The mysterious death of Nadezhda Alleluyeva. Letter twentieth: Alliluyeva’s memories of Stalin

Ada Petrova, Mikhail Leshchinsky
Stalin's daughter. Last interview

From the authors

On the last day of November 2011, on the news feeds of news agencies, in radio and television programs, a message appeared that in the United States in the town of Richland (Wisconsin), Lana Peters, known in Russia as Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, died of cancer at the age of 85. , Stalin's only daughter. Local newspaper Wisconsin State Journal journalist Doug Moe reported that the death occurred on the 22nd, but municipal authorities did not pay due attention to this because they did not know the previous name of one of the residents of the nursing home. The same correspondent said that he knew the deceased and visited her very modest one-room apartment, where there was not even a TV. “This was a poor woman living on $700 a month from the government,” he said.

Her US-born daughter Olga Peters, now Chris Evans, lives in Portland, Oregon, where she owns a small clothing store. She said she often talked to her mother on the phone, went to see her in Richland, and is now going to the funeral.

All messages were laconic, devoid of emotion, with short comments that mainly concerned her father and Svetlana’s life in America.

For us, this sad event was a real emotional blow, bringing a feeling of loss that you experience when losing a loved one or a spiritual friend. But we knew each other very little and spent only a week together, and even then two decades ago, back in the last century. But I remembered a lot...

Among the palace chambers and pompous temple gates, behind the Kremlin wall there is an unremarkable building with a massive door under the iron canopy of the porch. Once upon a time there was a holy of holies: Stalin’s last apartment in the Kremlin. After the death of the leader, the rooms were kept intact, as if the lackeys were afraid that the Master was about to return. Later the apartment became part of the Presidential Archives. Here, all, or almost all, documents and evidence of the most important events in the life of Joseph Dzhugashvili-Stalin and members of his family are kept in the strictest secrecy and complete inviolability.

There is some kind of secret in the Kremlin hill, fenced off from the world either by a fortress or a prison wall. Fate plays cruel jokes on those who reign here. The chosen ones quickly forget that they, too, are mere mortals, and that as a result, everything will again turn into lies, betrayal, revelations, tragedy, and even farce. You inevitably think about this when leafing through thousands of archival documents, ranging from some medical certificates and test results, private letters and photographs to documents that, without exaggeration, have historical significance.

It was then that we paid special attention to simple folders with “shoe” laces, on which was written by hand: “About the non-return of Svetlana Alliluyeva.” They came up with a word: “non-return.” In these folders the whole life of Stalin's daughter was revealed. This archival biography was, like a mosaic panel, assembled from the smallest details; children's drawings and reports from guards, letters to parents and transcripts of overheard conversations, secret service documents and telegrams from diplomatic missions. The picture turned out to be varied, but quite gloomy, and always: both during my father’s life and after his death, both at home and abroad.

What did we all know about this woman then? Never mind. Maybe a dirty little ditty:

Viburnum-raspberry,
Stalin's daughter escaped -
Svetlana Alliluyeva.
Here's a family...

Now I’m ashamed of this “knowledge”. The streams of sophisticated lies that spilled onto the pages of the Soviet press after Alliluyeva’s departure in March ’67 also rushed into the same direction. What was not written about then at the suggestion of experienced “editors” from the KGB! It was argued that this act was provoked by a severe mental illness, excessive sexuality, and delusions of persecution. On the other hand, vanity, a thirst for enrichment, and the search for cheap popularity were assumed. We even agreed to search for my father’s treasures, allegedly hidden in Western banks. Over the years, articles, essays and entire books began to appear about this life, based on some indirect evidence, gossip, speculation and myths. And none of these “authors” saw her, spoke to her, or interviewed her.

Meanwhile, four of her own works were published abroad, which appeared in the 90s here too: “20 Letters to a Friend”, “Only One Year”, “Distant Music”, “Book for Granddaughters”. Undoubtedly, they said a lot about the tragic fate of a child, a woman, a mother and a wife, an extraordinary personality, finally. And yet it was felt that many chapters were written in them under the influence of mood, moment, contradictions and tossing of an irrepressible soul. And, of course, we must also take into account the fact that they were written and published in the West, perhaps unwittingly, but “adjusted” to the local reader and publishing commercial interests.

The documents from the secret dossier were so shocking to this day that it was decided to definitely find Svetlana Iosifovna and, if possible, do a television interview with her. Of course, it was known that this would be very difficult to do. By the mid-90s, she had already lived in the West for many years, in recent years she had not given any interviews, changed her first and last name, carefully concealed not only her address, but it was not even known in which country she had settled.

We started by searching for Moscow relatives. And, fortunately, there were still quite a few of them at that time: cousin Vladimir Alliluyev - the son of Anna Sergeevna Alliluyeva, the sister of Stalin's wife Nadezhda, cousins ​​Kira and Pavel - children of Pavel Sergeevich Alliluyev, Nadezhda's brother, nephew Alexander Burdonsky, son of Vasily Stalin, and, finally, Svetlana Iosifovna’s son Joseph Alliluyev. They are all very nice, intelligent, well-established people. Vladimir Fedorovich Alliluyev - engineer, writer, Kira Pavlovna Politkovskaya (nee Alliluyeva) - actress, Alexander Pavlovich Alliluyev - scientist-physiologist, Alexander Vasilievich Burdonsky (nee Stalin) - theater director, People's Artist of the Republic, Joseph Grigoryevich Alliluyev - cardiologist, doctor medical sciences.

Unfortunately, many are no longer alive, but we have preserved recordings of interviews with them, which we will present in this book. These were vivid, although by no means rosy, memories of the history of the family clan, whose evil fate was kinship with Stalin, and, of course, of Svetlana, who, despite the break with her homeland and family, was remembered and loved like a kin.

Vladimir Fedorovich Alliluyev, the only one of his numerous relatives, continued to keep in touch with his cousin, or rather, she trusted him and corresponded. Vladimir Fedorovich and helped us contact Svetlana Iosifovna. On his recommendation, she agreed to meet in London, where she lived at the time. And we went...

When we called her and said that we were already in London and ready to work, she did not invite us to her place, but suggested that we meet somewhere in the city: in Kensington Park, for example. We were very worried, knowing from the stories her unpredictable character and tough temperament. Anything could be expected. Our heroine could refuse the interview, succumbing to a momentary whim, or maybe she simply wouldn’t like us.

She's already suffered so much from the press.

On that late autumn day, the city was covered in snow, so unusual for London, in the morning. Of course, it quickly melted away on the streets and sidewalks, but in the park it still lay on the green lawns and the remaining withered foliage. The gilded gates of Kensington Palace, then the residence of Princess Diana, were also framed in white. I thought professionally: in the park the princess of England would meet with the princess of the Kremlin. However, the appearance of Svetlana Iosifovna immediately destroyed this newly born journalistic cliche. A very modestly dressed, slightly stooped, charming woman, flushed from the morning snowy cool, approached us. Her open face, friendly, almost shy smile and large bright eyes immediately attracted attention. There was no wariness, no intense attention in her eyes - she was completely charming. And, as if they had known each other for a hundred years, a conversation began about trifles: how did you get there, how did you get settled, what was in Moscow? We handed her some letters and parcels, which she immediately put into her bag without opening. Without prolonging the forced awkward pause, Svetlana began to talk about the park where she had made an appointment, and that it was here that she liked to spend her lonely days. Not at all embarrassed, she pointed to a small cafe by the pond and said that here in the morning she drinks tea with a bun, and for lunch - broth and a pie. Everything is simple and accessible. Here, on the alleys of the park, he reads books, feeds the ducks and swans on the pond, and in the evening he leaves for his small apartment in north London, a kind of hostel for elderly people, under the care of the city authorities. Transport, thank God, is free for pensioners, but you have to pay for housing and utilities, but very little. So the 300 pounds pension that one respected professor from Cambridge assigned her is quite enough...

She immediately began to lay out all these details, as if afraid of our questions, a careless, and perhaps tactless invasion of her privacy. She outlined a circle into which it was forbidden to step. Of course, she was taught this by decades spent in America and England, and by the bitter experience of dealing with an arrogant and cynical press. But at first the newspapers wrote enthusiastically:

“This is an elegant, cheerful woman with red curly hair, blue timid eyes and an attractive smile, whose whole appearance glows with feelings of kindness and sincerity. “Hello! - she says. – Take pictures, write and say whatever you want about me. How much is it to say in front of the whole world everything you think..."

A couple of decades later, the same publications began to report that Stalin’s daughter had sunk to the bottom, was living in a shelter for drug addicts and alcoholics, and was losing her human appearance. Naturally, all this “news” was happily picked up by our press.

We understood how much effort it took for her decision to meet with us, we were grateful for it and were afraid of frightening off the fragile trust that had just been established. Of course, we had no intention of ever abusing it, but we still had to somehow ensure that she would again shovel her whole life, discover its dramas, hopes and disappointments. I was surprised that Svetlana Iosifovna did not ask about her relatives or life in the country. Is it really possible that during the years of wandering she not only changed her name, becoming the unknown Lana Peters, but also rejected from herself everything connected with the land where she was born, was happy and unhappy, where the ashes of her parents and grandparents rested, where they saw light her children? Of course not. Most likely, this was only an initial defensive reaction from touching the patient, the deep one. Then everything turned out that way.

However, the time for the sacred lunch for the English came, and we went to the most ordinary London restaurant. The dinner was ordinary, but it was clear how much pleasure the most ordinary dishes gave her, how she savored everything that was served to the table. “I haven’t feasted like this for a long time,” she thanked her at the end, and it was obvious that this was the truth.

When we parted, we agreed to film the next day. And again, she didn’t want us to film at her house or for us to come pick her up. “I’ll come to your hotel myself,” she said goodbye.

Chapter first
“The memories weigh too heavily on my shoulders, as if it wasn’t with me...”

A house full of love

The next morning, in front of the camera, she was fresh and natural: no “stiffness,” affectation, or desire to please. And the conversation began as if half a word, hooked on a catchy headline in one of the newspapers we brought: “The Kremlin Princess.”

“Lord, what nonsense! Yes, there were no princesses there. Here they also wrote that she ate from golden plates and slept on beds from the royal palace. It's all nonsense. This is what people write who don’t know anything and weren’t there. In the Kremlin, we all lived in strictness, in work, in studies. In my time, all the so-called “Kremlin children” studied very hard, graduated from universities, and received specialties. This was important. Who lived there? Molotovs, Voroshilovs, Kalinins and us. They all had rather squalid apartments with official furniture. During my mother’s life, we had a small, poorly furnished apartment in a house where palace servants lived during the reign of the Tsar. My father was very strict in terms of life and clothing. I was very careful. He sees something new on me, frowns and asks: “What is this? Foreign? “No, no,” I say. "Well then fine". I really didn’t like foreign things. No makeup, no perfume, no lipstick, no manicure. Oh my God! What a princess this is! In general, I really didn’t like the Kremlin apartment; I didn’t even have any vivid childhood memories of this life “behind the wall.” Another thing is the dacha in Zubalovo. It was once the rich estate of a former oil industrialist. The father settled the family there, and Mikoyan settled nearby. I remember Zubalovo as a house full of love. They were all very kind, the Alliluyevs. Grandmother and grandfather constantly lived in Zubalovo, and the rest came: mother’s sister Anna Sergeevna, brother Pavel Sergeevich, Alliluyevsky’s grandchildren. There were 7 of us children. And everyone was immediately spinning, spinning under their feet. My father was not the type who liked to be alone. He loved company, loved the table, loved to treat and entertain. Georgians are a family people. My father had no brothers or sisters. Instead of blood relatives, his family became the parents, brothers, sisters of his wives - Ekaterina Svanidze and my mother. When I was a child, I loved my parents very much, my mother more, my grandfather, grandmother, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters.”

The end of the 20s - the beginning of the 30s were a happy time for the Svanidze-Alliluyev family clan. Everyone is still together, successful, alive and well. Sergei Yakovlevich Alliluyev and his wife Olga Evgenievna greeted old age in honor and prosperity, surrounded by children and grandchildren.

Their daughter Nadezhda, Stalin’s wife, an intelligent and diplomatic woman, knew how to unite very different and difficult relatives.

From an interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva:

“My father met Uncle Lesha Svanidze in his youth. At that time, Alexander Semenovich had his party nickname Alyosha. So he remained for all of us under this name. He was a European-educated Marxist, a great financial figure, and worked abroad for many years. I remembered him and his wife Aunt Marusya as real foreigners: they were so intelligent, educated, and always well dressed. In those years, this was a rarity even at the “Kremlin” court. I loved Maria Anisimovna, I even tried to imitate her in some ways. She was a former opera singer and loved receptions, merry feasts, and premieres.

