Stalin's Daughter (26 page)

Millions of Russians lined up to pass the corpse and pour out their grief. For many, this was not hypocritical. A young Oleg Kalugin, who would become a general in the KGB, remembered his adolescent hero worship of Stalin:

It is difficult for most people to imagine how a nation worshipped such a monster, but the truth is that most of us—those who had not felt the lash of his repression—did. We saw him as a man who led the country through the war, turned a backward nation into a superpower, built up our economy so that there was employment and housing and enough food for all. His propaganda machine was all-powerful…. I revered Stalin.
²⁹

Stalin, the Man of Steel who had ruled for a quarter of a century, was dead. Even those who hated him had to mask their relief at his death. It was not safe to express anything but enduring devotion to the leader. Who knew what regime would succeed him?

PART TWO
The
Soviet Reality

Chapter 11
The Ghosts Return

This 1932 photograph shows prisoners at work in a forced-labor camp, one of many run by the “Gulag”—the government agency that operated throughout the Soviet Union from 1930 to 1960.

A
fter Stalin’s death, people began to emerge from the Gulag. Like everyone, Svetlana was shocked at the numbers. “Many people have come back, thousands and thousands who managed somehow to survive…. The scale on which the dead have come back to life is difficult to imagine.”
¹

On March 27, 1953, the new collective leadership, which
had been appointed by the Central Committee the night Stalin lay dying, declared an amnesty for nonpolitical prisoners. According to the historian Stephen Cohen, “Nearly one million camp inmates, mainly criminals serving short terms,” were immediately released.
²
It was Lavrenty Beria who took the initiative to release prisoners. Ironically, the Gulag had become an enormous strain on the public purse, not to mention its increasing instability. The Gulag population of the 1930s had been relatively docile, but now the camps housed a huge number of formerly armed men, including Soviet and German POWs.

The initial amnesty was for actual criminals serving terms of five years or less, as well as for those about to be convicted and expected to serve terms of five years or less. Of course it was difficult to determine who was a criminal, to be released, and who was a political prisoner. The freeing of prisoners classified as “ ‘politicals’ unfolded slowly over the next three years, agonizingly for those still there.”
³

The amnesty was a highly risky move for the new government. Would innocent people wrongly imprisoned be thirsting for revenge? Nikita Khrushchev recalled, “We were scared. We were afraid that the thaw might unleash a flood, which we wouldn’t be able to control and which would drown us all.” Mikoyan warned that they must proceed slowly: if all the “enemies of the people” were declared innocent, it would be clear “that the country was not being run by a legal government, but by a group of gangsters.”
⁴

On April 4, one month less a day after Stalin’s death, the 6:00 a.m. news was interrupted by an official announcement from the USSR Ministry of the Interior. The doctors accused of being involved in the Doctors’ Plot were declared innocent.

The USSR Ministry of the Interior has carefully examined all materials of the investigation and related data concerning
a group of doctors accused of sabotage, espionage, and other subversive activities aimed at doing harm to certain Soviet leaders. It has been established that the arrests of the doctors allegedly involved in the plot [fifteen doctors were named] by the former Ministry of State Security, were illegal and completely unjustified.

It has been established that the accusations against the above persons are false and the documentary materials non-authentic. All evidence given by the accused, who allegedly pleaded guilty, was forced from them by the investigators of the former Ministry of State with methods strictly forbidden by Soviet law.
⁵

This was unprecedented. Not only were the doctors being exonerated, but it was also being officially acknowledged that the charges against them were trumped up and their confessions coerced.

On April 3, the day before the announcement, Dr. Rapoport had been taken from his cell and was invited to sign his own release papers. He waited in a cubicle as his confiscated belongings were itemized with bureaucratic slowness and returned to him. The same officers who had arrested him then chauffeured him home. It was three in the morning when he arrived at his apartment complex on Novopeshchanaya Street. Of that journey, Rapoport wrote:

It is difficult to describe what I felt during that ride across nocturnal Moscow, which for decades had been wreathed in blood-curdling legends, as I made my way back from the netherworld, a world full of horrible mysteries…. I was blissfully conscious of the fact that I was going—not being transported—home, that I could stop the car and get out.
⁶

In the apartment three floors up, Rapoport’s dog, Topsy, recognizing her master as soon as he entered the vestibule, started to bark. As he put it wryly, “My dog was the first to announce to the world the end of the Doctors’ Plot.”
⁷
When he entered his apartment and embraced his astonished wife, she asked him if he knew Stalin was dead. He had not been told. Only then did he understand why he had been released.

It took a long time for the Soviet Procuracy to process the release of Gulag prisoners. The millions of prisoners, including those who had died, had to be issued “certificates of rehabilitation,” and there were endless and often deliberate procedural delays. No officials wanted to admit that a prisoner had been arrested on fabricated evidence or that they themselves were involved in the fabrication.

According to Svetlana, Khrushchev helped search the jails for her aunts, each sentenced in 1948 to ten years in solitary confinement. It seemed nobody knew where they were being held. After the March amnesty, both Anna and Zhenya spent more than a year in prison before they were freed. Like other families, the Alliluyevs waited in anguish, with no guarantee that their relatives were still alive. Many people had been arrested “without right of correspondence”—a euphemism for execution.

