His wife’s suicide was apparently a great blow to Stalin. Grief over the loss and pity for his children were combined with anger. Nadezhda had betrayed and humiliated him, cast a cloud over his reputation, and made his personal life a subject of sordid conjecture that endures to this day. “She did a very bad thing… ; she maimed me for the rest of my life,” he told relatives some two and a half years later.19
Out of habit, Stalin’s family led its customary life for a few years after Allilueva’s death. Almost every member of the household maintained his or her role within the family routine. Seeking relief from painful memories, Stalin moved to a new apartment in the Kremlin and began construction of the near dacha. The children remained under the care of governesses and nursemaids in Moscow and at the old dacha. Stalin, Vasily, and Svetlana were surrounded by the same relatives, especially the families of Pavel and Anna Alliluev (Nadezhda’s brother and sister) and Aleksandr Svanidze (the brother of Stalin’s first wife). This was a complicated and often unsavory world. The relatives schemed to outshine one another in Stalin’s eyes. Apparently Pavel Alliluev’s wife even had a brief affair with the dictator.20 Stalin appears to have enjoyed the competition among his relatives.
After Nadezhda’s death, Stalin tried to spend more time with his children. While they were having dinner together in the Kremlin apartment, he asked them how things were going in school, and he sometimes came to the dacha to pick them up and take them to the theater. On occasion, he brought them with him when he vacationed in the south. He was especially fond of Svetlana, who was a promising student and very attached to her father. He began to play a little game with his daughter, calling her khoziaika (which could be translated as “housekeeper” or “the boss”) while he played the role of the sekretarishka (little secretary) who followed her orders: “Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.” Svetlana would write out orders for her father: “I order you to let me go to Zubalovo tomorrow”; “I order you to take me to the theater with you”; “I order you to let me go to the movies. Ask them to show Chapaev and an American comedy.” Stalin responded with facetious pomposity.21 Other members of Stalin’s inner circle were appointed Svetlana’s sekretarishkas, playing along with the vozhd. “Svetlana the housekeeper will be in Moscow on 27 August. She is demanding permission to leave early for Moscow so that she can check on her secretaries,” Stalin wrote to Kaganovich from the south on 19 August 1935. Kaganovich replied on 31 August: “Today I reported to our boss Svetlana on our work, she seemed to deem it satisfactory.”22 Until the war began, father and daughter exchanged affectionate letters. “I give you a big hug, my little sparrow,” he wrote to her, as he had once written to his wife.23
Stalin’s relationship with his sons was much more fraught. For many years he avoided Yakov and his family, and Vasily gave him a great deal of trouble.24 The boy understood very early that he was the son of a powerful man. He preferred soccer to studying and often behaved defiantly toward those around him. “Vasily thinks he’s an adult and insists on getting what he wants, which is often foolish,” the commandant of the Zubalovo dacha reported to Stalin in 1935, when Vasily was fourteen. The situation only grew worse with time. Unable to tolerate the outrageous behavior of his imperious student, in 1938 one of Vasily’s teachers complained to the boy’s father, telling Stalin that Vasily was getting special treatment from the school administration and that he sometimes used threats of suicide to get his way. Stalin thanked the teacher for his honesty and described his son in extremely negative terms: “Vasily is a spoiled youth of average ability, a little savage (a real Scythian!) who is not always truthful, loves to blackmail weak authority figures, is often rude, and has a weak, or rather, unfocused will. He has been spoiled by ‘kith and kin,’ all the while emphasizing that he is ‘the son of Stalin.’” He asked the teacher to be firmer and promised that he would “take him by the scruff of the neck” from time to time. As was often the case, the letter was all for show, and the matter was ultimately resolved in typical Stalin manner. A purge of the school was conducted and the directors were fired, along with the teacher who had dared complain to Stalin. Vasily was sent to study at an aviation school in Crimea, where the special treatment continued. He was met at the train station with great fanfare by the school’s leadership, quartered away from the other cadets in a hotel, and fed special meals in the officers’ mess. Once, obviously pulling a prank, Vasily ordered some special dish. Since the local cook did not know how to make it, someone was sent to a nearby town to find out. Vasily rode all over Crimea in a car and also on a motorcycle. His education was overseen by senior military officials in Moscow. In 1940 he graduated with the rank of lieutenant. He liked to fly, but his character showed no sign of improvement. The system created by the father did irreversible harm to the son.
Vasily’s departure for Crimea came just as the old Stalin-Alliluev-Svanidze extended family ceased to exist. During the Great Terror, Stalin began to annihilate his own relatives. Between late 1937 and late 1939, Aleksandr Svanidze, his wife, and the husband of Anna Allilueva were arrested and then shot. In late 1938, apparently unable to endure the stress, Pavel Alliluev also died. Stalin had nothing further to do with those relatives who remained at liberty. The war further diminished the family. During its first days, Yakov, who, unlike Vasily, received no special protection, was taken prisoner by the Germans. Stalin ordered the arrest of Yakov’s wife but later freed her. Some accounts maintain that Stalin was offered Yakov in exchange for certain German generals (Paulus is most often named) but that he refused. There is no documentary evidence of this claim, and the story lacks credibility since it is hard to understand what would motivate Hitler’s leadership to pursue such an exchange. When the war ended, Stalin was given testimony by Yakov’s fellow prisoners.25 After Germany was defeated, Yakov’s 1941 interrogation protocol was seized, and testimony was obtained from the guards and commandant of the camp where he died.26 All this evidence shows that Yakov comported himself honorably as a prisoner. He was shot by a sentry while attempting to leave the prison grounds in 1943. Perhaps this news improved Stalin’s opinion of his son, and it may explain why, during his final years, the vozhd took an interest in his young granddaughter, Yakov’s daughter.