And they raised their son Jonrid, Jonik, unlike us, as a real barchuk. There were also Sashiko and Mariko, Uncle Alyosha’s sisters, but somehow I didn’t remember them.

Most of all, I loved Alliluyev’s relatives - Uncle Pavlusha and Aunt Anya, my mother’s brother and sister. My uncle fought near Arkhangelsk with the British, then with the White Guards and Basmachi. He became a professional military man and rose to the rank of general. He worked as a military representative in Germany for a long time. The father loved Pavel and his children Kira and Sasha.

Anna Sergeevna was surprisingly kind and selfless. She was always worried about her family and acquaintances, and always asked for someone. My father was always terribly indignant at this Christian forgiveness of hers and called her an “unprincipled fool.” Mom complained that Nyura was spoiling her children and mine. Aunt Anechka loved everyone, pitied everyone and forgave any childish prank.

I always want to resurrect those sunny years of childhood, so I talk about all those who were participants in our common life.”

From an interview with Kira Pavlovna Politkovskaya-Alliluyeva:

“It was a fun time. Voroshilov arrived, Mikoyan, Budyonny with an accordion began to play, Ordzhonikidze danced the lezginka. A fun time passed. I don’t remember them drinking much: the wine was light and sour. According to Caucasian tradition, they gave it to us children too. Grandfather was not very cheerful, but grandmother could pick up a guitar and sing.

Stalin knew how to communicate with children, he forgot who he was and what he was. Everyone really loved watching our movies and the American ones with Dina Durbin.

At that time, Svetlana got along with everyone, or her character traits did not appear. We always slept in the same room: her bed against one wall, mine against the other. I've always danced. The nanny leaves, and Svetlana asks me to dance. She sits on the bed, and I dance to Strauss on the gramophone. She was a very good girl."

From an interview with Alexander Pavlovich Alliluyev:

“Iosif Vissarionovich loved to play billiards. My father played well too. And then one day they agreed to play under the table. Usually Stalin won, but this time my father won. A curious situation arose. No one could imagine that Stalin would crawl under the table. My father quickly reacted and ordered me to climb, which I did with great pleasure. And suddenly my sister Kirka became indignant that it was unfair that Stalin should crawl under the table. Everyone laughed, and Stalin laughed loudest of all. Stalin loved it when a large company gathered. It happened that Marshals Budyonny, Voroshilov, Egorov, Tukhachevsky were sitting at the table, here were our parents and we, the children. Such gatherings often ended with large libations, and after them it was customary to fight. It was difficult to compare strength with Tukhachevsky. He was a physically strong man, athletic. He quickly dispatched his opponents. And in one such struggle, he, heavily drunk, approached Joseph Vissarionovich and lifted him in his arms, making it clear that he could do anything. I looked into Stalin’s eyes and saw something there that greatly frightened me and, as you see, I remembered for the rest of my life.”

Well, these kids could rightfully recite the pioneer slogan of those days: “Thank you to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!” True, childhood ended very quickly. The family clan was destroyed by its head. Some were destroyed, others went into exile and camps. And the starting point of all misfortunes was the suicide of Svetlana’s mother.

Nadezhda Sergeevna

From an interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva:

“My father met the family of the Bolshevik Alliluyev in 1890, when my mother was not yet alive. He lived the life of an underground worker. No home, no family. He was exiled in Siberia four times, escaped three times. His grandmother and grandfather looked after him like parents. They were older. They sent him tobacco and sugar to Siberia. He wrote them very tender letters. When he returned from exile once again, my mother was not yet 16. She fell in love with him.

The Alliluyevs, I think, felt sorry for him. It was later that they began to say that he was a great man. And then he was not any “great”. There was homelessness and unkemptness in him. I often think why did my mother fall in love with him? She felt sorry for him, and when a woman feels sorry, that’s all.

When I was a child, I adored my mother, I simply adored her. Mom was everything: home, family. Now I understand that she did not take care of children much. She was more concerned about our upbringing and education, because she herself had strived for this all her life. My childhood with my mother lasted only six and a half years, but during this time I already wrote and read in Russian and German, drew, sculpted, wrote musical dictations. Mom found good educators somewhere for me and my brother... It was a whole educational machine that was spinning, launched by my mother’s hand - but my mother herself was never at home near us. At that time, as I now understand, it was indecent for a woman, and even a party member, to spend time around children. This was considered philistinism. Aunties told me that she was “strict”, “serious” beyond her years - she looked older than her 30 years only because she was unusually reserved, businesslike and did not allow herself to let loose.”

When we worked at the Stalin Foundation, naturally, no one allowed us to make copies of documents, but we used a trick: we filmed everything on camera, and then made photocopies from the kinescope screen. Thus, we managed to bring a lot to London and show it to Svetlana Iosifovna. There was also family correspondence between father and mother, Svetlana and father. The first thing we heard from her when we opened the folders with documents were words of indignation that these deeply personal letters were stored in some kind of state archives, that they were in the possession of complete strangers.

Meanwhile, these letters could tell a lot about the relationship in the family, Stalin and his wife, which the then 6-year-old Svetlana simply cannot remember. Here, for example, are several fragments from the letters that the spouses exchanged when Stalin left for treatment in the south during the “velvet” season.

“It’s very, very boring without you, when you get better, come and be sure to write to me how you feel. My business is going well so far, I am doing it very carefully. I’m not tired yet, but I go to bed at 11 o’clock. In winter it will probably be more difficult...” (From a letter from Nadezhda on September 27, 1929.)

"How is your health? Comrades who arrived say that you look and feel very bad. On this occasion, the Molotovs attacked me with reproaches, how could I leave you alone..." (From a letter from Nadezhda on September 19, 1930.)

“Only people who don’t know the matter can reproach you for anything about taking care of me. The Molotovs turned out to be such people in this case. Tell the Molotovs for me that they were mistaken about you and committed injustice against you.

As for the undesirability of your stay in Sochi, your reproaches are as unfair as the Molotovs’ reproaches against you are unfair... “(From Stalin’s letter on October 24, 1930.)

“I am sending you “family correspondence.” Svetlana’s letter with translation, since you are unlikely to understand all the important circumstances that she writes about...

Hello daddy, come home soon Fchera Ritka Tokoy Prakas has done it too much, he’s very excited, I kiss you, your little lady.” (From a letter from Nadezhda on September 21, 1931.)

“Hello, Joseph! It rains endlessly in Moscow. Damp and uncomfortable. The guys, of course, were already sick with the flu and sore throat, and I was obviously saving myself by wrapping myself in everything warm. I never made it out of the city. Sochi is probably wonderful, it’s very, very good.

With us, everything goes on as before, monotonously - busy during the day, at home in the evening, etc...” (From a letter from Nadezhda on September 26, 1931.)

Of course, these letters will not surprise an uninitiated person, but for the daughter, who had never seen her parents’ correspondence before, they meant a lot. Apparently, under the influence of these impressions, she remembered a phrase from a conversation between her parents, which she accidentally witnessed. This happens in life when suddenly some episode from a distant and long-forgotten childhood comes to mind.

From an interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva:

“You still love me a little!” - Mom said to father.

I was so surprised by this “a little bit.” It seemed to the child that everyone around him should love each other very, very much. What does “a little bit” have to do with it? Now I understand that this phrase was a continuation of some big and difficult conversation, of which there were probably many in their lives. I think my father was very difficult to tolerate. Restraining himself in business relationships, he did not stand on ceremony at home. I had the opportunity to fully experience this myself. I am sure that my mother continued to love him, no matter what.

She loved him with all the strength of the integral nature of a monogamous person. Her heart, I think, was won once and for all. Complaining and crying - she couldn’t stand it...

I also remember very well the last two days of her life. On November 7, my mother took me to the parade on Red Square. This was my first parade. I stood next to my mother with a red flag in my hand, and Khrushchev, who was nearby, kept raising me in his arms so that the entire square could be better seen. I was 6 years old and the impressions were very vivid. The next day the teacher told us to describe everything we saw. I wrote: “Uncle Voroshilov rode a horse.” My 11-year-old brother made fun of me and said that I should have written: “Comrade Voroshilov rode a horse.” He brought me to tears. Mom came into the room and laughed. He took me with him to his room. There she sat me down on an ottoman. Everyone who lived in the Caucasus cannot refuse this traditional wide sofa with bolsters. Mom spent a long time instilling in me what I should be and how to behave: “Don’t drink wine! - she said. “Never drink wine!” These were echoes of her eternal disputes with her father, who, according to Caucasian habit, always gave the children good grape wine. She thought that this would not lead to good things in the future. By the way, the example of my brother Vasily proved this. I sat on her ottoman for a long time that day, and because meetings with my mother were rare, I remembered this one well. If only I knew that she was the last!

I know everything that happened on the evening of November 8th only from stories. There was a government banquet in honor of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. “Just,” her father said to her: “Hey, you! Drink! And she “just” suddenly cried out: “I’m not “hey” to you!” – she stood up and left the table in front of everyone. Then Polina Semyonovna Molotova, with whom she left the banquet together, told me: “It seemed that she had calmed down. She talked about plans, about classes at the academy, about future work.” Polina Semyonovna invited her to her place so as not to leave her alone at night, but her mother refused and left... My aunts later told me that the cause of her suicide was some kind of illness that caused constant headaches and deep depression..."

Of course, what Svetlana Iosifovna told me is the “softest” version of what happened at that ill-fated banquet. Most likely, this is the version of her father accepted in the family. In fact, there are a lot of memories of this event and its interpretations. Some say that he threw bread crumbs and orange peels at her, others recalled that he publicly called a woman and, calling a car, drove off to her place, while others believe that this was an exacerbation of a mental disorder. There is also a completely incredible version that she was supposed to shoot Stalin, but she couldn’t and committed suicide. One way or another, Nadezhda went home and shot herself there with a pistol given to her by her brother Pavel.

From an interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva:

“No one could understand how she could do this. Mom was a very strong and organized person. She grew up in a family of underground revolutionaries, was next to her father during the Civil War, and worked in Lenin’s secretariat. She was only 31 years old. Terrible. My father considered this a betrayal. Knife in the back. Immediately they began to whisper that it was he who killed her. And so it still goes. But we in the family know that this is not so. It was very difficult for him. He suddenly began to say: “Just think, she had such a small pistol. Pavel found something to give.” His mother's death devastated him. He told his relatives: “Nadya’s death crippled me forever.” It really was like that. He lost trust in everyone."

From an interview with Alexander Alliluyev:

“Years later, my mother told me that no one could have imagined that the matter would end in shooting. Nadezhda Sergeevna was going to go with her children to relatives in Leningrad. She did not reveal the reason for this, but only gave her brother, and my father, with whom she was very close, some small package and said: “I won’t be there, I wouldn’t want anyone to climb there.”

When this terrible tragedy happened, dad came home and asked mom about the package. They opened it and saw the letter. Our family was silent about him for many years. Addressing her father and mother, Nadezhda Sergeevna wrote that she was deciding to die because she saw no other way out. Joseph tortured her, he will get her everywhere. He is not at all the person he claims to be, the one they took him for. This is a two-faced Janus who will step over everything in the world. Nadezhda Sergeevna asked to take part in the children, especially to take care of Vasily, they say, he loves Svetlana anyway, but he’s bugging Vasily.

The parents were shocked. Mom offered to show the letter to Stalin, but father categorically disagreed and said that the letter should be burned. And so they did. For many years they were silent about this letter, and only after the war, when my mother left the camp, did she tell me and Kira.”

The official cause of death of Stalin's wife was appendicitis. The funeral was organized, as they say, according to the first category: with obituaries and articles in newspapers, nationwide grief and a funeral cortege through the center of Moscow. On November 9, Svetlana and Vasily were brought to say goodbye to their mother. Svetlana Iosifovna says that this became the most terrible memory of her childhood. A 6-year-old girl was forced to approach her mother's body and kiss her cold forehead. She ran away crying loudly. It is still not known for certain whether Stalin said goodbye to Nadezhda. Some claim that he came up, kissed his wife, and then pushed the coffin away from him, others say that he was confused with Alyosha Svanidze, and Stalin, they say, was not at the funeral at all, and he never came to the grave.

