourth was bigamous, conducted a few months before he died) was to Galina Bourdonskaya. They had two children, Sasha in 1941 and Nadezhda in 1943, but within a couple of years, after a new affair, Vasili threw Galina out and cut off all contact between her and the children. Only the family nanny, taking pity on both mother and children, enabled them to keep in touch by arranging clandestine meetings when Vasili was away.

Vasili’s second marriage in 1946 to the daughter of war hero and Red Army Marshal Timoshenko made the situation still worse for the children. According to Svetlana ‘their stepmother loathed them, they were neglected and hungry, and kept locked in an attic room’. The abuse so damaged little Nadezhda that it she sufferedfrom emotional problems for the rest of her life. Vasili’s marriage to Katya Timoshenko also lasted only a few years. The children of the second marriage not fare well either. Svetlana (born 1947) died an alcoholic at 43, and her brother (also called Vasili, born 1949) was only 23 when he died of a heroin overdose.

Vasili took full advantage of his position as Stalin’s son. He surrounded himself with a set of fast-livers; an unashamed womaniser, he thought nothing of attempting to seduce women in the presence of their husbands and he rapidly embarked upon the drinking habit which was to destroy him. He began the war as a 20 year-old captain and ended it four years later with the rank of general. By then his drinking was causing serious


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problems: an aerial display which he insisted should proceed in adverse weather conditions ended in tragedy and when one of the aircraft crashed; his father dismissed him. Throughout his career, Vasili thought nothing of having those who crossed him arrested and there were plenty of witnesses to give evidence against him when Stalin's death removed the protection he had enjoyed for so long. Within two months of his father’s death Vasili had been arrested and he spent most of the remaining nine years of his life in prison or military hospital.

According to the family, his fourth and final marriage, contracted two months before he died, was bigamous, engineered by the KGB by whom his ‘nurse’ was employed. The woman, Masha, took the place of honour as his bereaved widow at the graveside and did what she could to keep his real wife and children away. With KGB protection, their challenge to her position was futile. She took his few remaining possessions, two children by another relationship which she now passed off as Stalin'sgrandchildren, and went to Georgia where she basked in the reflected glory of her late ‘father in law’.

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Svetlana, Stalin's third child and his only daughter (born 1926) is more well-known in the West, as a result of her memoirs Twenty Letters to a Friend which created a considerable stir when they were published in the West in1967. She was deeply affected by her discovery that her mother had committed suicide but worse was to come the year after she discovered about it.

Though only sixteen, Svetlana fell for a forty year old film director and playboy, Alexei Kepler, who was part of her brother Vasili’s set. The NKVD kept her father fully informed of the affair, of course, and Stalin cannot have failed to have noted the parallel between his own seduction of Svetlana's mother, when she was 17 and he was 39. The NKVD warned Kepler off in the clearest terms but, emboldened by his friendship with Vasili, he foolishly chose to ignore the warning. The inevitable followed. He was arrested in March 1943, spent


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five years in the harsh Arctic mining camps of Vorkuta, returned to Moscow on his release, only to be re-arrestedduring the 1948 purge when many former prisoners were rounded up and given new sentences. He spent a further five years in the gulag. Stalin told Svetlana he was a British spy.

A year later, in 1944, she married Grigori Morosov. That marriage lasted only three years and they separated in 1947. Morosov’s father was swept up in the 1948 purge,too. The enemy he was supposed to have spied for now Jewish: ‘That first husband of yours was thrown your way by the Zionists’, her father later told her. Perhaps thistime Stalin genuinely believed it. Over the next few years, arrests of Zionist conspirators mounted. When Stalin died in March 1953 it is now known that he was just about to launch a major new purge against the Jews.

In 1949, Svetlana tried to find happiness again. This time she married Yuri Zhdanov, the son of Stalin's vicious long-time associate Andrei Zhdanov who had died the year before. The move into the family home of her newhusband, especially her relationship with her new mother-in-law, did not go well. Her late father-in-law had been a particularly unpleasant man, responsible for many thousands of deaths in the purges of the Thirties and Forties, who had only recently spearheaded a purge of theartistic community. It is unlikely that his widow was a very sympathetic character either. That marriage lasted just three years.