Anna returned home in the spring of 1954. Her son Vladimir recalled that the family received a phone call telling them that their mother would be coming home. Her niece Kyra, who had already been released, went to pick her up. Dressed like a vagrant in the ragged clothing all prisoners wore, Anna looked decades older and seemed totally disoriented. When Kyra brought her to the flat where Svetlana and the family were waiting, Anna did not recognize her youngest son. The young man who stood to embrace her bore no resemblance to the boy of twelve she had left behind. When Anna asked about her
mother, she was told Olga had died in 1951, still stoical about the catastrophes that had devastated her family.

Svetlana’s memory of Anna’s homecoming remained raw. “Aunt Anna was very sick when she emerged, she didn’t even recognize her children, or anyone else. She was just sitting there, and her eyes were not her eyes. They were fogged, misted.”
⁸
Kyra recalled, “She had hallucinations, heard voices talking to her, and talked to herself a lot.”
⁹

Like many Gulag prisoners, Anna rarely spoke about her years in solitary confinement. Though she knew the people who had denounced her, including Zhenya and Kyra, she said she understood. “Stalin did arrest me according to your reports—but it was not your fault; it was mine.”
¹⁰
What she meant by these words is unclear. “My aunt, Anna Sergeyevna, was forgiving of Stalin,” Zhenya’s son Sergei remarked, but only up to a point. She let the past go “for the sake of [Stalin’s] children, Svetlana and Vasili, whom she loved so very much.”
¹¹
But actually Anna was not unusual. Tragically, many, even in the Gulag, continued to insist that Stalin knew nothing. It was evil advisers who were responsible.

Anna’s death ten years later was a tragedy. In 1964 she was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility. As Svetlana recounted bitterly:

After six years in prison she was afraid of locked doors. She had ended up in hospital, very disturbed, talking all the time. She would walk the corridors at night talking to herself. One night a stupid nurse decided that she should not walk in the corridor, so she locked her into her room, even though it was known that she couldn’t stand locked doors. In the morning they found her dead.
¹²

Zhenya Alliluyeva returned home in the summer of 1954. One day she showed up at the apartment in the House on the
Embankment, where, according to her astonished son Alexander, her first words were “I knew it! I knew Stalin would release me!” In Alexander’s memory, his brother Sergei responded dryly, “He did not release you, he died.”
¹³
Svetlana rushed over to comfort her aunt, who couldn’t stop crying.

Her son Alexander recalled the first days of his mother’s freedom:

My mother could not talk when she returned; all the muscles of her mouth had been idle for such a long time while she was in solitary with no one to talk with. But gradually the capacity returned to her.
¹⁴

Not long after her release, Zhenya asked Svetlana to take her to Stalin’s Kuntsevo dacha. “I want to see what remains,” Zhenya told her. Svetlana remembered that visit:

The room was empty; they had wiped out all [my father’s] belongings and furniture, taken everything away and put back other things which were not his. There was a white death mask standing there. [Zhenya] was in her midfifties, and after prison she was quite weak. She stood there holding my hand, and she cried and cried and cried. She said: “Everything is hurting. Everything. The best days of our life have gone. We have such good memories. We will keep those, and everything else has to be forgiven.”
¹⁵

While her Aunt Anna and her mother had been sentenced to ten years in solitary confinement, Kyra Alliluyeva had been exiled for a five-year term to the town of Shuya, 180 miles northeast of Moscow. She always claimed that her exile had not been terrible:

In exile, I worked for a local theater for the first three years, then I worked with retarded children—I love children! … On stage I always had a part with singing and dancing, in musical comedies and vaudeville. It was all very helpful—not heavy stuff. I was in my own creative atmosphere, although I was lonely without my family. But there were always good people who came my way … people who never rejected me as an “exile”—they had been warned about that, yet still they were good friends to me.
¹⁶

Kyra’s term expired in January 1953, shortly before Stalin’s death. When she returned to Moscow with a “tainted passport” (indicating she had a prison record), she found her brothers living in two rooms of their six-room apartment in the House on the Embankment. The other rooms had been handed over to MGB female clerks. Kyra thought it better to live elsewhere. Zhenya would spend years fighting to get their apartment back under her control.
¹⁷

In this family, it was better not to analyze the whys of fate but simply to accept stoically the hand life dealt. And the family shared one survival strategy. Zhenya’s son Alexander explained: “Even after our mothers returned from prison, nobody in the family could believe Stalin himself to be an initiator of those arrests. They always thought the evil initiative came from somewhere else and they could not therefore blame Stalin directly, or alone, for their misfortunes.” His brother Sergei added, “We see Beria’s influence on Stalin as being very evil, because this way it makes things better for us. It would be much simpler to explain things this way.” Beria was their “sworn enemy,” who had polluted the mind of Stalin against them.
¹⁸

Svetlana shared this response. She blamed her father for the family’s tragedy, but she blamed Beria more, and yet she always
marveled: “It’s very strange that the family didn’t show any anger.”
¹⁹
Perhaps she understood that in some ways they were protecting her.

By the time of her aunts’ release, Beria was already dead. Khrushchev had taken only a few months after Stalin’s death to stage a leadership coup. In July 1953, Beria was arrested and accused of heading a group of conspirators who intended “to seize power and liquidate the Soviet worker-peasant system for the purpose of restoring capitalism and the domination of the bourgeoisie.”
²⁰
He was court-martialed, and shot in December, though the date of his execution is disputed.
²¹
For the Alliluyev family, this was a huge relief. “It was a great holiday for us!” said Zhenya’s son Sergei.
²²
With Beria’s death, an epoch had ended.