From an interview with Vladimir Alliluyev:

“Many members of our family, including myself, were convinced that the resentment towards Nadezhda for committing suicide was so deep that Stalin never came to her grave. But it turned out that this was not the case. Joseph Vissarionovich’s security officer Alexei Rybin, who was with him for many years, told me that in October 1941, when the fate of Moscow hung in the balance and the government was preparing for a possible evacuation, Stalin came to Novodevichye Cemetery to say goodbye to Nadezhda Sergeevna. He also claimed that Joseph Vissarionovich periodically came to Novodevichye and sat silently for a long time on a marble bench near the monument. There was even a small gate cut into the wall of the monastery opposite the burial for him.”

From an interview with Svetlana Alliluyeva:

“I think that the death of his mother took the last remnants of warmth from his soul. He was freed from her softening presence, which was so disturbing to him. I think that from that time on he was finally strengthened in that skeptical, unfriendly view of people that was characteristic of his nature.”

The newspaper "Top Secret" publishes the memoirs of Stalin's daughter, written in 1965 and which became the basis for her scandalous book "20 Letters to a Friend", published with the assistance of the CIA in 1967

In 1967, the memoirs of Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva were published in Germany and the USA. “Thanks to the CIA - they took me out, didn’t abandon me, and published my “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” recalled Svetlana Alliluyeva, who became Lana Peters in exile. The CIA then helped publish this book as an elegant gift to the Kremlin, on the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. Today, 50 years after the publication of “20 Letters to a Friend,” the newspaper “Top Secret” publishes the diary entries of Stalin’s daughter. Unlike the popular and many times reprinted book, these notes, consisting of 6 chapters, have one undoubted advantage - they are not clouded by politics and editing by Sovietologists from Langley. In them, the daughter of the great, wise and terrible “father of nations” simply remembers her life and her father. In some places, these memoirs of Alliluyeva are much sharper and more accurate than her own book, since they were not subject to American censorship. These notes reached the editorial office of the newspaper “Top Secret” thanks to the historian and journalist Nikolai Nad (Dobryukha). He brought to the editorial office 17 pages of neat, typewritten text, yellowed from time to time; it was the so-called samizdat of the mid-60s of the last century. This is the first uncensored confession of Svetlana Alliluyeva. The second confession is known to everyone - it, edited and formatted in the form of letters, was published in the West. However, researcher Nikolai Nad himself will tell you better about this archival history.

Journalist and historian Nikolai Nad during an interview with former chairman of the USSR KGB Vladimir Semichastny. November 2000

“Maybe when I write what I want to write, I’ll forget myself”

I got a samizdat copy of Svetlana Alliluyeva’s diary entries, made on a typewriter, thanks to many years of confidential acquaintance with high-ranking state security officials of different generations (including former chairmen of the KGB of the USSR). As a result, after many years of searching and questioning, when I had already stopped searching, a copy of samizdat from the original confession of Alliluyeva, dated August 1965. The name “letters” appeared later, 2 years later, in the West, and then, in Moscow, in Zhukovka, Svetlana imagined her memories as “one long, long letter.”

First, let me remind you of the details of time. At the end of December 1966, Svetlana was allowed to travel to India so that she could accompany the ashes of her deceased common-law husband Brajesh Singh. And at the beginning of March 1967, Alliluyeva “chose Freedom” and asked for political asylum at the American embassy in Delhi. How the manuscript on the basis of which the book “20 ​​Letters to a Friend” was written came to India, and from India to the USA, former KGB Chairman Vladimir Efimovich Semichastny once told me (died January 12, 2001 – Ed.):

– Svetlana handed over the printed manuscript of the future book through her friend, who was the daughter of the Indian ambassador to the Soviet Union. We were simply powerless to prevent this, since international law did not allow even the KGB to inspect diplomatic baggage, and especially the clothes of diplomats. This removal of Alliluyeva’s memoirs took place before she left for India, because, according to our intelligence data, an agreement had already been reached in Moscow to publish them abroad. And it is possible that Svetlana’s request for permission to leave in order to “scatter over the waters of the Ganges” the ashes of her beloved Hindu husband who died in Moscow was just a cover. Her love for this Indian passed away too quickly abroad...

The book “20 ​​Letters to a Friend” begins with the words: “These letters were written in the summer of 1963 in the village of Zhukovka, near Moscow, over a period of thirty-five days.” And the samizdat manuscript begins like this: “This book was written in 1965 in the village of Zhukovka. I consider what is written in it to be a confession.” Yes, in fact, it ends with a date: “Zhukovka, August 1965.” What's the difference, you say? But for a historian, everything starts with little things.

After “finishing off” Stalin at the XXII Congress and removing his body from the Mausoleum at the end of 1961, Svetlana tried not to appear in Moscow, especially in crowded places.

And even replacing her father’s surname with her mother’s surname did not save the daughter from growing hostility, and sometimes outright bullying, even from those who quite recently had literally become her best friends. She lived mostly in the country, often alone. Betrayal, misunderstanding of others and suffering brought her to church. She was baptized, it became easier, but she did not find the desired salvation in God either. And then she returned to her memories again, hoping to cleanse and calm her soul with revelations on paper. Yes, the first strong wave of such calm washed over her in the summer of 1963, the second - in 1965. She, first of all, for herself, wrote and rewrote, crossed out and added her memories and reflections. And it was in these difficult days that I came to hope that “maybe when I write what I want to write, I’ll forget myself”. These words are not in the official book “Twenty Letters to a Friend.” But they remained on the pages of samizdat, because Svetlana’s tormented soul at first did not expect any letters, deciding only to make the most frank confession to herself. The idea of ​​publishing the manuscript in the West matured later, along with the decision to emigrate, or rather to escape from the USSR.

The original original, which has come down to us in samizdat typescript, is based not on letters, but on a six-part confession and contains almost no lyrical digressions, of which “20 Letters” abound so much that they are more reminiscent of a work of art. Moreover, there is a professional conclusion that the book was not written by Alliluyeva, but mainly (in accordance with the developments of a team of CIA Sovietologists) some much more experienced and capable writer, who, like an actor, managed to talentedly get used to the role, to show himself in the spirit of Alliluyeva’s bursts of inspiration more often than she herself. But hence, in her memoirs published in the West, there are many inaccuracies, inconsistencies and contradictions. Even the dates of the birth of his brother, the death of Stalin’s mother, the suicide of Sergo Ordzhonikidze and the name of General Vlasik, who provided his father’s security for 25 years, are mixed up in the book. Because of such multilateral interventions, some things in the book became more negative, and some things, surprisingly, on the contrary, lost their degree of anti-Sovietism.

All this seems to be this, but not that... especially for those who know the details and subtleties of Stalin’s life and deeds. And in this sense, samizdat noticeably wins, especially where, in place of the usual (I would say: officially accepted) descriptions of Stalin, the daughter (unlike the book) gives impressions of meetings with her father that are accessible only to her.

Let me compare at least such a small episode in samizdat and in a book. The book says: “...I saw my father again only in August, when he returned from the Potsdam Conference. I remember that on the day when I was with him, his usual visitors came and said that the Americans had dropped the first atomic bomb in Japan... Everyone was busy with this message, and my father did not talk to me particularly carefully.”. How correctly and accurately everything is stated, so many words and so little mood!

And here’s how Svetlana herself says about this in her notes: “I was silent and did not insist on a meeting, it would have ended badly. Then I saw my father only in August 1945, everyone was busy with the message about the atomic bombing, and my father was nervous and spoke inattentively to me ... "

One detail - just two words: “father was nervous” (Stalin was nervous!), these two words immediately create tension that will be remembered forever.

Or in the book there is such an insignificant episode concerning the first hours after Stalin’s death: “Loud sobs were heard in the corridor - it was the sister, who was showing a cardiogram right here in the bathroom, crying loudly - she was crying so much, as if her whole family had died at once...”

In the samizdat version of the diary entries, this episode reveals far from insignificant Kremlin secrets: “Someone was crying loudly in the corridor. It was a nurse who gave injections at night - she locked herself in one of the rooms and cried there, as if her whole family had died.”

That is, as we now know, this “sister with a cardiogram” was nurse Moiseeva, who, according to the instructions for the procedures of March 5–6, 1953, recorded in the “Folder of draft records of medicinal prescriptions and duty schedules during the last illness of I.V. Stalin”, at 20:45 she administered an injection of calcium gluconate.

At 21:48 she signed that she had administered 20% camphor oil. And finally, at 21:50 Moiseeva signed that for the first time during the entire period of treatment she administered an injection of adrenaline to Stalin, after which he died.

But this is another story, which Svetlana Alliluyeva could not have known then and never found out. (See documentary evidence of this fact in my book "How Stalin was Killed".)

In general, in my opinion, the diary entries of Svetlana Alliluyeva, which have come down to us in the samizdat version, are of undoubted interest.

This is the first sincere confession for its own sake. Remember? “Maybe when I write what I want to write, I’ll forget myself.”

This book was written in 1965 in the village of Zhukovka. I consider what is written in it to be a confession. Then I couldn’t even think about releasing it. Now that this has become possible, I would like everyone who reads it to feel that I am addressing them personally

The first page of the “samizdat” memoirs of Stalin’s daughter

Part I

It's so quiet here. Thirty kilometers away is Moscow. A volcano of vanity and passion. World Congress. Arrival of the Chinese delegation. News from around the world. Red Square is full of people. Moscow is boiling and endlessly thirsty for news, everyone wants to be the first to know it.

And it's quiet here. This oasis of silence is located near Odintsovo. They don’t build big dachas here, they don’t cut down forests. For Muscovites, this is the best weekend getaway. Then again a return to boiling Moscow. I've lived here all my 39 years. The forest is still the same, and the villages are still the same: they cook food on kerosene stoves, but the girls already wear nylon blouses and Hungarian sandals.

This is my homeland, right here, and not in the Kremlin, which I can’t stand. When I die, let them bury me here, near that church over there, which has survived, although it is closed. I don’t go to the city, I’m suffocating there. My life is boring, maybe when I write what I want to write, I will forget. The entire generation of my peers lives a rather boring life; we envy those who are older than us. To those who returned from the Civil War: these are the Decembrists who will teach us how to live. And in the Kremlin, as in a theater: the audience is open-mouthed, applauding, there is the smell of old scenes, fairies and evil spirits are flying, the shadow of the deceased king appears and the people are silent.

Today I want to talk about March 1953, about those days in my father’s house when I watched him die.

ON MARCH 2, they found me at a French lesson and said that Malenkov asked to come to the Near Dacha. (We called her that because she was closer than the others.) It was something new, so that someone besides my father would ask to come to him. My taxi was met by Khrushchev and Bulganin: “Let’s go to the house, Beria and Malenkov are there, they will tell you everything.”

It happened at night, my father was found at 3 o’clock on the carpet and carried to the ottoman, where he lay now. There were a lot of people crowded in the large hall, the doctors were strangers - Academician Vinogradov, who observed his father, was in prison. They put leeches on the back of the head and neck, the nurse continuously gave some kind of injections, everyone saved a life that could not be saved. They even brought some kind of device to support breathing, but they never used it, and the young doctors who came with it just sat there looking confused.

It was quiet, like in a temple, no one said extraneous things, no one fussed. And only one person behaved obscenely loudly - it was Beria. His face reflected cruelty, ambition and power: he was afraid at that moment of being outwitted or underwitted. If the father occasionally opened his eyes, then Beria was the first to be next to him, look into his eyes and try to seem the most faithful. This was a complete example of a courtier. When it was all over, he was the first to jump out into the corridor, and his loud voice could be heard there, not hiding his triumph. This nit did a lot, knowing how to trick his father and at the same time laughing into his fist. Everyone knew this, but they were wildly afraid of him at that moment - when his father was dying, no one in Russia had more power than this man.

The right half of my father’s body was paralyzed; he only opened his eyes a few times, and then everyone rushed to him...

When the body later lay in front of me in the Hall of Columns, my father was closer to me than during his lifetime. He has never seen his five grandchildren, and yet they still love him. I didn’t sit there, I could only stand: I stood and understood that a new era was beginning, liberation was beginning for me and the people. I listened to music, a quiet Georgian lullaby, looked into the calmed face and thought that I had done nothing to help this man during my life.

Bleeding in the brain leads to oxygen starvation and then to suffocation. The father’s breathing became faster and faster, his face darkened, his lips turned black, the man slowly suffocated - the agony was terrible. Before his death, he suddenly opened his eyes and looked around at everyone. Everyone rushed towards him, and then he suddenly raised his left hand and either pointed at something or threatened us. The next minute it was all over.