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Nadya’s parents Sergei and Olga Alliluyev had three otherchildren: Pavel, Anna, and Fyodor. Sergei’s revolutionaryactivities merited a short paragraph in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia but no mention is made of the fate of his daughter or the rest of his children. Living quietly in the Kremlin, the old couple must have had many opportunities to regret the path that their early revolutionary life had taken them. By the mid-thirties they had already lost one daughter to suicide and a son, Fyodor, to insanity. The purges would take their


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remaining daughter and daughter-in-law and leave their grandchildren fatherless.

Pavel Alliluyev, their oldest child, got into trouble early in his life when he was expelled from school. By 1913, still in his teens, he was arrested for leading strikes in Tiflis. His political and military career flourished in the civil war. As military commissarwith the rank of general in the tank forces he played a part in the savage suppression of the Basmachi Revolt.7 After the war he ended up in Novgorod where he was elected secretary of the Bolshevik Party Committee. It was here that he met his wife Evgenia (‘Zhenya’), a talented her actress whose striking appearance would not later go unnoticed by Stalin. Through his family connections, Pavel also came to the attention of Lenin who appointed to accompany the famous polar explorer and geologist Nikolai Urvantsev on his Far Northern Expedition. The expedition, between 1919 and 1922 was responsible for the discovery of the mineral deposits at Mount Rudnaia in the Taimyr region in northern Siberia. This would subsequently become the site of the Norilsk gulag mining combine.8 Zhenya accompanied him on the trip.In primitive living conditions not very different from those of the nomad tribes of the northern tundra, she gave birth there to twins, both of whom died there. Theirbodies would later be followed into the permafrost by tens of thousands of prisoners who perished in the Arcticmines that were developed as a result of their discoveries.

Pavel and Zhenya travelled widely in the service of the Communist Party. In the late 1920s, after the Siberian trip, Stalin sent them to Germany - ostensibly as diplomats and but in practice to conduct secret negotiations with the newly emerging Adolf Hitler. Their contacts with the Nazi party would later be turned against them, and used to accuse them of spying against

7 The Basmachi Revolt lasted for almost 10 years (until 1926) and took place over a large area of what is now modern Turkistan. Soviet historians portrayed as an uprising of thugs and bandits. In fact it was a popular revolt against Bolshevik repression. 8 Urvantsev, discover of the Norilsk geological complex would later, as the purges claimed him too, be imprisoned there.


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the Soviet Union.9 And it was in Germany that Pavel boughtthat fateful pistol as a present for his sister Nadya.

Anna Alliluyeva, Nadya's only sister, married Stanislav Redens, a man who was destined for a high-flying career with the NKVD. In 1922, two years after their marriage, Redens was appointed as secretary to Dzerzhinsky, a fellow Pole, the head of the Cheka (the earliest incarnation of the NKVD).

By 1937, Redens had become Head of the NKVD Administration in Moscow. As one of only six first grade Commissars of State Security, only one rank below NKVD boss Yagoda, Redens was one of the most powerful NKVD menin the Soviet Union and a zealous participant in the Great Terror of 1937-38. Redens’s fate, more of which is described later, was to follow those who he had killed.

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The first of Stalin's immediate family circle to fall were his brother- and sister-in-law through his first wife Kato, Alexander (‘Alyosha’) and Maria Svanidze, the ones had brought their nephew, Stalin's son, Yasha, to Moscow in the early 1920s. A great friend of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (in the end, not a healthy connection10) Alyosha had been appointed as Vice-Commissar of the USSR State Bank in 1934. Like the Alliluyevs, with whom they were good friends, the Svanidzes were a regular part of Stalin's intimate circle.

