Newspaper Article

Revealed: Stalin's family secrets

Ronay, Gabriel

1999

Overview

Members of the [Josef Stalin] household in the Kremlin were forbidden, on pain or death, to reveal that his wife had not died from appendicitis, as was officially announced, but from a bullet from her own gun. This was kept from the children and from the country at large. Stalin's initial shock soon gave way to fury against the \"traitor woman\". \"It was wrong of her,\" Stalin wrote to his sister- in-law Maria Svanidze, \"that she crippled me (through her deed). But the children soon forgot that she had ever existed.\" There was no second dispatch. Stalin, who always read the party paper from cover to cover, immediately summoned the Politburo. The denouement was predictable. On March 2, 1943, [Aleksandr Kapler] was sentenced to 10 years' hard labour in the gulag. He paid a heavy price for [Svetlana]'s kisses. That evening, Stalin searched his daughter's bedroom and tore up Kapler's love letters and photographs, screaming at her that \"your lover is a British spy\". Then he told Svetlana's sobbing old nanny, who was also in the room: \"There is a terrible war on. Meanwhile, my own daughter is only concerned with f***ing.\" Although Stalin did not have a good word for his son in his earlier notes and letters, [Vaska] eventually replaced Svetlana in their father's affections. The documents show that Stalin indulged his useless son as he made a career out of carousing. Despite endless scandals with officers' wives, street brawls and the killing of a fellow officer in a \"fishing accident\", he was made Commissar for War and, subsequently, commander of an air-force division. At the age of 24, became the youngest general of the Soviet Union.

• Publisher: Gannett Media Corp
• Subject: Alliluyeva, Nadia / Kapler, Aleksandr / Ronay, Gabriel / Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (1879-1953)