Stalin: A Biography

A couple of exceptions existed. The biography included a photograph of him waving from the Kremlin Wall and a painting of him in his generalissimus’s uniform; but although both of them showed him as older than in earlier pictures, the effects of age were fudged. In the painting his moustache appeared dark and even the hair on his head had only a suggestion of grey. The face had no smallpox-pitted skin. His tunic hung on him with unnatural fineness and the medals on his chest, including his marshal’s five-pointed star, looked as if they were stuck to a flat board. This painting by the artist B. Karpov was used in posters, busts and books.¹⁵ There was also a photograph of him sitting with his fellow marshals; but his image was so small in relation to the page that his face and body were barely discernible — and anyway the airbrushers had again been at work: his shoulders were implausibly wide and he seemed larger than the other figures in the photo.¹⁶

Sporadic attempts to ‘humanise’ his image occurred. The most notable were the memoirs produced by the surviving Alliluevs. Anna Allilueva and her father Sergei, proud of their family’s past, recorded their impressions of Stalin before the October Revolution. These were published in 1946.¹⁷ Sergei’s book appeared posthumously: he had died, worn out by years of toil and worry and family tragedy, the previous July. Anna was alert to the risks of writing about Stalin and made a formal approach to Malenkov to assure herself that the book would have Stalin’s blessing.¹⁸ The texts were eulogistic and had gone through the censorship.¹⁹ But Sergei let slip that he had known Stalin as Soso Dzhughashvili. He also mentioned that Stalin’s first attempt to escape administrative exile in Novaya Uda in the winter of 1903–4 was marred by an elementary error: Stalin forgot to take warm clothing with him and his face and ears were severely frozen.²⁰ Anna’s memoir gave still more details about the private life of Stalin. She described how his damaged arm precluded him from being called up in the First World War. She related that he looked thinner and older after the February 1917 Revolution and that, when he came to live with the Alliluevs, he liked to tease the family maid. The memoir reported that Stalin slept in the same room as Sergei in late summer. It also described his approval of Nadya Allilueva’s zeal in tidying up the apartment. And it gave a comical account of Stalin’s fondness for his pipe: Anna recalled that he had fallen asleep with it lit and burned the sheets.²¹

Stalin soon regretted having sanctioned the Alliluev books. Anna was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to the camps for ten years for defaming him. He ignored her letter to him that she had cleared the project before publication and that she had done nothing wrong.²² She could hardly believe what was happening. She wrote to him defending her family and its record. Implicitly she accused ‘dear Joseph’ of ingratitude: ‘But there are people who our family simply saved from death. And this isn’t overpraise but the very truth, which it is very easy to prove.’²³ That she could send such a message to the Leader is a sign of her courage or stupidity. Enough of Stalin’s in-laws had perished before the Second World War for her to have known the kind of person she was addressing.

Although the widowed Olga Allilueva, to whom Stalin had expressed fond gratitude in 1915, was not persecuted, she became severely depressed. Nadya had killed herself in 1932, Pavel had died in 1938 and Fëdor had never recovered from the mental trauma of the trick played upon him by Kamo at the end of the Civil War. None of Olga’s children or children-in-law remained at liberty in the post-war years. Pavel’s widow Yevgenia did not save herself by marrying again and leaving the vicinity of Stalin: she had been arrested a year earlier than Anna and received the same punishment. Olga was inconsolable: she died a broken old woman in 1951. This was how Stalin rewarded the Alliluevs for the favours they had rendered him before the October Revolution. His Svanidze in-laws had already received his special expression of thanks. Alexander Svanidze had been arrested in the Great Terror and shot in 1942; his wife Maria had had a heart attack on receiving the news. Not only they but also the two sisters of Stalin’s first wife Ketevan — Maria and Alexandra — had perished before the end of the Second World War. The only close relatives who lived without fear of arrest were his children Svetlana and Vasili. They were the exceptions: the pattern was that a family connection with Stalin brought about repression.