Everyone stood there, petrified, then the government members moved towards the exit to their cars and went to the city to tell the news. They fussed all these days and were afraid: how it would all end, but when it happened, many had sincere tears. There were Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Bulganin, Khrushchev - they were all afraid, but they also respected their father, who could not be resisted. Finally everyone left, only Bulganin, Mikoyan and I remained in the hall. We sat next to the body, which should have been lying there for several hours. It was on the table and covered with the carpet, where the father had the stroke, in the room where dinners usually took place. Business was decided here during lunches. The fireplace was burning (my father preferred and loved it only for heating). There was a radio in the corner. My father had a good collection of records, Russian and Georgian: now this music was saying goodbye to its owner.

The guards and servants came to say goodbye, everyone was crying, and I sat like a stone. And then a white car drove up to the porch and the body was taken away. Someone threw a coat over me, someone hugged me by the shoulders. It was Bulganin, I buried my face in my chest and burst into tears, he cried too. I walked along a long, dimly lit gallery to the dining room, where I was forced to eat before leaving for Moscow. Someone was crying loudly in the corridor. It was a nurse who gave injections at night - she locked herself in one of the rooms and cried there, as if her whole family had died.

It was five o'clock in the morning, and soon the news would be announced on the radio. And then at 6 o’clock the slow voice of Levitan or someone else similar to him was heard, a voice that always communicates something important, and everyone understood what had happened. That day, many people cried on the streets, and I felt good that everyone was crying with me.

12 years have passed and little has changed in my life. I, as before, exist under the shadow of my father, and life is in full swing all around. A whole generation has grown up for whom STALIN almost does not exist, just as many others associated with this name do not exist, neither good nor bad. This generation brought with it a life unknown to us. Let's see what it will be like. People want happiness, colors, languages, passions. I want culture, so that life can finally become European and for Russia, I want to see all the countries. Greedy, rather, now. I want comfort, elegant furniture and clothes. This is so natural after so many years of Puritanism and fasting, isolation and isolation from the whole world. It’s not for me to judge all this, even if I am against abstractionism, but I still understand why it captures the minds of not at all stupid people: I know that they feel the future in modern times. Why stop them from thinking the way they want. After all, this is not what is scary, what is scary is ignorance, not carried away by anything, believing that everything is enough for today and that if there is five times more cast iron and four times more eggs, then, in fact, there will be a paradise about which this stupid person dreams humanity.

The twentieth century, the revolution mixed everything up and moved it from its place. Everything changed places: wealth and poverty, nobility and poverty. But Russia remained Russia, and it also needed to live, build, and strive forward. To conquer something new and keep up with the others, but I would like to catch up and surpass.

And now there is a gloomy empty house where my father used to live for the last 20 years after my mother’s death. Initially it was made nicely, modernly - a light one-story cottage, located among forests, gardens and flowers. Upstairs there is a huge solarium covering the entire roof, where we loved to walk and run. I remember how everyone who belonged to our family came to look at the new house, it was fun and noisy. There was my aunt Anna Sergeevna, my mother’s sister and her husband Stakh Redens, there was Uncle Pavlusha and his wife, there were Svanidze - uncle and aunt Marusya, my brothers Yakov and Vasily. But somewhere in the corner of the room, Lavrenty’s pince-nez, quiet and modest, was already sparkling. He came from time to time from Georgia to fall at his feet, and came to look at the new dacha. Everyone who was close to our house hated him, starting with Redens and Svanidze, who knew him from their work in the Georgian Cheka. Disgust for this man and a vague fear of him were unanimous in our circle of loved ones.

Mom had been making scenes a long time ago, in 1929, demanding that this man should not set foot in our house. The father answered: “Give me the facts, you don’t convince me!” And she shouted: “I don’t know what facts you need, I see that he is a scoundrel, I will not sit at the same table with him!” - “Well, get out, this is my comrade, he is a good security officer, he helped us in Georgia to foresee the uprising of the Mingrelians, I believe him.”

Now the house stands unrecognizable, it was rebuilt many times according to his father’s plans; he must have simply not found peace for himself: either he lacked the sun, or he needed a shady terrace. If there was one floor, another was added, and if there were two, one was demolished. The second floor was added in 1948, and a year later there was a huge reception in honor of the Chinese delegation, then it stood idle.

My father always lived downstairs, in one room, it served him all - a bed was made on the sofa, telephones were on the table, the large dining table was littered with papers, newspapers, books. This is where food was served if no one else was there. There was a buffet with dishes and medicines; my father chose the medicine himself, and his only authority in medicine was Vinogradov, who examined him every two years. There was a large carpet and a fireplace - the only attributes of luxury that my father recognized and loved. In recent years, almost every day almost the entire Politburo came to dine with him, dined in the common room, and immediately received guests. I only saw Tito here in 1946, but everyone, probably the leaders of the Communist Parties, visited here: Americans, British, French, etc. It was in this room that my father lay in March 1953; one of the sofas near the wall became his deathbed...

From spring to autumn, my father spent his days on the terraces, one was glazed on all sides, two were open with a roof and without a roof. A glass terrace, added in recent years, opened directly onto the garden. The garden, flowers and forest all around were my father’s favorite pastime, his relaxation. He himself never dug the ground, did not pick up a shovel, but trimmed dry branches, this was his only work in the garden. Father wandered around the garden and seemed to be looking for a cozy place, but he looked and did not find it. They brought him papers, newspapers, and tea. When I visited him for the last time, two months before his death, I was unpleasantly surprised - photographs of children were hung on the walls of the rooms: a boy on skis, a girl feeding a baby goat milk, children under a cherry tree and something else. A gallery of drawings appeared in the large hall: there were Gorky, Sholokhov and someone else, and there was a reproduction of Repin’s response to the Cossacks to the Sultan. My father loved this thing and loved to repeat the obscene text of their answer to anyone. A portrait of Lenin hung higher up, not one of the best.

He did not live in the apartment, and the formula “Stalin in the Kremlin” was invented by someone unknown.

The house in Kuntsevo experienced a strange event after the death of its father. On the second day after the death of his father, by order of Beria, they called all the servants and guards and announced that things should be taken out, and everyone left the premises. Confused people who did not understand anything, collected things, dishes, books, furniture, loaded them onto trucks, and took everything away to some warehouses. People who had served for ten to fifteen years were thrown out onto the street. Security officers were sent to other cities, two shot themselves on the same days. Then, when Beria was shot, they took things back and invited former commandants and servants. They were preparing to open a museum, but then the 20th Congress followed, after which the idea of ​​a museum could not come to anyone’s mind. Now the service buildings are either a hospital or a sanatorium, the house is closed, gloomy...

Svetlana on the knees of Beria, at that time still the first secretary of the Transcaucasian regional committee of the CPSU (b)

The house where I spent my childhood belonged to Zubalov, an oil industrialist from Batumi. Father and Mikoyan knew this name well; in the 1890s they organized strikes at his factories. After the revolution, Mikoyan and his family, Voroshilov, Shaposhnikov and several other families of old Bolsheviks settled in Zubalovo-2, and father and mother settled in Zubalovo-4 nearby. At Mikoyan’s dacha, even today everything has been preserved as the emigrated owners abandoned it: on the veranda there is a marble dog, the owner’s favorite, marble statues taken from Italy, on the walls there are ancient French tapestries, multi-colored stained glass windows.

Our estate was constantly being transformed. Father cleared the forest around, half of it was cut down, it became lighter, warmer, drier. The plots were planted with fruit trees, strawberries, raspberries, and currants were planted in abundance, and we children grew up in the conditions of a small landowner’s estate with its village life, picking mushrooms and berries, our own honey, pickles and marinades, our own poultry.

Mom cared about our education and upbringing. My childhood with her lasted six and a half years, but I was already reading and writing in Russian, German, drawing, sculpting, gluing, and writing musical dictations. Next to my brother was a wonderful man, teacher Muravyov, who came up with interesting walks into the forest. Alternately, summer, winter and autumn, a teacher was with us, doing clay modeling, sawing, coloring, drawing and I don’t know what else.

This entire educational kitchen was spinning, launched by my mother’s hand. Mom was not near us at home, she worked in the editorial office of a magazine, entered the Industrial Academy, was always sitting somewhere, and gave her free time to her father, he was her whole life. I don’t remember affection, she was afraid to spoil me: my father spoiled me. I remember my last birthday with my mother in February 1932, then I turned six years old. It was celebrated in the apartment: Russian poems, couplets about drummers, double-dealers, Ukrainian hopak in national costumes. Artyom Sergeev, now a general, and then a peer and comrade of my brother, standing on all fours, imitated a bear. My father also took part in the celebration, although he was a passive spectator and did not like the children's hubbub.

Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin often lived with us in Zubalovo, whom everyone adored (he filled the whole house with animals). Hedgehogs were running on the balcony, snakes were sitting in jars, a tame fox was running around the park, a hawk was sitting in a cage. Bukharin, wearing sandals, a sweatshirt, and canvas summer trousers, played with the children, joked around with my nanny, taught her to ride a bicycle and shoot a blowgun. Everyone had fun with him. Many years later, when he was gone, Bukharin’s fox ran around the Kremlin, already depopulated and deserted, for a long time and hid from people in the Tainitsky Garden...

Adults often had fun on holidays, Budyonny appeared with a dashing accordion, and songs were heard. My father also sang, he had hearing and a high voice, but for some reason he spoke in a dull and low voice. Budyonny and Voroshilov sang especially well. I don’t know if my mother sang, but on exceptional occasions she danced Lezginka beautifully and smoothly.

The Kremlin apartment was managed by the housekeeper Caroline Tin, a Riga German woman, a sweet old woman, neat, very kind.

In 1929–1933, servants appeared; before that, my mother ran the household herself, received rations and cards. This is how the entire Soviet elite lived then - they tried to educate their children, they hired governesses and German women from the old days, their wives worked.

In the summer, my parents went on vacation to Sochi. For entertainment, my father would sometimes shoot with a double-barreled shotgun at kites or hares caught in car headlights at night. Billiards, bowling alley, and small towns were the sports available to my father. He never swam, he didn’t know how, he didn’t like to sit in the sun, he liked walking in the forest.

Despite her youth, in 1931 my mother turned 29 years old, she was respected by everyone in the house. She was beautiful, smart, delicate and at the same time firm and stubborn, demanding in what seemed immutable to her. My mother treated my brother Yasha, my father’s son from his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, with sincere love. Yasha was only seven years younger than his stepmother, but he also loved and respected her very much. Mom was friends with all the Svanidzes, relatives of her father’s first, early deceased wife. Her brothers Alexei, Pavel, sister Anna and her husband Redens - they were all in our house constantly. Almost all of them had a tragic life: the talented and interesting fate of each of them was not destined to take place to the end. Revolution and politics are merciless to human destinies.

Our grandfather, Sergei Alliluyev, was from the peasants of the Voronezh province, Russian, but his grandmother was a gypsy. All the Alliluyevs got their southern, somewhat exotic appearance from the gypsies: huge eyes, dazzling dark skin and thinness, a thirst for freedom and a passion for moving from place to place. Grandfather worked as a mechanic in the railway workshops of Transcaucasia and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1896.

In St. Petersburg he had a small 4-room apartment; such apartments seem like the ultimate dream to our current professors. After the revolution, he worked in the field of electrification, built the Shaturskaya hydroelectric power station, and was at one time the chairman of Lenenergo. He died in 1945 at the age of 79. His mother's death broke him, he became withdrawn and completely quiet. After 1932, Redens was arrested, and after the war, in 1948, Anna Redens herself went to prison. Thank God, before he lived to see this day, he died in June 1945 from stomach cancer. I saw him shortly before his death, he was like a living relic, he could no longer speak, he only covered his eyes with his hand and cried silently.

Svetlana with her father and brothers Vasily (left) and Yakov (right). Sitting next to Stalin is the Secretary of the Central Committee Andrei Zhdanov

He lay in the coffin like a Hindu saint - his withered, thin face, his hooked nose, his snow-white mustache and beard were so beautiful. The coffin stood in the hall of the Museum of the Revolution, many people came - old Bolsheviks. At the cemetery, one of them said words that I didn’t quite understand at the time: “He was from the generation of Marxist idealists.”