Maria Svanidze kept a diary which has survived in Stalin's personal archive. Although certain pages have been torn out, it provides a great deal of insight into the life and events of Stalin's family circle. Maria, it reveals, was sufficiently enamoured of Stalin for it to

9 Stalin made a habit of eliminating those who knew anything about him which might compromise him at a later date. He would have feared that knowledge of these negotiations, so early, would have been used against him by future opponents. 10 Sergo Ordzhonikidze (1886-1937) was a former revolutionary comrade of Stalin’s who, while Commissar of Heavy Industry, defended one of his subordinates who had been set up in one of the Show Trials. He was reported to have died suddenly of a heart attack. Khrushchev later alleged he committed suicide; others have suggested he was murdered on Stalin’s orders.


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be a point of friction between her and Alyosha. In the end she lost out to Zhenya Alliluyeva, Nadya's married sister-in-law, whose clandestine intimacy with Stalin, once noticed, merited a comment in the diary in 1934. Theaffair between Stalin and Zhenya probably predates Nadya's suicide, although the date of its consummation can only be a matter of speculation.

In addition to one brother, Kato Svanidze had two sisters: Maria (‘Mariko’) had been Avel Yenukidse’s secretary for 10 years. For Maria, this was to prove to be a dangerous association. As well as employing Stalin'ssister-in-law by his first marriage, fellow-Georgian Yenukidze was godfather to Stalin's second wife, Nadya Alliluyeva. Yenukidze opposed the Zinoviev/Kamenev treason trial and had become a sympathetic conduit for those seeking to obtain release for arrested loved ones. Although a Bolshevik of long-standing who had known Stalin since the early days, this meant that he had become a marked man. As the Thirties progressed Stalin took great pains to remove any one who had known him in the days before he became leader.11 Expelled from the party, Yenukidze was finally arrested in 1936. Bukharin alleged that Yenukidze had been the first to see Nadya's body after her death, having been called by her nurse, that what he had seen had given rise to the suspicion that Stalin had murdered her and that this was why he wassilenced. Officially, he was found guilty of treason and espionage and was shot in 1937.

In typical fashion, the fall of one man presaged thefall of all those he had been associated with. Mariko Svanidze’s status as Stalin’s sister-in-law was not sufficient to protect her. She was arrested and spent thenext five years in the camps. She was shot in 1942.

Alyosha Svanidze (Kato’s brother) and his wife Mariawere taken at about the same time. Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev and their daughter Kyra were there at the time and Kyra later wrote about the arrest:

11 Some, such as Roman Brackman, (The Secret File of Joseph Stalin – A Hidden Life, Routledge: London 2003), maintain that this was because he had also worked as an informer for the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, in the years before the Revolution and that he was trying to bury the story by killing those who knew about it.


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In 1937 we moved into another apartment... We had a house-warming party. Alyosha Svanidze and his wife Maria Anisimova came. Our entrances were next to each other. After a house-warming she put on an overcoat over her velvet dress and they went home. Two or three hours laterand their son Tolik (Maria’s son by an earlier marriage) ran in, white in the face, and said ‘Eugenia Alexandrovna, did you know Mama has been arrested? They came and took Mama and Papa’... The search went on till morning …. they sealed the apartment, there was no one there, they are taken them all to prison. We were shattered, Papa was stunned. 12

Alyosha spent three years in prison before being sentenced to death in December 1940. This sentence was reduced to 15 years hard labour in January 1941 but he was not destined to survive long. He was shot in Ukhta camp on 20 August 20, 1941, a few weeks after their foster son Yasha Stalin's capture by the Germans, and theimprisonment of Yasha’s wife, mother-in-law (and baby) for encouraging him in a deliberate plot to disgrace Stalin.13 Stalin’s vengeance was deadly.

By 1942, Maria Svanidze had survived five years’ imprisonment in Dolinskoye in Kazakhstan. The Kazakhstan camps were harsh enough before war shortages began to reduce food supplies dramatically. Estimates of the 1941 gulag mortality rates suggest that in some camps at that time 20-25% of the inmates were dying each year. Maria managed to smuggle a note out to Zhenya. Close to death from starvation, she begged Zhenya (who she knew had beenStalin’s lover) to intercede for her with him. By then, Stalin had possession of Maria's diary and would have known that Maria knew of his relationship with Zhenya. Zhenya waited to catch Stalin in a good mood. Perhaps there would have been no good time. He angrily cut her

12 Radzinsky, p.42113 On Stalin’s orders, NKVD Commissar Merkulov’s offered to spare Alyosha that if he would confess to being a German intelligence agent. When he refused and was executed, Stalin's reaction was: ‘Well, what a proud man Alyosha turned out to be! I didn't expect it.’ Martin Gilbert, History of the Twentieth Century, 3 vols (London: HarperCollins, 1998) Vol. 2 (1933-1951)


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short and told her never to mention it again. Soon after that, Maria Svanidze was shot.

