Why Stalin's daughter renounced her past

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It seemed that Sveta was incredibly lucky in life. She was born not just anywhere, but in the family of the "leader of all times and peoples" who ruled a huge country. Moreover, Svetochka was his favorite. He already spoiled her, and cared for, and cherished, like anyone else in his country.

Kremlin Penates

It is curious that the new workers 'and peasants' government, having overthrown the hated tsarist regime, adopted the way of life from him. The new party elite, in a noble manner, surrounded their children with nannies, servants and governesses. Svetlana Alliluyeva in her book "Twenty Letters to a Friend" wrote about her childhood: "They strove to educate children, hired good governesses and German women (" from the old days ")".

In this book, Svetlana complained about her difficult childhood. Perhaps such complaints aroused sympathy in someone, but most Soviet girls could only sigh enviously. Another thing is that the adolescent years of the princess were weighed down by a real drama, which you would not wish on an enemy either. Svetlana was only 6 years old when her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide.

On November 7, 1932, the country's party elite celebrated the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution at Voroshilov's apartment. According to Svetlana's recollections, there was a small incident at the banquet. Stalin said to his wife: "Hey, you, drink!" And she suddenly screamed: "I don’t hey!" - got up and left the table in front of everyone. Nadezhda went home, wrote a suicide note and shot herself. At first, Stalin was shocked and said that he himself did not want to live any longer. But, when he read the letter of his wife, full of numerous accusations, including political ones, he flew into a rage. Svetlana wrote that when her father came to the civil funeral, then, walking up to the coffin for a minute, suddenly pushed it away from himself with his hands and, turning, walked away. And he did not go to the funeral.

Apparently, not everything was going well in the Soviet kingdom, since the queen decided to leave this life, not even taking into account the children: after all, she had two of them - a son, Vasily and a daughter, Svetlana. And one gets the impression that the children without maternal care, to put it mildly, have become loose. The son turned into a reveler and a drunkard, and the daughter, according to her father, became too amorous. In the fall of 1942, Svetlana, then still a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, met at her brother Vasily's apartment with the forty-year-old screenwriter Alexei Kapler. A romance quickly began between them, which Stalin did not like very much. Kapler was declared an English spy and given 10 years in the camps, and his father tried to reason with his daughter with weighty slaps in the face.

Salvation is in love

In the fall of 1943, Svetlana entered Moscow University. And a year later, she jumped out to marry fellow student Grigory Moroz. However, the king did not want to see either his son-in-law or his relatives in his house. Therefore, he allocated them separate mansions in the government House on the embankment overlooking the Kremlin. For three years, Stalin never met his son-in-law. But on the other hand, he was regularly informed that the father of his daughter's husband, Joseph Moroz, everywhere introduces himself as an old Bolshevik and a professor and says that in a related way - like a matchmaker to his father-in-law - he visits Stalin in the Kremlin. In the end, Stalin got tired of reports about the matchmaker's chatter, and he gave the order to divorce his daughter, although she had already become a mother by that time, having given birth to a son.

Finally, Stalin himself found a suitable party for his daughter - almost a prince. In 1949, Svetlana married Yuri Zhdanov, the son of a famous party leader. But the dynastic marriage went wrong. In 1951, shortly after the birth of their daughter, Zhdanov and Alliluyeva divorced. And then he died and after death the king was defamed. The princess quietly yearned, turning into an ordinary civil servant. She brightened her melancholy with love stories. She had several other common-law husbands, including the famous sports commentator Vadim Sinyavsky. In the 60s, she met in Moscow with the Indian Brajesh Singh. In 1966, he died, and Svetlana asked to let her go to India in order to fulfill the last will of her civil husband - to take his ashes home. The decision was made at the very top. Permission to leave the USSR was given to her by a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU A. N. Kosygin.

