A great distance grew between them when Svetlana learnt, through the Illustrated London News, that her mother had not died of appendicitis as she had been told.
Stalin would lose his temper completely if she formed any kind of friendship with a man. He stopped kissing her — she was not his “clean little girl” any more. When Svetlana defied Stalin, he would talk crudely of her sexual activity in front of her and his male colleagues. He had the NKVD — the forerunner of the KGB investigate her lovers. While she was still a schoolgirl, Stalin discovered that she was having an affair with a middle-aged Jewish film-maker named Aleksei Kapler. He confronted her.
“I know the whole story,” he said, brandishing the NKVD file. “I’ve got all your telephone conversations right here.”
“But I love him,” she protested.
“Love!” he said, slapping her across the face. “Your Kapler is a British spy. He’s under arrest.”
Kapler served five years in the mining camps at Vorkuta, in the Arctic Circle.
Stalin was delighted when Svetlana’s first marriage broke up, but when she married again soon after, they became estranged. After Stalin died, Svetlana defected to the West. She lived in Britain, America and Switzerland, and after four broken marriages, at the age of 70, she became a nun “to atone for the sins of my father”, she said.
While, at the beginning, there were kisses for his daughter, his sons were handled brutally from the outset. Yakov, his son from his first marriage, was treated with contempt, perhaps because he reminded Stalin of his own Georgian origins. He only came to live with his father in the Kremlin at Nadya’s insistence. He probably wished he hadn’t.
“The boy Yakov was subjected to frequent and severe punishments by his father,” Trotsky related.
When Yakov tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in 1928 or 1929, Stalin said
callously: “Ha, he couldn’t even shoot straight.” When he was captured during World War II, Stalin denounced hire w a traitor a s “no true Russian would ever surrender”. He refused a German offer to exchange hint oral had Yakov’s wife imprisoned.
His younger son, Vasily, was also beaten.
“At home, he would knock the boy down and let him have it with his boots,” Svetlana said.
After a disastrous career in the Red Air Force, Vasily died an alcoholic wreck at the age of forty-one. One of his sons died of a heroin overdose. One daughter was an alcoholic; another was confined to a mental asylum.
Stalin loved to be photographed with young children and the party machine trumpeted his love for them. A story frequently told at the time is of a three-year-old child coming home from his first day at school and telling his father: “You are not my father any more.”
“What do you mean I am not your father?” the man would exclaim, horrified.
“You are not my father,” the child would say. “Stalin is my father. He gives me everything I have.”
In fact, Stalin turned his brutality towards his own sons into public policy. In 1935, Stalin changed the law so that children could be hanged. Children as young as ten were arrested and tortured into informing on their parents or confessing that they were “counterrevolutionary, Fascist terrorists”. The children of adults who had been arrested were also vulnerable to arrest. When asked why, Stalin replied: “For being freethinkers, that’s what.”
During the famine of 1932, Stalin personally issued orders to shoot the hungry children who were stealing food from railway trucks and who, for some reason, Stalin thought had contracted venereal diseases. In all, it is estimated, that “Uncle Joe” was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children plus two or three million children who starved to death during the famines of the 1930s.
There was a joke in the old Soviet Union that ran this way:
A schoolteacher asked one of her pupils: “Who is your father?”
The child answered: “Comrade Stalin.”
And who’s your mother?”
The child said: “The Soviet motherland.”
“And what do you want to become?” the teacher asked.
The child said: “An orphan.”
Stalin had a thing about boots. Not only were they useful for kicking his son, his own father was a cobbler. When drunk, he had kicked the young Stalin with his boots. He also beat Stalin’s mother, leaving Stalin with a deep misogyny.
The Soviets even had some jokes about his boots:
Question: Why did Lenin wear botinki [ankle-high boots], while Stalin wore sapogi [high boots]?
Answer. Because during Lenin’s time, in Russia, the shit was only up to the ankles.
Official photographs always show Stalin in high boots, usually with his trousers tucked in them, peasant style. He rarely took his own boots off, and he always slept with his socks on, but this may have been to hide his deformed left foot. According to Tsarist police records, the second and third toes of his left foot were joined together.
Stalin even had one of his bodyguards sent to the gulag for abandoning his boots. The man wore slippers instead so as not to wake Stalin when he was sleeping. Stalin accused the man of planning to sneak up and assassinate him.
Stalin wore boots on even the most inappropriate occasions. On holiday in Georgia in the late twenties, he was in the garden with his guests, showing off his prize roses. He was wearing a lightweight tussore silk suit and heavy black riding boots which were quite out of keeping.
“Joseph Vissarionvich,” asked one of his guests, “it’s so hot, but you are still wearing boots. How can you stand it?”
“What can I say?” said Stalin. “Boots are really comfortable things. And useful. You can kick someone in the head with them — so hard he’ll never find all this teeth.” And he burst out laughing.
This was typical Stalin’s sadistic fantasies. He always identified with the aggressor — even his own father. In power, he “modelled himself” on the Tsars, particularly Ivan the Terrible and Alexander I who defeated Napoleon. Stalin even compared himself to Nicholas II, who had imprisoned and exiled him.
Stalin’s all-time favourite aggressor was Hitler. He used Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives as a model for his own purges. Even when Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, he ordered frontline troops not to fight back, thinking there had been some mistake. He simply could not believe Hitler was attacking, even though everyone else saw it coming.
Many political commentators had remarked on a homosexual element in the Nazi-Soviet pact, but Stalin had strong feelings about homosexuality. In 1933, he made all homosexual acts illegal, giving no clear reason. For propaganda purposes, a “homosexual conspiracy” was dreamt up. Gays were ganging up to overthrow the state.
In January 1934, mass arrests of homosexuals began and Maxim Gorky published an article in Pravda, saying: “Destroy homosexuals and fascism will disappear.” Stalin often referred to his enemies as “prostitutka” — male prostitutes.
There were rumours that Stalin had a homosexual relationship in the mid-1930s with his chief bodyguard, the Hungarian Jew, K.V. Pauker. Pauker would have been the submissive partner in the relationship. He certainly knew what Stalin liked. His party piece was an imitation of Grigori Zinoviev who, when about to be executed, fell to his knees and embraced the boots of his executioner.
“Stalin watched every move of “Zinoviev” and roared with laughter,” an eyewitness reported. “When they saw how much Stalin enjoyed the scene, his guests demanded that Pauker repeat the performance. Pauker obliged. This time Stalin laughed so much that he bent down and held his belly with both hands. And when Pauker introduced a new improvisation and, instead of kneeling, raised his hands to heaven and screamed, “Hear Israel, our God is the only God!” Stalin could bear it no longer and, choking with laughter, began to make signs to Pauker to stop the performance.”