Tolik, Maria’s son from her first marriage, was killed in the war. Alyosha and Maria’s own son, ‘Dzhonnik’14 was just 10 years old when he witnessed his parents' arrest. Yakov, Stalin’s son, wanted to take him in but his wife Yulia, fearing the consequences of such an act of generosity (her first husband had been shot andshe was well aware of the very real danger of showing sympathy with children of ‘enemies of the people’) beggedhim not to do so. So Dzhonnik was consigned to a state orphanage, and did not return to Moscow until 1956. He remained psychologically damaged for the rest of his life.

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As Moscow NKVD chief, Stanislav Redens, husband of Anna Alliluyeva, would have been well aware of the plight of the Svanidzes at the time of their arrest in 1937. Most probably, Stalin had decided their fate, and he would have been powerless to intervene. On this he might be excused. Of his complicity in the Purges, now at their height, he cannot.

In the period 1937-38, as mentioned elsewhere in this book, the official number of executions in the Soviet Union exceeded 680,000. During this time Redens had overall authority for NKVD operations in Moscow. After his own arrest, in an interview with Yezhov, head of the NKVD from 1937, Redens acknowledged that over 50,000 arrests had taken place under his authority.

The volume of arrests was so great that it was not possible to try it every case individually. The ‘album procedure’ was adopted; people were convicted on the basis of a cursory examination of a few documents, and the those to be executed were entered on lists which weresigned off ‘en bloc’ by Stalin or Yezhov, the head of theNKVD. Since August 1937 torture had become routine in 14 ‘Dzhonnik’ was the diminutive of ‘Dzhonrid’ after John Reed, the American Communist sympathiser and journalist who had witnessed and written about the 1917 revolution in Seven Days that Shook the World. Reed is the only foreigner whose remains have been interred in the KremlinWall.


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extracting confessions and this also helped to speed up the process. Prisoners could be unaware that they had been tried in absentia until they arrived at the execution grounds. During his interrogation Redens reported ‘in only a few hours, using the album procedure,we succeeded in convicting 500-600 people, sometimes as many as 1000 at a time. In 95 per cent of the cases the sentence was death.’ on completing a batch of sentences the documents were passed to Yezhov who, ‘as a rule usually only glanced at the last page and would laughingly ask his secretary if the quota of Poles to be executed had been met.’

Throughout the purges it became Stalin's practice touse one generation of the NKVD to liquidate the previous generation of the NKVD, to rely upon them to continue thepurge and then after a while to liquidate them in turn. Around 3000 NKVD officers were purged in 1937. The purgesaffected all ranks. Yagoda, head of the NKVD, fell in late 193615, and was replaced by Yezhov, who was supplanted by Beria within two years. Yezhov’s purge was not immediate - he employed some of Yagoda’s old men, Redens included, for up to a year before disposing of them. Throughout 1937, Redens remained diligent in the pursuit of mass executions for his brother-in-law.

In July 1937, Pravda announced the award of the Order of Lenin ‘to a number of comrades whose names the whole country knows well’. Both Yezhov and Redens were honoured for their diligence in the mass repression. In October 1937 Redens and received still further honours, being elected to the new USSR Supreme Soviet but by then Yezhov had already decided to dispose of him. He kept silent while Redens remained useful.