But the incredible happened in India: the princess, spitting on the two small children left at home - a son and a daughter, went to the camp of the main strategic enemy of the USSR - the American embassy - and asked for political asylum. Even the Americans themselves were shocked by this act of the Soviet princess. And therefore, in order not to spoil relations with the USSR at all, they sent her not to the USA, but to Switzerland. In the USSR, a serious scandal unfolded. Because of the flight of Alliluyeva, the chairman of the KGB Semichastny lost his post. And the first test for the new head of the KGB, Andropov, was the task of neutralizing the blow to the image of the USSR in connection with the forthcoming publication in the West of a book of memories of a fugitive princess.

Creative outlet

A few months after Svetlana Alliluyeva's move to America, information appeared that foreign publishing houses were fighting for the right to publish her autobiographical book Twenty Letters to a Friend, and one of them had already paid her a record advance of $ 2.5 million. The KGB carried out a cunning operation and anticipated the release of the book by publishing excerpts from it in the German magazine Stern. And the book itself did not carry any mind-blowing revelations. Obviously, Svetlana simply did not know political secrets. As a result, the circulation was frozen, and its remnants were sold for next to nothing.

The third official marriage became especially costly for her. Although they lived with the American architect Peters for only two years, Svetlana managed to give birth to a daughter during this time and threw a lot of money into her husband's projects.

Svetlana loved men, but not very much her children. She sent her daughter from Peters to a Quaker boarding school, and she herself began to travel the world. But that too soon bored her. A middle-aged, not particularly beautiful, impractical and not of a great mind, the Soviet princess in the West felt lonely and in 1984 she returned to the USSR. But even here, by and large, no one needed her, even the children whom she abandoned almost 20 years ago. True, when she moved to Tbilisi, conditions were created for her there, befitting the status of a member of the royal family. But this did not please her anymore. In 1986, Alliluyeva returned to the United States.

A few years later, the Soviet princess found herself in the Richland almshouse in the modest American town of Spring Green. One day there she was visited by a reporter from London, David Jones. In an interview with him, Svetlana Alliluyeva said: “I fled from Russia. I have been an American citizen for 30 years, but they there, in Russia, cannot admit it in any way. They continue to consider me Russian. And I hate them! I hate Russian! We are not Russians, we are Georgians."

That's how they are, princesses. They themselves ruin their lives, but they hate their people.

What was Alliluyeva hiding?

In the book by Svetlana Alliluyeva "Twenty Letters to a Friend" there is one unusual episode.

Describing the fateful moment when Svetlana learns about the death of her father and comes to the dacha, where the leader's comrades-in-arms wander, stunned by the significance of what had happened, she notices a certain woman in the room, about whom she says: “I suddenly realized that I know this young woman doctor where did I see her? . After that, the author does not mention that woman anywhere else. Why?

This episode was clearly written for a reason. Considering that by the time the manuscript was published, Svetlana had moved abroad and was no longer afraid of anyone, it can be assumed that Alliluyeva noticed that there were strangers in the house who could "help" Stalin's death. After all, the aforementioned female doctor could not get into the house from the street - someone brought her. And the doctors and nurses serving the leader were subordinate to Lavrenty Beria. So this unfamiliar woman could also be Beria's man. It has been said for a long time that Stalin could have been poisoned. It was not for nothing that when the leader's son Vasily Stalin announced this publicly, he was immediately sent to prison. And Svetlana did not want the same fate - therefore, remembering this woman, she hinted to someone: I know everything, but I don’t want to remember.

And this mysterious "someone" left her alone forever.

Figures and facts

Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina was born on February 28, 1926.

• Graduated from the Faculty of History of Moscow State University and graduate school of the Academy of Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the CPSU.

• Husbands: Grigory Morozov, Yuri Zhdanov, William Peters.

• Children: son Joseph Alliluyev, daughters Ekaterina Zhdanova and Olga Evans (Peters).

• In 1966 she emigrated abroad.

• Died November 22, 2011 in the United States.