Such was the man who had taken Nadya Allilueva as his wife after the October Revolution. There had been no wedding ceremony, but their daughter Svetlana was told that her parents lived as spouses from some unspecified time before the Soviet government’s transfer from Petrograd to Moscow in 1918. (Apparently the official registration did not take place until 24 March 1919.)3 Nadya was less than half his age at the time and he was her revolutionary hero; and she had yet to learn that the harsh features of his character were not reserved exclusively for the enemies of communism.
At first things went well. Alexandra Kollontai, who got to know Nadya in the winter of 1919–20, was impressed by her ‘charming beauty of soul’ as well as by Stalin’s demeanour: ‘He takes a great deal of notice of her.’4 But trouble was already in the air. Joseph wanted a wife who took household management as her priority; this was one of Nadya’s accomplishments which had caught his eye in 1917.5 Nadya, however, wanted a professional career. As the daughter of a Bolshevik veteran, she had carried out important technical tasks on the party’s behalf in the Civil War. Although she had no professional qualifications, she had a grammar school education and proved a competent clerk at a time when politically reliable secretaries were few.6 She soon learned how to decode telegrams transmitting confidential information among Soviet leaders, including her husband.7 Lenin employed her on his personal staff.8 Joseph was more often absent on campaign than at home until autumn 1920, leaving Nadya to devote herself to her Sovnarkom duties. She became so close to the Lenins that if Nadezhda Krupskaya was going away on a trip, she would ask her to feed their cat. (Lenin could not be depended upon.)9 Nadya joined the party, assuming that her involvement in Bolshevik administration at the highest level would continue.
Her hope was dashed when Joseph returned from the Soviet–Polish War and family chores increased. Joseph wanted a settled domesticity at the end of his working day, whenever that might be. Matters came to a head late in the winter of 1920–1. Nadya, pregnant since June 1920, had gone on working while carrying the child. Joseph himself had fallen badly ill. In the Civil War he had frequently complained of his aches and pains as well as his ‘exhaustion’.10 No one had taken him seriously because he had usually done this when trying to resign in high dudgeon. Brother-in-law Fëdor Alliluev, seeing him before the Tenth Party Congress, remarked how tired he looked. Stalin agreed: ‘Yes, I’m tired. I need to go off to the woods, to the woods! To relax and have a proper rest and sleep as one ought!’11 He took a few days off. It was only when he retired to his bed after the Congress that medical attention became an obvious necessity. Professor Vladimir Rozanov, one of the Kremlin doctors, diagnosed chronic appendicitis. Rozanov said the problem might have existed for a dozen years; he could barely believe Stalin had been able to stand upright. Instant surgery was vital.
Operations for appendicitis in that period were often fatal. Rozanov worried that the procedure could infect Stalin’s peritoneum; he also thought him dangerously thin.12 Initially a local anaesthetic was administered because of his weakened condition. Yet the pain became unbearable and the operation was not completed until after a dose of chloroform. Allowed home afterwards, Stalin lay on a divan reading books and convalesced over the next two months. As he got better, he went out in search of company. By June he had been passed fit. Coming upon Mikhail Kalinin in discussion with other Bolsheviks about the NEP, he announced his return to work: ‘It’s oppressive to lie around by yourself and so I’ve got up: it’s boring without one’s comrades.’13 This sentiment might easily have been included in any collection of memoirs about Stalin; but the rest of Fëdor Alliluev’s story was too embarrassing for Stalin to allow publication. He would not permit people to discover that he had ever been anything but tough in mind and body.
Joseph’s illness and recuperation coincided with the arrival of their first child. Vasili Stalin was born in Moscow on 21 March 1921. Delight at his safe delivery was tempered for Nadya by the fact that Joseph increased pressure on her to dedicate herself to domesticity. No one on her side of the family helped her out: all of them, including her mother Olga, were immersed in political activity. Olga was anyway hardly a model for child rearers. When Nadya and the other Alliluev children had been young, they had often had to fend for themselves while their parents went about their professional lives and revolutionary activity.
Nadya could not turn for help to the other side of the family: Joseph’s mother Keke adamantly refused to move to Moscow. In June 1921, after recovering from the appendicitis operation, Stalin had headed south on party business to Georgia and visited Keke. The son greeted his mother without the warmth that might have been expected after their long separation.14 She knew her own mind and did not flinch from enquiring: ‘Son, there’s none of the tsar’s blood on your hands, is there?’ Shuffling on his feet, he made the sign of the cross and swore that he had had no part in it. His friend Sergo Ordzhonikidze expressed surprise at this religious recidivism; but Stalin exclaimed: ‘She’s a believer! I wish to God that our people believed in Marxism as they do in God!’15 They had been apart from each other for many years; and even though he had wriggled out of answering her straightforwardly, her question to him showed she knew a gulf of belief would continue to keep them apart. As a Christian Keke had reason to tell her son that the Red Kremlin was no place for her. For her safety and comfort, Stalin moved her into one of the servants’ apartment in the old Viceroy’s palace in Tbilisi. Budu Mdivani commented that the local authorities increased the guard on her: ‘This is so that she doesn’t give birth to another Stalin!’16
But Joseph did not come back unaccompanied. In Georgia he also sought out his son Yakov by his first wife Ketevan. Yakov had been looked after by Ketevan’s brother Alexander Svanidze and his wife Maria. Joseph hardly knew the thirteen-year-old Yakov but wished to take him at last into his care — or at least into Nadya’s. Nor was this the end of the family’s expansion. The leading Bolshevik F. A. Sergeev, alias Artëm, perished in a plane crash in July 1921 leaving a young son. It was the custom in the party for such orphans to be fostered by other Bolsheviks, and this is what the Stalins did. The lad Artëm Sergeev lived with them until manhood (and became a major-general in the Red Army in the Second World War).17 Stalin also interested himself in the upbringing of Nikolai Patolichev, the son of a comrade who reportedly had died in his arms in the Soviet–Polish War of 1920.18 Young Patolichev was not brought into the family. Nevertheless in the space of a few months the Stalin household had grown in number from two to five.
Nadya brought in domestic assistance while her busy husband focused his energies on politics. She hired a nanny for Vasili; she also employed servants. She herself was like a terrier in getting raw materials for the kitchen. The Kremlin administrative regime, run by Stalin’s old friend Abel Enukidze, assigned a quota of food products for each resident family. Joseph, whose health had troubled him throughout the Civil War, had been recommended a diet with plenty of poultry. As a result he had acquired the monthly right to fifteen chickens, a head of cheese and fifteen pounds of potatoes. By mid-March 1921, days before the new baby was due, the family had already eaten its way through ten of its fifteen chickens. (Either the birds were unusually small and thin or the Stalins had the appetite of horses.) Nadya wrote a request for an increased quota.19 (Even before she married Joseph she had known how to handle the Soviet bureaucracy: in November 1918, after the Alliluevs moved to Moscow, she wrote to Yakov Sverdlov asking for a better room for them.)20 In later years she made further pleas. One of them was a request for a new kindergarten; she was turned down on that occasion.21