The marriage of my grandfather and grandmother was very romantic. She ran away from his house, throwing a bundle of things through the window, when she was not yet 14 years old. In Georgia, where she was born and raised, youth and love came early. She was a strange mixture of nationalities. Her father was Ukrainian Evgeniy Fedorenko, but his mother was Georgian and spoke Georgian. He married a German woman, Eichholtz, from a colonist’s family; she, as expected, owned a pub, cooked wonderfully, gave birth to 9 children, the last one Olga, our grandmother, and took them to the Protestant church. Unlike the delicate grandfather, she could burst into screams and abuse at our cooks, commandants, and servers, who considered her a blessed old woman and a tyrant. Four of her children were born in the Caucasus, and all were southerners. Grandma was very good - so much so that there was no end to fans. Sometimes she rushed into adventures with some Pole, then with a Bulgarian, or even with a Turk. She loved southerners and claimed that Russian men were boors.

My father knew the Alliluyev family since the late 1890s. Family legend says that in 1903, he, then still a young man, saved his mother in Baku when she was two years old and she fell from the embankment into the sea. For the mother, impressionable and romantic, such a connection was of great importance when she met him as a 16-year-old high school student, as an exiled revolutionary, a 38-year-old family friend. Grandfather came to our apartment in the Kremlin and used to sit in my room for a long time, waiting for my father to come for dinner. Grandmother was simpler, more primitive. Usually she accumulated a stock of purely everyday complaints and requests, with which she addressed her father at a convenient moment: “Joseph, just think, I can’t get vinegar anywhere!” Father laughed, mother got angry, and everything was quickly settled. After 1948, she could not understand why, why her daughter Anna was in prison, she wrote letters to her father, gave them to me, then took them back, realizing that this would lead to nothing. She died in 1951 at the age of 76.

Her children, all without exception, suffered a tragic fate, each to their own. Mother's brother Pavel was a professional military man, since 1920 the Soviet military representative in Germany. From time to time he sent something: dresses, perfume. My father couldn’t stand the smell of perfume, believing that a woman should smell fresh and clean, so perfume was used underground. In the fall of 1938, Pavel went on vacation to Sochi, and when he returned to his armored department, he did not find anyone to work with - the department was swept away with a broom. He felt bad with his heart, and right there, in the office, he died of a broken heart. Later, Beria, who settled in Moscow, convinced his father that he had been poisoned by his wife, and in 1948 she was accused of this along with other espionage cases. She received 10 years of solitary confinement and was released only after 1954.

The husband of my mother’s sister Redens, a Polish Bolshevik, after the Civil War was a security officer in Ukraine, and then in Georgia, here he first encountered Beria, and they did not like each other. His arrival in the NKVD of Moscow in 1938 meant bad things for Redens; he was sent to Alma-Ata, and was soon summoned to Moscow, and was never seen again... Lately, he has been trying to see his father, standing up for people. My father did not tolerate interference in his assessments of people: if he transferred his acquaintance to the category of enemies, then he was not able to make the reverse transfer, and the defenders themselves lost his trust, becoming potential enemies.

After her husband’s arrest, Anna Sergeevna moved with her children to Moscow, she was given the same apartment, but she was no longer allowed into our house. Someone advised her to write her memoirs; the book was published in 1947, and aroused the terrible anger of her father. A devastating review appeared in Pravda, unacceptably rude, categorical and unfair. Everyone was incredibly scared, except Anna Sergeevna, she didn’t even pay attention to the review, she knew that it was not true, what else. She laughed and said that she would continue her memories. She failed to do this. In 1948, when a new wave of arrests began, when those who had already served their time since 1937 were returned to prison and exile, this share did not escape her.

Together with Pavel's widow, together with academician Lina Stern, Lozovsky, Molotov's wife Zhemchuzhina, she was also arrested. Anna Sergeevna returned in 1954, after spending several years in a solitary prison hospital, she returned as a schizophrenic. Many years have passed since then, she has recovered a little, the delirium has stopped, although sometimes she talks to herself at night. Talking about the cult of personality makes her angry, she begins to worry and talk. “We always exaggerate everything, they exaggerate,” she says excitedly, “now everything is blamed on STALIN, and it was difficult for Stalin too.” Anna Redens died in 1964 after this book was written in draft.

Part II

It’s strange, but my father knew and saw only three of his 8 grandchildren, my children and Yasha’s daughter Gulya, who aroused genuine tenderness in him. It’s even stranger that he had the same feelings for my son, whose father, a Jew, his father never wanted to meet. At the time of the first meeting, the boy was about three years old, a very pretty child: either Greek or Georgian, with blue eyes with long eyelashes. My father came to Zubalovo, where my son lived with my husband’s mother and my nanny, already old and sick. The father played with him for half an hour, ran around the house with a quick gait and left. I was in seventh heaven. The father saw Ioska two more times, the last time about four months before his death, when the baby was already seven years old. One must think that the son remembered this meeting; the portrait of his grandfather is on his table. At the age of 18, he graduated from school and, of all possible professions, chose the most humane one - a doctor.

But my Katya, despite the fact that her father loved her father, like all the Zhdanovs, did not evoke tender feelings in him; he saw her only once, when she was two and a half years old. On November 8, 1952, on the twentieth anniversary of my mother’s death, as usual, we were sitting at a table laden with fresh vegetables, fruits, nuts, and there was good Georgian wine - it was brought only for my father. He ate very little, picked something and pinched off crumbs, but the table always had to be laden with food. Everyone was happy…

Alexei Svanidze, the brother of my father’s first wife, was three years younger than me, an old Bolshevik “Alyosha,” a handsome Georgian who dressed well, even with panache, a Marxist with a European education, after the revolution, the first People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Georgia and a member of the Central Committee. He married Maria Anisimovna, the daughter of wealthy parents, who graduated from the Higher Women's Courses in St. Petersburg, the Conservatory in Georgia and sang at the Tiflis Opera. She belonged to a wealthy Jewish family of immigrants from Spain. Svanidze and his wife came to us in Zubalovo along with Mikoyan’s sons, Gamarnik’s daughter, and Voroshilov’s children. Young people and adults met on the tennis court, there was a Russian bathhouse where amateurs, including my father, gathered. Uncle Lesha had his own methods of education: having learned one day that his son, while having fun, put a kitten in a burning fireplace and burned it, Uncle Lesha dragged his son to the fireplace and stuck his hand there...

Shortly after Redens' arrest, Alexei and his wife were also arrested. How could the father do this? The crafty and flattering man that Beria was, whispered that these people were against it, that there were compromising materials, that there were dangerous connections, trips abroad and the like. Here are the facts, materials, X and Z showed anything in the dungeons of the NKVD - my father did not delve into this, the past disappeared for him - this was all the inexorability and cruelty of his nature. “Oh, you betrayed me,” something said in his soul, “well, I don’t know you anymore!” There was no memory, there was only a malicious interest in whether he would admit his mistakes. Father was merciless in the face of Beria’s machinations - it was enough to bring protocols admitting his guilt, and if there was no confession, it was even worse. Uncle Lyosha did not admit any guilt, did not appeal to his father with letters for help, and in February 1942, at the age of 60, he was shot. That year there was some kind of wave when people sentenced to long imprisonment were shot in the camps. Aunt Marusya listened to her husband’s death sentence and died of a broken heart...

Now they make mother out to be either a saint, or mentally ill, or innocently murdered. She was neither one nor the other. Born in Baku, her childhood was spent in the Caucasus. Greek and Bulgarian women are like this - regular oval faces, black eyebrows, slightly upturned nose, dark skin, soft brown eyes with straight eyelashes. In her mother’s early letters, a cheerful, kind girl of fifteen years old is visible: “Dear Anna Sergeevna! Sorry that I didn’t answer for a long time, I had to prepare for the exams ten days in advance, since I was lazy in the summer. I had to adjust a lot, especially in algebra and geometry, this morning I went to take the exam, but it is still unknown whether I passed it or not,” she wrote in May 1916.

A year later, the events begin to interest the girl: “On March 13, we went to the gymnasium to the funeral of the fallen. The order was excellent, although we stood still for seven hours. They sang a lot, we were struck by the beauty of the Champ de Mars - torches were burning all around, music was thundering, the spectacle was uplifting. Dad, the centurion, had a bandage over his shoulder and a white flag in his hand.”

In February 1918 she writes: “Hello, dears! There is a terrible hunger strike in St. Petersburg. They give eight pieces of bread a day. Once they didn’t give it at all, I even scolded the Bolsheviks, but now they promised to add more. I’ve lost about twenty pounds, I have to change everything, all my skirts and underwear, everything is falling apart...”

After marriage, my mother came to Moscow and began working in Lenin’s secretariat. She was strict with us children, and my father always carried me in his arms and called me with affectionate words. One day I cut a tablecloth with scissors. God, how my mother spanked my hands, but my father came and somehow calmed me down, he could not stand the child’s crying. Mom was with us very rarely, always busy with studies, service, and party assignments. In 1931, when she turned 30, she studied at the Industrial Academy, her secretary was the young Khrushchev, who later became a professional party worker. Mom longed for work, she was oppressed by the position of the first lady of the kingdom. After the children, she was the youngest in the house. Yasha’s attempt to commit suicide in 1929 made a very painful impression on her; he only wounded himself, but her father found a reason for ridicule: “Ha! missed!" – he loved to mock. There are many photographs left of my mother, but the further we go, the sadder she is. In recent years, it has increasingly occurred to her to leave her father, he was too rude, harsh, and inattentive for her. Recently, before her death, she was unusually sad, irritable, she complained to her friends that everything was boring, nothing made her happy. My last meeting with her was two days before her death. She sat me down on her favorite ottoman and spent a long time instilling in me what I should be like. “Don’t drink wine,” she said, “never drink wine.” These were echoes of her eternal dispute with her father, who, according to the Caucasian habit, gave the children wine to drink...

The reason itself was insignificant - a small quarrel at the banquet of the 15th anniversary of the October Revolution. Her father told her: “Hey, drink!” – she shouted: “I don’t want you, hey you.” She got up and left the table in front of everyone. The father was sleeping in his room. Our housekeeper prepared breakfast in the morning and... went to wake up my mother. Shaking with fear, she ran to our nursery and called the nanny, they went together. Mom was lying covered in blood next to her bed, in her hand was a small Walter pistol, which Pavel had once brought from Berlin. She was already cold. Two women, exhausted from fear that the father might come in now, laid the body on the bed and put it in order. Then they ran to call the head of security Enukidze, my mother’s friend Polina Molotova. Molotov and Voroshilov arrived.

“Joseph, Nadya is no longer with us,” they told him. We children were sent out for a walk at an inopportune time. I remember how at breakfast we were taken to the dacha in Sokolovka. At the end of the day, Voroshilov arrived, went for a walk with us, tried to play, and he cried. Then in the hall of today's GUM there was a coffin and farewell took place. They didn’t take me to the funeral; only Vasily went. The father was shocked by what happened, he did not understand: why was he stabbed in the back like that? He asked those around him: wasn’t he attentive? At times he felt sadness; he believed that his mother had betrayed him and went with the opposition of those years. He was so angry that when he came to the civil funeral service, he pushed the coffin away and, turning around, walked away and did not go to the funeral. He never visited her grave on Novodevichy: he believed that his mother left as his personal enemy. He searched around: who is to blame(?), who inspired this idea in her? Maybe in this way he wanted to find his important enemy, in those days there were often shootings - the end of Trotskyism, collectivization began, the party was torn apart by the opposition. One after another, major party figures committed suicide, most recently Mayakovsky shot himself, in those days people were emotional and sincere, if it was impossible for them to live like that, then they shot themselves. Who does that now?

Our carefree childhood life fell apart after our mother passed away. The very next year, 1933, when I arrived in our beloved Zubalovo, in the summer I did not find our playground there in the forest with a swing, a Robinson house - everything was swept away like a broom, only traces of sand remained for a long time in the forest, then everything was overgrown. The teacher left, his brother’s teacher remained for another two years, then he tired of Vasily by sometimes forcing him to do his homework, and disappeared. My father changed his apartment, it was uncomfortable - it was located along the floors of the Senate building and was previously just a corridor with one and a half meter shutters and vaulted ceilings. He saw us children during lunch. There were gradually no more people in the house who knew my mother; everyone disappeared somewhere. Now everything in the house was put at the expense of the state, the staff of servants increased, double staffs of security, waiters, cleaners, and all the employees of the GPU appeared. In 1939, when everyone was being grabbed left and right, some helpful personnel officer discovered that my nanny’s husband, with whom she separated before the World War, served as a clerk in the police. When I heard that they were going to kick her out, I started roaring. The father could not stand the tears, he demanded that the nanny be left alone.

