From Russia, twisted love / The tortured life of Stalin’s daughter |
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, would have been 100 years old today, and she is one of history’s curios worth remembering. Born when Stalin was already installed as Lenin’s successor, and dying in 2011, well into the rule of Vladimir Putin – whom she referred to as an ‘awful former KGB-SPY’ – Alliluyeva, who defected to the West in 1967, embodied all the violent ups and downs of her age. As her biographer Rosemary Sullivan put it, ‘The epoch drove right through her because she was Stalin’s daughter; all the pluses and minuses of this system went straight through her.’
‘Something in me was destroyed’, she wrote. ‘I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father and defer to his opinions without question’
‘Something in me was destroyed’, she wrote. ‘I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father and defer to his opinions without question’
It was a system that, for the first six years of her life, gave her an idyllic childhood. Svetlana grew up at ‘Zubalovo’ – a dacha complex near Moscow sheltered behind birches and a pine forest. There she lived surrounded by a warm extended family, not just the Georgian relatives of her mother Nadezhda, but those of Stalin’s first wife too, who died in 1907. Endless luminaries from the Politburo passed through – Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Anastas Mikoyan (who lived on the estate), and Nikolai Bukharin, who, in Svetlana’s words, ‘was loved by everyone.’
But after Nadezhda’s tragic suicide in 1932 – following a bitter public argument with Stalin – the abundant life of Zubalovo seemed to wither. Ordzhonikidze committed suicide in 1937, Bukharin was executed after a show trial the following year, and Stalin, living behind gates and barbed wire at his Kuntsevo dacha miles away, imprisoned most of Svetlana’s beloved older relatives or had them shot. These, she said, were ‘years of the steady annihilation of everything my mother had created, of the systematic elimination of her very spirit.’ Zubalovo, a ghost of itself, turned into a place of silence, paranoia and painful memories.
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