In January 1938 a new Deputy People's Commissar arrived from Leningrad. He announced to a meeting of leading NKVD officials, including Redens, that he had been appointed as Head of the Moscow NKVD, Redens’ own position. Redens knew nothing of his dismissal until thatmoment. He and his fellow NKVD officials were then harangued before their colleagues for failing to arrest enough people. Given the thousands of lives he had

15 His sister Taissa was seen in the Norilsk camps in the early 1940s.Her fate is unknown.


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destroyed, this is perhaps the one charge that was unfair. In an obvious and ominous demotion, he was transferred to Kazakhstan where he became the new NKVD head (and continued diligently arresting people). He was left there to sweat. Aware that Yagoda had been treated exactly the same a year earlier, Redens would have been in no doubt as to his eventual fate. The summons to return to Moscow came six months later.

After his arrest, his wife Anna pleaded with both Stalin and Beria (who the family still accuse of conducting a personal vendetta against them) for his release. As Robert Conquest writes:

Beria told her that Redens was an enemy of the people and would receive no mercy, but that since their marriage had never been registered, she had better forget him. She appealed to Stalin buthe merely told her that the NKVD would make the right decision.16

This was interesting line to take, given that Stalin’s ‘marriage’ to Anna’s sister-in-law Nadya had taken place without any ceremony. Anna was taken to see Redens in Lefortovo prison in order to persuade him to confess (to spying and plotting to kill Stalin). ‘Trust no one!’ he whispered to her. He would have known more than most how true that warning was. She was bundled out of the cell. Redens was shot some time towards the end of1938.

Redens’ execution was not the only tragedy for the Alliluyev family in late 1938. In November 43 year-old Pavel, Nadya's older brother, died suddenly. He had returned from holiday to discover that his department hadbeen purged in his absence. Most of his colleagues had been arrested. At 11 o'clock in the morning he collapsed;by the time he was admitted to hospital he was unconscious. He died 20 minutes later. Zhenya was kept from his bedside until he had died, probably lest he should regain consciousness and tell her what had happened to him. Although it was announced that he had had a heart attack, it is more probable that he had been

16 Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin's Secret Police (Stanford: Hoover Institution, 1985), p.80


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poisoned. He left a 19 year-old daughter and 10 and 7 year old sons.

Frightened of what the future held for her after thesudden deaths of both her husband and brother-in-law within the space of a few weeks, Zhenya remarried shortlyafterwards. Her next husband, Nikolai Vladimirovich, had lost his wife to the Purges and was caring for his two children single-handed. Remarriage did not protect her but it may have postponed her fate. It was a further nineyears before the secret police came for her.

*

With the victorious end of the Great Patriotic War, Stalin was able to turn his attention once again to the suppression of counter-revolution and a second terror began in 1947. Once again, being a relative of Stalin provided no immunity, and the final act in the tragedy inthe Alliluyev family began.

Even being Stalin’s former lover was not enough to save Zhenya from arrest. Perhaps it was his sense of vulnerability regarding her knowledge of him and that drove him to act. The family story is that Beria, out to destroy the remnants of the Alliluyevs, began to circulate the rumour that she had poisoned her husband. If the story (about Beria’s rumour-mongering) is true, itwould appear to confirm that Pavel had been poisoned: it was not uncommon for the NKVD to accuse someone else of carrying out the murder that they had committed; and theydid sometimes eliminate high profile victims with poison.On 10 December 1947 she was arrested and accused not onlyof poisoning her husband but of making contact with foreigners and indulging in espionage. Fearful of torture, she confessed to every fictitious charge. She was sentenced to 10 years in solitary confinement. Her second husband Nikolai followed her into prison and finally her 28 year-old daughter Kyra was arrested too. Kyra was comparatively lucky – she spent only six months in Lubyanka and was sentenced to five years in exile.

Anna Alliluyeva, Stanislav Redens’s widow, then did a very unwise thing: she tried to publish her memoirs. Pathologically suspicious, Stalin saw she needed to be


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silenced. ‘They know a lot’, he told Svetlana, ‘they havebeen talking too much: and this is helpful to our enemies’.17 Vladimir Redens had only been three years old when the NKVD came for his father. He was 13 when they arrested his mother. By then his older brother Leonid was20.

Her father, old Sergei Alliluyev, died of natural causes in 1945. He did not have to witness, as did his wife Olga, the final tragedy of his daughter’s and daughter in-law’s arrest. Olga Alliluyeva survived until 1951 but never saw them again. When Stalin died in March 1953, the gates of the camps were opened and those whom the gulag had not destroyed began to make their way home.Many survivors were physically or mentally broken.

