Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Demian’s reply shows how taken aback he was by Stalin’s fanatical outburst: “Instead of a Circassian girl you warmed me up with a treatise.” In response to Stalin’s other remarks about his cunning political strategy—attacking leaders of the opposition and then wooing their adherents in order to put an end to fractions and factions—Demian felt himself on surer ground. Here he and Stalin were cronies again. Demian wrote: “If the best husband and wife start arguing sharply, even if the reasons are purely matters of principle, the argument can end with either the husband fucking somebody else or his wife being fucked by others. I am sure that you and I will not refuse somebody else’s and will not let go of our own, and if we do let go, then it will be because ‘she’s a whore,’ even if she’s festooned with quotations.”

The Bedny–Stalin letters convey the contradictions in Stalin’s thinking: coarse in tactics and expression, arcane in professed ideology.

The same duality is apparent in Stalin’s relationships with his wives and children. Some of his behavior is ascribable to Georgian custom: a wife must never show her husband up in public, must never act disrespectfully or frivolously. Children, too, however much loved, must defer in public. Among Georgian highlanders, a husband makes no display of affection in public to his wife or children, not even to single out his own child for rescue from general danger.

Stalin was, even by these standards, an exceptionally unfeeling parent. Not until his second marriage, after the 1917 revolution, did he take a cursory interest in Iakov, whom he had handed over as a baby to his sister-in-law and Mikhail Monaselidze, her husband. When, in 1928, Iakov tried to shoot himself, Stalin greeted him with “Ha, so you missed!” Iakov fled to his stepmother’s parents, the Alliluevs. Stalin wrote to Nadezhda, his second wife: “Tell Iakov from me that he has acted like a hooligan and a blackmailer with whom I do not and cannot have anything in common. Let him live where and with whom he wants.”

In 1941, less than a month after the outbreak of war, Iakov was captured by the Germans. Stalin refused Count Bernadotte’s offer to negotiate Iakov’s release. The refusal was interpreted as putting national before personal interests, but Stalin went further: he had Iakov’s wife imprisoned as a deserter’s spouse, and when Iakov’s picture was used by the Germans for propaganda leaflets, Stalin asked the Spanish communist Dolores Ibarruri “La Pasionaria” to infiltrate undercover agents among Spanish fascists in Germany in order to reach Iakov in his POW camp and presumably kill him. In 1943, however, Iakov was electrocuted and shot dead by the Germans.

To his daughter Svetlana Stalin was at first affectionate, even playful, calling her Khoziaika (housewife) or Satanka, but after she began a succession of ill-judged liaisons, she too fell out of favor and saw little of her father.

Stalin’s marital history falls just short of the pathological. The inquisitive mind of a pedant and autodidact, behind a brooding romantic face, attracted women. Old flames flare up in the letters Stalin kept in his archive: “Do you remember the beautiful neighbor Liza, who used to look after you . . . that’s me.”³² Stalin’s first wife, Kato, made no complaints—she was no mute peasant; she had been educated by private tutors and her brother had studied in Germany—but, a conventional Georgian wife, she kept in the background. Stalin’s subsequent liaisons with Onufrieva, Pereprygina, and others, and his second marriage to the seventeen-year-old Nadezhda Allilueva—apart from a preference for adolescent girls and for solitude—do not suggest grossly abnormal sexuality.

Stalin liked female nudity, as his choice of postcards showed. In his marginalia to Anatole France’s dialogue on prudery, he underlined the comment, “Few women know how beautiful nudity is,” and wrote, “Very original” against the statement that “a plant shows with pride what a human being conceals.” When, years later, widowed again, he read the diary that Tolstoi’s wife kept for 1910, the last and most unhappy year of a stormy marital life, Stalin found much to comment on, singling out in particular Sofia Tolstaia’s entry: “Only the Trubetskoys bathed, husband and wife together in the river, and astounded us by so doing.”

After Stalin married Nadezhda in 1917, it was said that he had first raped her; even that he had slept with her mother nine months before Nadezhda was born. The notorious temperament of Olga Allilueva, the fact that both parties had been in the same city in 1900, and the tension toward the end of the marriage support the rumor, though Nadezhda had many other reasons to kill herself in 1932.