Next to my father, I remember General Vlasik, a Red Army guard in 1919 and then a very important person behind the scenes. He, heading his father’s entire guard, considering himself almost the closest person to him and being stupid, rude, illiterate, but noble, went so far as to dictate the thoughts of Comrade STALIN to artists. He was always in sight; later he was in Kuntsevo and directed all his father’s residences from there. The new housekeeper assigned to our apartment in the Kremlin, a lieutenant, and then a state security major, was appointed by Beria, who was a relative and was his direct supervisor.

Svetlana Alliluyeva on vacation

Since 1937, an order was introduced: wherever I went, a security officer followed me a little distance away. At first, this role was played by the bilious, skinny Ivan Ivanovich Krivenko, then he was replaced by the important, fat Volkov, who terrorized my entire school. I had to get dressed not in the locker room, but in a nook, near the office. Instead of breakfast in the public canteen, he handed me a personal sandwich, also in a special corner. Then a nice man appeared, Mikhail Nikitich Klimov, who followed me throughout the war. In my first year at university, I told my father that I was ashamed to walk around with this tail, he understood the situation and said: “To hell with you, let them kill you, I’m not answering.” So I got the right to go alone to the theater, cinema, or just outside. The death of my mother devastated my father and took away his last faith in people. It was then that Beria drove up to him, having climbed with the support of his father to the first secretaries of Georgia. From there, the journey to Moscow was no longer long: in 1938, he reigned here and began to visit his father every day.

Beria was more cunning, more treacherous, more purposeful, firmer and, therefore, stronger than his father, he knew his weak strings, flattered him with purely oriental shamelessness. All my mother’s friends, both brothers of my first wife and my sister were the first to fall. The influence of this demon on my father was strong and invariably effective. He was a born provocateur. Once in the Caucasus, Beria was arrested by the Reds, caught in treason, and sat awaiting punishment. There was a telegram from Kirov, the commander of Transcaucasia, demanding that the traitor be shot; this was not done, and she became the source of Kirov's murder. There was another person in our house whom we lost in 1937. I'm talking about Ordzhonikidze, he shot himself in February, and his death was declared a betrayal of doctors. If mom were alive, only she could fight Beria.

From 1933 until the war, I lived at school. There was a huge library in my father’s rooms; no one used it except me. The dinner table was, of course, set for 8 people; we went to the theater and cinema at 9 pm. I walked ahead of the procession to the other end of the deserted Kremlin, and behind me were armored vehicles in single file, and countless guards walked. The movie ended late, at 2 am, we watched 2 episodes and even more. Sometimes in the summer, my father took me to his place in Kuntsevo for three days, and if he felt that I was bored with him, he was offended, did not talk and did not call for a long time.

Sometimes he would suddenly come to Zubalovo, barbecue would be grilled on a fire in the forest, the table would be set right there, and everyone would be given good Georgian wine to drink. Without my mother, squabbles between relatives arose in Zubalovo; warring factions sought protection from my father. They sent me, and my father got angry: “Why are you repeating like an empty drum?” In the summer, my father usually went to Sochi or Crimea. My father signed all his letters to me: “Secretary of Setanka, the poor man, I. Stalin.” It was a game invented by him: he called me the mistress, and himself and his comrades my secretaries; he amused himself with it before the war. My father was with few people as tender as he was with me, he also loved his mother, and told how she beat him.

She also beat his father, who loved to drink and died in a drunken brawl; someone hit him with a knife. My mother dreamed of seeing my father become a priest and regretted that he did not become one until the last days of his life. She did not want to leave Georgia, led the modest life of a pious old woman and died in 1937 at the age of 80. My father sometimes showed some quirks towards me. He didn’t like dresses above the knees, and more than once brought me to tears with his nitpicking about my clothes.

de: “You’re walking around with bare legs again.” Either he demanded that the dress be not waist-length, but a robe, then he tore the beret off my head: “What the hell, can’t you get yourself a better hat?”

Yakov Dzhugashvili with his daughter Galina

Part III

His father did not like his eldest son Yasha, and when he fell ill after an unsuccessful suicide, he began to treat him even worse. Yasha's first marriage quickly fell apart; a year later he married a pretty woman, abandoned by her husband. Ulya was Jewish, and this also displeased her father. True, in those years he did not express his hatred of Jews as clearly as after the war, but even earlier he had no sympathy for them. But Yasha was firm, they were different people: “Father always speaks in theses,” my brother once told me.

The war began, and his unit was sent to where there was complete confusion, to Belarus, near Baranovichi. Soon they stopped receiving any news. At the end of August I spoke with my father from Sochi. Ulya stood next to me, not taking her eyes off my face. I asked: why is there no news from Yasha? “Trouble happened, Yasha was captured,” said the father and added, “don’t say anything to his wife yet.” Ulya rushed to me with questions, but I insisted that he himself knew nothing. The father had the idea that this was not without reason, that someone had deliberately betrayed Yasha, and whether Ulya was involved in this. In September in Moscow, he told me: “Yasha’s daughter will stay with you for now, and his wife, apparently, is a dishonest person, we need to figure this out.” Ulya was arrested in October 1942 and remained in prison until the spring of 1943, when it became clear that she had nothing to do with this misfortune, and Yakov’s behavior in captivity convinced his father that he was not going to surrender.

In the fall, leaflets with photographs of Yasha were dropped on Moscow - in a tunic, without buttonholes, thin and black. The father looked at Yasha for a long time, hoping that it was a fake, but it was impossible not to recognize Yasha. Many years later, people who had been captured returned, it was known that he behaved with dignity and suffered cruel treatment. In the winter of 1944, my father suddenly said to me during our rare meeting: “The Germans offered to exchange Yasha for one of their own, I will bargain with them, in a war as in a war.” He was worried, it was clear from his irritated tone, and he didn’t talk about it anymore. Then he returned to this again in the spring of 1945: “Yasha was shot by the Germans, I received a letter from a Belgian officer, he was an eyewitness.” Voroshilov received the same news. When Yasha died, his father felt some kind of warmth towards him and realized his unfair treatment. I recently saw an article in a French magazine. The author writes that the father answered negatively to the correspondents’ question about whether his son was in captivity and pretended that he did not know this. It looked like him. Abandon your own, forget as if they did not exist. However, we betrayed all our prisoners in the same way. Later there was an attempt to immortalize Yasha as a hero. My father told me that Mikhail Chiaureli, when staging his puppet epic “The Fall of Berlin,” consulted with him: whether it was worth making Yasha there as a hero, but my father did not agree. I think he was right. Chiaureli would have made a fake doll out of his brother, just like everyone else - he only needed a plot to exalt his father. Perhaps the father simply did not want to stick out his relative; he considered all of them, without exception, not worthy of memory.

When the war began, we had to leave Moscow to continue studying, we were rounded up and sent to Kuibyshev. It was unknown whether my father would leave Moscow; just in case, his library was loaded. In Kuibyshev they gave us a mansion on Pionerskaya Street; there was some kind of museum here. The house was hastily renovated, there was a smell of paint, and there were mice in the hallways. My father did not write, it was very difficult to talk to him on the phone - he was nervous, angry, answering that he had no time to talk to me. I arrived in Moscow on October 28, my father was in the Kremlin shelter, I went to see him. The rooms were decorated with wooden panels, a large table with cutlery, like in Kuntsevo, exactly the same furniture, the commandants were proud that they copied the Near Dacha, believing that this was pleasing their father. The same people came as always, only in military uniform. Everyone was excited, maps were lying around and hanging, and the situation at the front was reported to father. Finally, he noticed me: “Well, how are you there?” – he asked me, not really thinking about his question. “I’m studying,” I answered, “they organized a special school for evacuated Muscovites.” My father suddenly looked up at me with quick eyes: “Like... a special school? Oh... you,” he looked for a more decent word, “oh, you’re a damned caste, give them a separate school.” Vlasik, you scoundrel, this is his doing.” He was right: the capital’s elite arrived, accustomed to a comfortable life, bored here in modest provincial apartments, living according to their own laws. Thank God, I studied there only for one winter and returned to Moscow in July. I felt terribly lonely, maybe the age was right: 16 years old - the time of dreams, doubts, challenges that I had never known before.

That winter, a terrible discovery befell me - in an American magazine I came across an article about my father, where, as a long-known fact, it was mentioned that his wife committed suicide on November 9, 1932. I was shocked and couldn’t believe my eyes, I rushed to my grandmother for an explanation, she told me in detail how it happened: “Well, who would have thought,” she said dejectedly, “who would have thought that she would do this.” Since then I had no peace, I thought about my father, his character, I looked for reasons. Everything connected with the recent arrest of Uli now seems strange, I began to think about things that I had never thought about before, although these were only attempts at doubt.

In the fall of 1941, housing was prepared in Kuibyshev for my father - they built several dachas on the banks of the Volga, dug a colossal shelter underground, and in the former building of the regional committee they set up the same empty rooms with tables and sofas that were in Moscow. But he didn't come.

Trouble awaited me in Moscow. In the fall, our Zubalovo was blown up, a new house was built, not like the old one - awkward, dark green. Zubalov's life in the winter of 1942 and 1943 was unusual and unpleasant; the spirit of drunken revelry entered the house. Guests came to brother Vasily - athletes, actors, pilot friends, copious libations were constantly held with the girls, the radio blared. There was fun, as if there was no war, and at the same time it was extremely boring.

My whole life was just the dying of roots - fragile, unreal. I was not attached either to my relatives by blood, or to Moscow, where I was born and lived all my life, or to everything that surrounded me there since childhood.

I was forty years old. For twenty-seven of them I lived under heavy pressure, and for the next fourteen I only gradually freed myself from this pressure. Twenty-seven years - from 1926 to 1953 - were a time that historians call the “period of Stalinism” in the USSR, a time of one-man despotism, bloody terror, economic difficulties, brutal war and ideological reaction.

After 1953, the country began to gradually revive and come to its senses. Terror seemed to be a thing of the past. But what took shape over the years as an economic, social and political system turned out to be tenacious and tenacious within the party, and in the minds of the enslaved and blinded millions.

And although I lived at the “very top of the pyramid”, where the truth reached the least, my whole life fell into two periods the same as the life of the entire country: before 1953, and after it.

For me, the process of liberation from spiritual captivity followed its own path, not like others. But he walked steadily, and drop by drop the truth made its way through the granite.

“A drop chisels a stone, not by force, but by falling often.” We learned this Latin saying by heart back in university.

Otherwise, I would not be thinking now, in Lucknow, about what I should do, but would live calmly in Georgia, where my father’s name is still surrounded by honor, and would give tours of the Stalin Museum in Gori, telling about “great deeds” and “ achievements"…

In the family where I was born and raised, everything was abnormal and depressing, and my mother’s suicide was the most eloquent symbol of hopelessness. The Kremlin walls are around, the secret police are in the house, in the school, in the kitchen. A devastated, bitter man, walled off from old colleagues, from friends, from loved ones, from the whole world, together with his accomplices, he turned the country into a prison where everything living and thinking was executed; the man who aroused fear and hatred among millions of people is my father...

If only fate had allowed me to be born in the shack of an unknown Georgian shoemaker! How natural and easy it would have been for me, along with others, to hate that distant tyrant, his party, his deeds and words. Isn’t it clear where is black and where is white?

But no, I was born his daughter, his beloved in childhood. My youth passed under the sign of his irrefutable authority; everything taught and forced me to believe this authority, and if there was so much grief around, then I could only think that others were to blame for it. For twenty-seven years I witnessed the spiritual destruction of my own father and watched day after day as everything human abandoned him and he gradually turned into a gloomy monument to himself... But my generation was taught to think that this monument is the embodiment of all the beautiful ideals of communism, its living personification .

We were taught communism almost from the cradle - at home, at school, at university. We were first Octoberists, then pioneers, then Komsomol members. Then we were accepted into the party. And if I did not do any work in the party (like many), but only paid dues (like everyone else), then I was still obliged to vote for any party decision, even if it seemed wrong to me. Lenin was our icon, Marx and Engels the apostles, their every word an immutable truth. And every word of my father, written or oral, is a revelation from above.

Communism was an unshakable stronghold for me in my youth. The authority of the father remained unshakable, his rightness in everything without exception. But later I began to gradually doubt his rightness and become more and more convinced of his unreasonable cruelty. The theories and dogmas of “Marxism-Leninism” faded and faded in my eyes. The party was deprived of its heroic and revolutionary aura of righteousness. And when, after 1953, she tried clumsily and helplessly to disassociate herself from her former leader, it only convinced me of the deep internal unity of the party and the “cult of personality” that it had supported for more than twenty years.