Zhenya was 49 when she went to prison and came back six years later at the age of 55, a changed person. She came home in the summer of 1954 and her first words, according to the family were ‘I knew it! I knew Stalin would release me!’ On discovering that Stalin was dead, she wept. She had been in solitary confinement for so long that she found it hard to talk. Often in prison, sherecalled, she could not sleep for the screams of those who were being interrogated. In despair she had tried to commit suicide by swallowing glass. Like many failed suicide attempts, it was to damage her health for the rest of her life. Even after Stalin’s denunciation by Khrushchev in 1956, she always kept a picture of him.

The years in solitary confinement had left an even deeper mark upon Anna Redens. According to Svetlana

Aunt Anna was very sick when she emerged, she didn't even recognise her children, or anyone else…She was sitting in her oldroom, unable to recognise her two grown-up sons, indifferent to everyone. Her eyes were cloudy and she was staring out of the window, unmoved. 18

Her daughter wrote:

…she had hallucinations, heard voices talking to her, and talked to herself a lot. She did not wash her clothes, it was all same for her, wearing the same dress all the time. 19

17 Rosamund Richardson, The Long Shadow (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 23118 Richardson, p. 23219 Richardson, p. 232


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According to her son Vladimir (‘Volodya’):

My mother looked terrible, she kept looking for me, because when she was arrested I was still a boy of 12. Now I was the tallest of them, and aged 20. She did not recognise me. ‘Where is Volodya?’ she kept asking.20

She remained deeply disturbed. According to Anna Larina, Bukharin's widow, it was common knowledge in Moscow that she had emerged from prison half mad21. When she finally died in 1964, her end was equally tragic:

After six years in prison she was afraid of locked doors. She hadended up in hospital, very disturbed, talking all the time. One night a stupid nurse decided that she should not walk in the corridor, so she locked her into her room, even though was known that she couldn't stand locked doors. In the morning they found her dead.22

For Kyra, Pavel and Zhenya’s daughter, Stalin's death also brought release, though in Kyra’s case it was return from exile rather than prison. It still was not easy for her either. When she was arrested her husband's parents had forced him to divorce her. On her return her old employer refused to give her back her job. She, too, could not escape from the emotional ambiguity of her tragedy: she cried when she learned that Stalin had died.

To have been intimate with Stalin for so many years and complicit in the violence of the revolutionary era, before some of them were murdered and others imprisoned, has not helped the family to come the terms with their tragedy. The few members of Stalin's generation who survived are now dead. Their children are now old too.

There is a story which Anna and Stanislav Redens’s son Volodya tells23 about his father. Volodya believes it 20 Richardson, p. 23221 Anna Larina, This I Cannot Forget (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), p.29922 As told to Richardson by Svetlana Alliluyeva (Richardson, p.234)23 Richardson, p.102. Svetlana Alliluyeva’s memories of Redens also make interesting reading: ‘Redens was a charming person if we can forget that he was, after all, a close associate of Dzerzhinsky working in the secret police. What his work was we never really knew;


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illustrated how his father was a man of integrity and high moral principle, rather than the ruthless killer many others would conclude that from the story he tells.

It happened during the time that Redens was the Cheka (later NKVD) boss in the Crimea. Rumour reached Redens that some sailors who were carrying out requisitioning of valuables (from whom? one might ask) were pocketing some of the proceeds. He had a number of gold pieces hidden in a house that was about to be searched and then sent the sailors have to do requisitioning. When they handed their booty in two gold coins were missing. Questioned, they admitted the theft. Redens had them both shot. To Volodya, it illustrated nothis father’s cruelty but his integrity – ‘My father said that Chekists could not be this sort of man. Because of this, the authority of the Cheka in the Crimea rose a good deal’.

