Vasily and Svetlana were disappointments for Stalin during the war. Vasily, who was stationed near Moscow, would host drunken parties at the Zubalovo dacha. At one such gathering, in late 1942, sixteen-year-old Svetlana met the thirty-eight-year-old Soviet filmmaker Aleksei Kapler, who had gained prominence as the screenwriter of popular films about Lenin and the revolution. The two began an affair that ended several months later when Stalin ordered Kapler’s arrest. Apparently he was furious over Svetlana’s relationship with Kapler, whom she has described as her first love, and considered it all the more inappropriate in wartime. According to Svetlana, his reaction forever destroyed the closeness between them:
I’d never seen my father look that way before.… He was choking with anger and was nearly speechless.… “Your Kapler is a British spy. He’s under arrest!” …
“But I love him!” I protested at last, having found my tongue again.
“Love!” screamed my father, with a hatred of the very word. And for the first time in my life he slapped me across the face, twice. “Just look, nurse, how low she’s sunk!” He could no longer restrain himself. “Such a war going on, and she’s busy the whole time---------!” Unable to find any other expression, he used the coarse peasant word.27
The next blow came from Vasily. By early 1943 he held the rank of colonel and had been placed in charge of an air regiment. That April he and a group of his subordinates decided to do some fishing. The fish were stunned using explosives. One shell exploded on land, killing one of the regiment’s officers and wounding Vasily with shrapnel. He, of course, was treated at the Kremlin hospital in Moscow. Stalin was enraged. Apparently this escapade was one transgression too many, or so one might conclude from an order issued by People’s Commissar for Defense I. V. Stalin on 26 May 1943:
(1) Immediately remove V. I. Stalin from his position as commander of an air regiment and do not give him any other command posts in the future until I permit it.
(2) Inform the regiment and former regimental commander Colonel Stalin that he is being removed from his post for drunkenness and debauchery and for spoiling and corrupting the regiment.28
Being long accustomed to his father’s empty threats, Vasily was not terribly worried by this reproach. Indeed, he was soon given new, more senior posts, and by war’s end he was a twenty-four-year-old general. Stalin’s son could get away with almost anything. Around the same time Svetlana, now a university student, married a former schoolmate. She soon gave birth to a son, named Iosif after his grandfather. Nevertheless, Stalin refused to meet with his son-in-law, who was Jewish and had not fought in the war. Perhaps he consented to the marriage only to avoid the acrimony that came with the Kapler affair.
Once Germany was defeated and wartime pressures receded, Stalin did not return to his family—or rather did not allow his family back into his life. He had grown accustomed to solitude and his nocturnal lifestyle, and he rarely made time for his children. Apparently he never developed grandfatherly feelings. By now he was in his declining years, weary, in poor health, and obsessed with thoughts of treachery and the hunt for enemies. The final blow dealt against his family was the arrest of Pavel Alliluev’s wife and Nadezhda’s sister Anna. They were released only after his death.
Stalin’s children, admittedly, were hardly a comfort in his old age. Vasily sank rapidly into alcoholism and dissipation, and by his thirtieth birthday he was already an old man, plagued with a number of chronic diseases. Thanks to his father’s indulgence, he nevertheless held increasingly senior army posts and squandered government funds with impunity. The younger Stalin greedily chased the good life: he built and repeatedly renovated his suburban estate, spent lavishly on an elaborate hunting lodge, and established sports teams, luring top athletes with huge salaries and apartments. He had goods shipped in from Germany via airplane, ran through a series of lovers and wives, and drank heavily in the company of sycophantic hangers-on. Toward the end of Stalin’s life, after yet another scandalous episode, the father removed the son from the key post of air commander for the Moscow Military District. Vasily was sent to study at a military academy, thereby removing any remaining constraints on his drinking. Meanwhile, Svetlana divorced the husband her father did not like and married one he did—Yuri Zhdanov, son of Stalin’s late comrade. This marriage, however, was not happy and did not last long.
After his death, Stalin’s children suffered deeply symbolic fates. Vasily, after drunkenly insulting his father’s successors, was put in prison and died in exile at the age of forty. Svetlana married an Indian Communist. When she was given permission to travel to India for his funeral, she took the opportunity to defect and move to the United States, where she died in 2011. While in emigration, Svetlana published a memoir of life in the Stalin family, Twenty Letters to a Friend, which was both nostalgic and embellished. She placed the blame for her father’s pathological cruelty on the scheming and insinuations of Lavrenty Beria. In the end, her attitude toward the system her father created was most eloquently expressed by her defection to the country that he considered socialism’s most fearsome enemy.
6 THE GENERALISSIMO
Victory elevated Stalin to unprecedented heights. The exultant show of military might that paraded across Red Square in June 1945 was an important symbol of his new power, now more secure than ever and legitimized with the title of generalissimo. But Stalin was a seasoned enough politician to know that victory, which had transformed the Red Army into one of the most formidable forces on the planet, was just the first step on the long and difficult postwar path toward regaining and holding the country’s status as a world power. The Soviet Union was a weakened nation. The extent of suffering and devastation that had befallen it is almost unimaginable. Contemporary demographers speak of 27 million lives lost, and many of those lives were young—the country’s future. Thousands of towns and villages lay in ruins, and many people were forced to improvise some form of shelter. Several million wounded veterans needed government support. The demobilization of an army of 11 million and the transition to a peacetime economy also demanded significant resources. The postwar famine—a tragic testament to the devastation wreaked on collectivized agriculture and to the weakness of the Stalinist distribution system—peaked in 1946–1947. As many as 1.5 million people died of hunger or disease. Many millions were afflicted by dystrophy and other serious illnesses causing permanent disability. As usual, cannibalism raised its ugly head during the famine years. To all these hardships were added desperate guerrilla wars in western Ukraine and the Baltic states, territories that had been absorbed into the Soviet Union on the eve of the war and given a taste of Stalinist terror.
There was also a whole new set of international challenges. Relations with the Allies had cooled considerably. Stalin’s Soviet Union and the Western democracies, brought together in a marriage of convenience by Nazi aggression, had little in common. Negotiations to resolve the postwar repartition of the world opened up new areas of contention, but the Soviet Union was too weak to put up a decisive fight. It was unnerved by the United States’ nuclear monopoly and devoted huge resources to ending it.
A particular danger facing the Stalinist regime was the incongruity between the symbolic triumph of victory for Soviet society and the hard realities of daily life. The war had taken millions of Soviet citizens beyond the country’s borders to Europe, an experience that many found shocking. The victors saw that the slaves of capitalism enjoyed a standard of living immeasurably better than theirs. They now knew that for years official Soviet propaganda had been pulling the wool over their eyes. Tens of millions of peasants, many of whom had fought in the war, dreamed of dismantling the kolkhoz system and believed that their sacrifices at the front had earned them this reward. A threatening gulf was opening up between the Soviet people’s postwar expectations and their reality. As they struggled to overcome extreme daily hardships, mourned the dead, and listened to stories from returning soldiers, people’s conversations inevitably drifted toward ideas and topics that were taboo: the price of war and victory, the questionable privileges enjoyed by party and government officials, and the causes of hunger and deprivation. The system’s usual response to such “incorrect” thinking was arrest and prosecution for “anti-Soviet propaganda.” But would that response work in the new, postwar USSR?