It gradually became more and more obvious to me not only the despotism of my father and the fact that he created a system of bloody terror that killed millions of innocent victims. It also became clear to me that the entire system that made this possible was deeply flawed, and that no one involved could escape responsibility, no matter how hard he tried. And the entire structure, based on lies, collapsed from top to bottom.

Once you have your sight, you cannot pretend to be blind. This process of insight was not easy and slow for me. He's still going. My generation knew too little about the history of their country, the revolution, the party; they hid the truth from us for a long time.

I knew my father at home, in the circle of loved ones, with whom he was contradictory and changeable. But for a long time I could not know the history of the political struggle for sole power that he waged in the party against his former comrades. And the more I recognized her - sometimes from the most unexpected sources - the deeper my heart sank each time, and my heart froze in horror, and I wanted to run away without looking back, I don’t know where... After all, it was my father, and this made the truth more terrible.

Official denunciations of the “cult of personality” explained little. This very illiterate term said that the party cannot and does not want to formulate and reveal the vicious foundations of the entire system, hostile and opposed to democracy. It was not political interpretations, but life itself with its unexpected paradoxes that helped me understand the truth. And although my mother has been dead for a long time, I must pay tribute, first of all, to the memory of her.

Only my first six and a half years were warmed by my mother and they remained in my memory as a sunny childhood. I remember my mother very beautiful, smooth, smelling of perfume. I was completely given over to the hands of the nanny and teacher, but my mother’s presence was expressed around me in the entire way of our children’s life. She considered our education and ethical upbringing to be the most important. Honesty, work, truth were the most important things to her. She herself contained a strong and sharp crystal of Truth, which requires living “not by bread alone.” Mom was not yet thirty years old, she was studying to become an engineer in the textile industry, she wanted not to depend on her “high position”, which oppressed her.

Mom was an idealist and had a romantic attitude towards the revolution, like poets. She believed in a better future, which will be created by people who improve, first of all, themselves. This is what her old friends said about her - Polina Molotova, Dora Andreeva, Maria Kaganovich, Ekaterina Voroshilova, Ashkhen Mikoyan. She had other friends, much closer to her and her interests, former high school classmates, but I did not have the opportunity to meet them after her death. I only knew her former music teacher, A.V. Pukhlyakova, a gifted, interesting person. Much later, she taught me music, and always spoke of my mother as having a sensitive artistic nature.

Grandmother, my mother’s mother, who even in old age remained temperamental and unrestrained in her tongue, often repeated: “your mother was a fool!” From the very beginning she condemned her for her marriage to my father, and this harsh “assessment” reflected the usual view of realists on romantics and poets. According to my aunts, my mother was very restrained, correct and rather melancholy - in contrast to my grandmother's fervor. The aunts believed that she was too “strict and serious”, too “disciplined” for her age. And everyone who knew her unanimously said that she had been unhappy, disappointed and depressed lately.

She was only sixteen years old when my father seemed to her like a hero of the revolution. As she became a mature person, she realized that she had made a mistake. Her own principles clashed with my father's political cynicism and cruelty. Everything around her went in a completely different direction than she thought was correct, and her father turned out to be not at all the ideal that she had pictured - rather the opposite...

Her life, according to her sister, had become unbearable. One day she left for Leningrad, taking her children so as not to return to her father, but then she returned. Later she wanted to go to Ukraine, to join her sister, and work there. She argued with her father, protested against repression, but this did not help: she could not change anything. When she was only thirty-one years old, she committed suicide, driven to despair by deep disappointment and the inability to change anything.

It was 1932, a terrible year of famine, the efforts of the Five-Year Plan, forced collectivization, a year when demands were loudly heard within the party itself for the removal of my father from the post of General Secretary.

Before her death, my mother left a letter to my father full of political accusations. Only the closest people could read this letter; it was quickly destroyed. His political character would have given too much importance to the incident for the party itself.

My aunts, who returned from prison in 1954, told me about this letter, about my mother’s suicide. My father had already died, I was an adult and my aunts would not lie to me after everything they had suffered. They said that the event itself shocked everyone so much then - that everyone was confused and only cared about how to somehow hide what had happened. Therefore, doctors were not allowed to see the body, there was no medical report, and the obituary mysteriously reported “an unexpected death on the night of November 9th.” They were not even allowed to embalm the body until the day of the funeral; No one was allowed into the house.

Antipathy, fear, hatred of the father figure were so strong that year that rumors of murder immediately spread. This seemed to many more plausible than the suicide of a young, healthy woman who had general sympathy on her side. I have heard more than once various versions of the murder, the most contradictory, but boiling down to one thing: that it was committed by the hands of my father.

Meanwhile, according to my aunts (my mother’s sister Anna Redens and her brother’s wife Evgenia Alliluyeva), my father was shocked more than anyone, because he fully understood that this was a challenge and a protest against him. He couldn't even bring himself to go to the funeral. He was broken, devastated. He considered his mother a faithful, devoted friend. He ignored and underestimated her assessments and opinions, which differed from his own, simply because his attitude towards his wife, towards his family, was always “Asian”, in the most banal sense of the word. Having recovered from what had happened, he only became embittered. And in 1948, he did not hesitate to send his aunts to prison for 10 years simply because they “knew too much.” In the party, in later years, the official version was established that my mother was “nervous,” and it was considered indecent to mention her. I heard this version in the Zhdanov family, precisely in 1948-50.

Mom was loved by everyone who knew her, and Bukharin and Kirov were among her closest friends. There is no doubt that their liberalism and democracy were closer to her nature than her father’s intolerance. Bukharin and Kirov optimistically believed that their father could be “influenced” for the better. Mom lost this optimism, which is why despair broke her. She turned out to be more perspicacious than the two experienced politicians.

The three tragic fates of people close to each other - mothers, Bukharin and Kirov - deeply and mercilessly explain to me the system of “Stalinism”. All three fought against her, each in his own way, and died in an unequal struggle... What can Khrushchev, Mikoyan and other former accomplices, who cowardly supported my father in everything, and after his death wished to evade responsibility, explain to me?!

When my mother died, I was only six years old, and for a long time I could not know the truth. For the next decade, I only watched as everything created by her hands and efforts was destroyed by the roots. They drove the teachers and servants out of the house, the entire system of children's classes collapsed, and as a symbol of it, even our playground at the dacha was destroyed. My mother’s simple furniture and her trinkets were gone. All her notebooks and personal belongings were removed and locked, and the key was kept by the commandant from the MGB. Now the whole house was militarized, the servants were paid employees of the MGB and was headed by a state security captain. The house as it was under my mother ceased to exist: the apartment in the Kremlin, our old dacha and my father’s new dacha, where he has now moved to live, began to be called by the official name: “object no. such and such.”

Ten years after my mother’s death passed monotonously and isolatedly for me. I lived in the Kremlin as if in a fortress, where my nanny remained the only kind creature near me. I could not understand in those years what was happening in the country, but the cruel tragedies of those years did not escape our family. In 1937, the brother of my father’s first wife, the old Georgian Bolshevik A.S. Svanidze, and his wife Maria were arrested. His sister Mariko was arrested. Then my mother’s sister’s husband, the Polish communist Stanislav Redens, was arrested. Three Svanidzes and Redens died in prison, and my mother’s sister was forbidden to visit us children. My mother’s brother, Pavel, died of a broken heart, shocked by the arrests of his loved ones and numerous friends, whom he unsuccessfully tried to defend in front of his father. His widow was forbidden to see us. The old people, my mother’s parents, actually lost the opportunity to meet with my father - he did not want questions about the fate of the “disgraced relatives,” whose death, of course, no one except himself could sanction.

It was impossible for a 12-13 year old schoolgirl to comprehend everything that was happening. It was unthinkable to agree that “Uncle Alyosha”, “Aunt Marusya” and “Uncle Stakh” are the very “enemies of the people” that the official propaganda of those days repeated, even to schoolchildren. One could only think that they had found themselves in some kind of common tragic confusion, which “even the father himself” could not figure out. Many years had to pass for everything that was happening not in our family alone, but throughout the country, to be connected in my mind with the name of my father, so that I could understand that he himself did it... And in those years I could not even imagine, that he was capable of dooming to innocent death those people whose honesty and decency were well known to him. Only later, in my youth, several discoveries convinced me of this.

I was 16 years old when I found out that my mother's death was a suicide. This was a brutal discovery for me. There was a war going on, I was in Kuibyshev that winter with my mother’s sister and grandmother. Having immediately started asking them, I realized that my mother was very unhappy, that she and her father had different views on everything - from politics to raising children. I always loved my mother, although she did not spoil us. And now I felt that my father was obviously deeply wrong, and that he was to blame for her death. His unshakable authority has shaken sharply...

I was raised in unquestioning obedience and respect for him. At home, at school, everywhere I heard his name only with the epithets “great”, “wise”. I knew that he loved me more than my brothers, he was pleased that I studied well. I saw him little, he lived separately at his dacha, but still after my mother’s death, right up to the start of the war, he tried to pay me as much attention as possible. I respected him and loved him until I grew up.

But the time has come for “rebellious youth,” when all authorities are criticized, and above all, the authority of parents. And I suddenly felt some absolute truth in my mother’s appearance, in what I remembered and what others said about her, and my father suddenly lost this authority. And then everything only developed stronger and stronger in this direction: my mother grew more and more in my eyes, the more I learned about her, and my father only lost his halo.

Less than a year later, a new shock occurred. I was a 17-year-old schoolgirl, a man twenty years older than me fell in love with me, and I fell in love with him. This innocent romance, which consisted of walks along the streets of Moscow, going to theaters and cinema, and the tender affection of two different people who understood each other, aroused the horror of the “investigative officers” around me and the anger of my father.

An adult, mature person understood that his romantic interest was futile. This was obvious to him, and he was about to leave Moscow. But suddenly, he was arrested, accused of espionage and exiled to the north for 5 years, and later to the camps for another 5 years. There was no doubt about it, he was arrested on the orders of his father, I found out: the initiative came from him. The senseless despotism was so obvious that for a long time I could not come to my senses... It was impossible to save the person - my father did not change his decisions.

These two discoveries, made within one year, separated me from my father forever, and in subsequent years the gap only intensified.

After the war, my father almost stopped visiting the Kremlin apartment, remaining at his dacha, and we began to see each other rarely. I was no longer the favorite daughter, and my daughter's love and respect were dissipating like fog. But I was still far from understanding my father’s “political biography”. At first I distanced myself from him as a human being.

The truth did not reach beyond the high wall that fenced off the Kremlin from the rest of Russia. Behind this wall I grew like a plant on a waterless rock, reaching for the light, feeding from somewhere in the air. This rock was my home, and I was stretched to the side, away from it. School and university were outlets from which light and fresh air came: my friends were there, and not inside the Kremlin.

All my life I have been happy with my friends: they resolutely separated me from my name. For them, I was a peer, a student, a young woman, always just a person. My friends from school and university have remained with me throughout my life. I saw them on the last day before leaving for India. Books, art, knowledge - that’s what united us. Many of them had parents and relatives arrested, but the same was true in my family, and this did not change their attitude towards me. Probably, the good memory of my mother helped me.

In 1940, the father of one girl in our class was arrested. She was friends with me and brought a letter from her mother to my father, asking her to save her husband. I gave the letter to my father in the evening at dinner, when a lot of people were sitting at the table, and involuntarily everyone began to discuss it. Molotov and others remembered this man - M. M. Slavutsky was the Soviet consul in Manchuria, then for some time the USSR ambassador to Japan. An incredible miracle happened - he was released and he returned home a few days later. But I was strictly forbidden to take letters of this kind for delivery, and my father scolded me for a long time for this. However, the case was quite eloquent: the fate of a man depended on his word alone.

Sometimes my father suddenly said to me: “Why do you meet with those whose parents were repressed?” Obviously, he was informed about this. Often the result of his dissatisfaction was that the school director transferred these children from my class to a parallel one. But years passed and we met again, and the attitude towards me remained friendly as before.

At the university, my circle of acquaintances expanded. I often visited my friends’ houses and saw their neglected “communal” apartments. Rarely did anyone come to see me in the Kremlin, and I didn’t want to invite me there. To do this, I had to order a “pass” at the Kremlin gates, and I was ashamed of all these rules.