Two of Volodya’s aunts were imprisoned, an experience which broke one completely and from which the other never fully recovered; one uncle was poisoned; his father was shot; another aunt killed herself and the remaining uncle went mad. He, his brother, and three cousins were orphaned. And yet, of the man who caused of all their misery, he says

I have read a lot of contemporary books and they disagree completely with the way he (Stalin) is described. He was a man dedicated fully to his cause. He never wanted anything for himself - he left no possessions after his death. He gave his life to Russia, to the Soviet Union... Stalin was a great man whohad both a good side and a bad side, like everyone. What he did in our country was huge, his merits are enormous and he is not guilty of everything that happened in the country.24

So Volodya remains an unrepentant admirer of the man who destroyed his family.

*

although he is known for being one of the victims of the Purges, how many people were his victims we shall never know.... As a person he was very pleasant, attractive looking, a handsome man who loved his wife and children and was loved by everybody around: a pleasant imageremains in the memory.’.24 Richardson, p.274


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At the time of writing25, Svetlana is still alive. Following her unhappy marriage to Yuri Zhdanov she had anaffair with an Indian communist but they were forbidden to marry. When her lover died in 1966 she was allowed to travel to India with his ashes. Once in India, she defected to the West. Left behind in the Soviet Union, her 20 year old son Yosef and 17 year old daughter Katya knew nothing of their mother’s intentions until they heard it in the news. They took it very badly. Katya, whose own husband shot himself in his late thirties, refused even to meet her mother when she returned to the USSR for 18 months in 1984-86. Svetlana and Yosef did seeher again but not until after many years of estrangement.

In America, life still did not go well for her. Another marriage, to an architect, did not last. She lived variously in the United States and Britain; she even returned to the Soviet Union for a few years. Neither of the Cold War protagonists knew what to do withher. In the end she had no propaganda value to either andshe wandered from country to country. Her only roots werein suffering.

A few years ago, my own life, Stalin’s family and the story of Norilsk, the gulag centre that I had been researching and writing on, all briefly touched. I was preparing for another trip to Russia when the phone rang.I heard the familiar voice of a Norilsk friend – Could I find where Svetlana Alliluyeva was and pass on best wishes to her from a relative?

Yulia Meltser, the widow of Stalin’s son Yakov, had married again after his death and had a daughter. After the war, Svetlana sought Yulia out but Yulia wanted nothing to do with her. Now, fifty years later, it seemedYulia wanted to make amends. Remorse, perhaps? Yulia’s daughter was staying with relatives in Norilsk for a few months and hoped that I would be able to uncover Svetlana’s whereabouts, talk to her and help rebuild thatbroken relationship - one more consequence, albeit smaller than most, of the destruction Stalin had wrought upon those closest to him.

25 2008


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I spent some days as an amateur sleuth. I found the shabby former hostel in North London which had been Svetlana’s first home when she fled the Soviet Union. I exchanged emails with an old friend of hers, who knew herin the 1980s when, under the pseudonym of Lana Peters, she married for the third time and moved to Wisconsin. I was told of a biographer who had been in touch some months before and might be able to help. When the biographer’s contact details appeared to lead nowhere, further research revealed that she was most probably an investigative journalist trying to smoke Lana out. I began to feel uneasy about my own prying into Lana’s privacy.

Lana had told her friend that one day she hoped to return to the Swiss convent she stayed in briefly on her way out of the Soviet Union. One story is that she is there today; another is that she is living in an old peoples’ home in the west of England…. and another that she is back in Wisconsin. One thread that these stories have in common is that she lives alone and sees no one.

An administrative mix-up meant that I didn’t get my visa in time to make the trip to Norilsk. I lost my flights and had to cancel the trip. Yulia Meltser’s daughter was only going to be there for a few more weeks and I was not going to make it for another 8 months. I stopped looking. Svetlana deserved her privacy. I could do nothing to help her live with her past but I could at least help protect the privacy of her last days and leaveher alone. That was something.

(See next page for Stalin’s Family Tree)© Giles Udy 2008


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STALIN’S FAMILY

The following diagram shows the relationships and fate of those connected with Stalin through his two wives, Kato Svanidze (d 1908) and Nadya Alliluyeva (d 1932)


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A Cursed Family - The Fate of Stalin's Circle

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Transcript of A Cursed Family - The Fate of Stalin's Circle