During my university years, our “club” was the Moscow Conservatory. There I always met my former classmates. Music was one of the great outlets; it reminded us that the beautiful, the eternal still exists. The life of the intelligentsia in the post-war years became increasingly gloomy; the slightest attempts to think independently in the social sciences, literature, and art were mercilessly punished. People came to the Conservatory for a breath of fresh, clean air.

At the university I took a course in Historical and Social Sciences. We studied Marxism seriously, taking notes on Marx, Engels, Lenin and, of course, Stalin. From all these studies I only came to the conclusion that the theoretical Marxism and communism that we studied had nothing to do with real life in the USSR. Our socialism in the economic sense was more like state capitalism. Socially, it was some kind of strange hybrid: a bureaucratic barracks regime, where the secret police resembled the German Gestapo, and the backward agriculture resembled a 19th-century village. Marx never dreamed of anything like this. Progress was forgotten. Soviet Russia broke with everything revolutionary that was in its history and took the usual path of great-power imperialism, replacing the liberal freedoms of the early 20th century with the terror of Ivan the Terrible...

I was not friends with the youth of “my” Kremlin circle, although, of course, I knew many. Here, too, the common desire was to break out of the Kremlin, and everyone had friends on the other side of the Kremlin wall - this was not the exception, but rather the rule.

I was drawn to people who were gentle, kind, and intelligent. It so happened, regardless of my choice, that these nice people who treated me warmly often turned out to be Jews, at school and at university. We were friends and loved each other; they were talented and warm-hearted. My father was indignant at this and said about my first husband: “The Zionists planted him on you.” It was impossible to convince him.

In the post-war years, anti-Semitism became a militant official ideology, although this was hidden in every possible way. But everywhere it was known that when recruiting students and hiring, preference was given to Russians, and for Jews the percentage rate was essentially restored. This was a resurrection of the great-power chauvinism of Tsarist Russia, where attitudes towards Jews had always been a dividing line between the liberal intelligentsia and the reactionary bureaucracy. In the Soviet Union, anti-Semitism was forgotten only in the first decade after the revolution. But with the expulsion of Trotsky, with the destruction during the years of “purges” of old party members, many of whom were Jews, anti-Semitism was revived “on a new basis,” primarily in the party. The father not only supported it in many ways, but also planted it himself. In Soviet Russia, where anti-Semitism had long roots in the philistinism and bureaucracy, it spread wide and deep with the speed of the plague.

In 1948, by chance, I found myself almost a witness to a deliberate murder. These were the dark days of the party's campaign against the so-called "cosmopolitans" in art, which attacked the slightest hint of Western influence. As has happened more than once, this was just an excuse to settle scores with undesirable people, and this time the “struggle” had the character of open anti-Semitism.

The atmosphere in Moscow in those days was heavy, and arrests began again. In Moscow, the State Jewish Theater, whose director was S. Mikhoels, was closed. The theater was declared “a hotbed of cosmopolitanism.” Mikhoels was a famous actor and popular public figure. I heard him speak during the war, when he had just returned from a trip to England and the USA, where he went as chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. He then brought a gift to his father from American furriers, a fur coat - their signatures were on the back of each skin. (I didn’t see the fur coat; it was kept somewhere along with all the gifts, but I heard about it from Father Poskrebyshev’s secretary).

During one of the then rare meetings with my father at his dacha, I entered the room while he was talking to someone on the phone. I waited. They reported something to him, and he listened. Then, as a summary, he said, “Well, a car accident.” I remember this intonation very well - it was not a question, but a statement, an answer. He didn't ask, he suggested it: a car accident. After finishing the conversation, he greeted me, and after a while said: “Mikhoels was killed in a car accident.” But when the next day I came to class at the university, a student, whose father worked for a long time at the Jewish Theater, was crying and told how Mikhoels, who was driving in a car, was murdered yesterday in Belarus. The newspapers reported about a “car accident”...

He was killed and there was no disaster. “Car Crash” was the official version proposed by my father when he was informed of the execution... My head was pounding. I knew all too well that my father saw “Zionism” and conspiracies everywhere. It was not difficult to guess why he was “reported on the execution.”

A few days after this, I learned about the arrest of my aunts. The two elderly women had nothing to do with politics. But I knew that my father was irritated by the memoirs of Anna Sergeevna Redens and was unhappy that Uncle Pavlusha’s widow soon married a Jewish engineer. He was arrested along with her. “They knew a lot and talked a lot, and this plays into the hands of the enemies,” my father explained to me the reason for their arrest.

He was angry with the whole world and didn’t trust anyone anymore. “You also make anti-Soviet statements,” he told me then quite seriously. It became impossible to talk to him; I began to avoid meetings with him, and he did not strive for them. In recent years, we have seen each other once every few months, or less often. I had no affection left for my father, and after each meeting I was in a hurry to leave. In the summer of 1952, I finally moved from the Kremlin with my children to a city apartment, where my children were waiting for me now.

In the winter of 1952-53, the darkness thickened to the limit. Molotov's wife Polina, former Deputy Foreign Minister S. Lozovsky, academician Lina Stern and many others have already been arrested on charges of “Zionist conspiracy”. They concocted a “case of doctors” who were also allegedly conspiring against the government. The wife of Komsomol secretary N.A. Mikhailov told me then: “I would send all the Jews out of Moscow!” Apparently her husband thought the same. This was the official mood then, and its source was, as I could guess, at the very top. However, at the 19th Party Congress, held in October 1952, they continued to talk about internationalism...

Adding to all the madness was the rattling of weapons. For a trivial reason, US Ambassador George Kenan was expelled from Moscow. One colonel, an artilleryman, a comrade of my brothers, confidentially told me in those days: “Eh, now would be the time to start fighting back while your father is alive. We are invincible now!” It was terrible to think about this seriously, but obviously such sentiments existed in the government. People were afraid to speak, everything became quiet as before a thunderstorm.

And then my father died. Lightning struck the very top of the mountain and peals of thunder rolled across the entire earth, foreshadowing warm showers and a blue, clear sky... Everyone was waiting for this clear, cloudless sky without lead clouds hanging overhead. It became easier for everyone to breathe, speak, think, and walk the streets. Including me.

I spent three days at the bedside of my dying father and saw him die. I was hurt and scared because it was my father. But I felt and knew that after this death there would be liberation, and I understood that it would be liberation for me too.

Svetlana Alliluyeva

20 letters to a friend

IN MEMORY OF MY MOTHER

These letters were written in the summer of 1963 in the village of Zhukovka, near Moscow, over a period of thirty-five days. The free form of the letters allowed me to be absolutely sincere, and I consider what is written to be a confession. At that time it was not possible for me to even think about publishing a book. Now, when such an opportunity arose, I did not change anything about it, although four years have passed since then, and I am already far from Russia. Apart from the necessary corrections in the process of preparing the manuscript for printing, minor deletions and the addition of footnotes, the book remained in the form in which my friends in Moscow read it. I would now like everyone who reads these letters to consider that they are addressed to him personally.

Svetlana Alliluyeva. May, 1967 Locust Valley.

July 16, 1963 How quiet it is here. Just thirty kilometers away - Moscow, a fire-breathing human volcano, red-hot lava of passions, ambitions, politics, entertainment, meetings, grief, vanity, - the World Women's Congress, the World Film Festival, negotiations with China, news, news from all over the world in the morning, afternoon and in the evening... The Hungarians arrived, film actors from all over the world are walking the streets, black women are choosing souvenirs in GUM... Red Square - whenever you come there - is full of people of all colors, and each person brought here their unique destiny, their character, their soul. Moscow is boiling, seething, suffocating, and endlessly thirsts for new things - events, news, sensations, and everyone wants to be the first to know the latest news - everyone in Moscow. This is the rhythm of modern life. But here it is quiet. The evening sun gilds the forest and grass. This forest is a small oasis between Odintsovo, Barvikha and Romashkovo, an oasis where no more dachas are built, no roads are built, but the forest is cleaned, the grass in the clearings is mowed, dead wood is cut down. Muscovites walk here. “The best rest on a day off,” like say radio and television, is to walk with a backpack on your shoulders and with a stick in your hands from the Odintsovo station to the Usovo station, or to Ilyinsky, through our blessed forest, through wonderful clearings, through ravines, clearings, birch groves. A Muscovite wanders through the forest for three or four hours, breathes oxygen, and - it seems to him that he has been resurrected, strengthened, recovered, rested from all his worries - and he rushes back to boiling Moscow, tucking a withered bouquet of meadow flowers onto the shelf of a suburban train. But then for a long time he will advise you, his acquaintances, to spend Sunday walking in the forest, and they will all take paths just past the fence, past the house where I live. And I have lived in this forest, in these parts, all my thirty-seven years. It doesn’t matter that my life has changed and these houses have changed - the forest is still the same, and Usovo is still there, and the village of Kolchuga, and the hill above it, from where the entire surrounding area is visible. And all the same villages where they take water from wells and cook on kerosene stoves, where in the house behind the wall a cow moos and chickens croak, but TV antennas now stick out on the gray miserable roofs, and the girls wear nylon blouses and Hungarian sandals. Much is changing here, too, but the forest still smells of grass and birch - as soon as you get off the train, my familiar golden pines stand, the same country roads run away to Petrovsky, to Znamensky. This is my homeland. Here, not in the city, not in the Kremlin, which I can’t stand, and where I lived for twenty-five years, but here. And when I die, let them put me in the ground here, in Romashkovo, in the cemetery near the station, on the hill - it’s spacious, you can see everything around, fields all around, the sky... And the church on the hill, old, good - though it doesn’t work and is dilapidated , but the trees in the fence near it have grown so wildly, and so gloriously it stands all in dense greenery, and still continues to serve the Eternal Good on Earth. Just let them bury me there, I don’t want to go to the city for anything, to suffocate there... I’m telling you this, my incomparable friend, so that you know. You want to know everything about me, everything is interesting to you, so know this too. You say that you are interested in everything that concerns me, my life, everything that I knew and saw around me. I think there were a lot of interesting things around, of course, a lot. And it’s not even important what happened, but what you think about it now. Do you want to think with me? I will write to you about everything. The only benefit of being apart is that you can write letters. I will write to you as much as I can - I have five weeks of separation ahead of me from you, from a friend who understands everything and who wants to know everything. This will be one long, long letter to you. You will find here everything you need - portraits, sketches, biographies, love, nature, well-known events, outstanding, and small, reflections, speeches and judgments of friends, acquaintances - everyone I knew. All this will be colorful, disorderly, everything will fall on you unexpectedly - as it happened in my life. Don't think, for God's sake don't think, that I consider my own life very interesting. On the contrary, for my generation, my life is extremely monotonous and boring. Perhaps, when I write all this, some unbearable burden will finally fall from my shoulders, and then my life will only begin... I secretly hope for this, I cherish this hope in the depths of my soul. I'm so tired of this stone on my back; perhaps I will finally push him off of me. Yes, the generation of my peers lived a much more interesting life than me. And those who are five or six years older than me are the most wonderful people; These are those who from the student audience went to the Patriotic War with a hot head, with a flaming heart. Few people survived and returned, but those who returned are the very color of modernity. These are our future Decembrists - they will teach us all how to live. They will still have their say - I’m sure of this - Russia is so thirsty for smart words, so yearning for it - in word and deed. I can't keep up with them. I had no exploits, I did not act on stage. My whole life took place behind the scenes. Isn't it interesting there? It's twilight there; from there you see the audience applauding, mouths agape in delight, listening to the speeches, blinded by sparklers and decorations; from there you can see the actors playing kings, gods, servants, extras; you can see when they play, when they talk to each other, like people. It's twilight behind the scenes; It smells like mice and glue and old junk decorations, but it’s so interesting to watch! The lives of make-up artists, prompters, and costume designers pass there, who would not trade their lives and destinies for anything - and who else but them knows that all life is a huge theater, where a person does not always get exactly the role for which he intended. And the play goes on, passions run high, heroes wave their swords, poets read odes, kings get married, fake castles collapse and grow in the blink of an eye, Yaroslavna cries like a cuckoo on the wall, fairies and evil spirits fly, the shadow of the King appears, Hamlet languishes, and the People are silent ...

You're probably already tired, my friend, of the endless deaths that I'm talking about

I’m telling you... Indeed, was there even one that was prosperous?

fate? It’s as if a black circle is outlined around the father - everyone who falls into

its limits are dying, being destroyed, disappearing from life... But now it’s already ten

years since he himself passed away. My aunts returned from prison -

Evgenia Aleksandrovna Alliluyeva, widow of Uncle Pavlusha, and Anna Sergeevna

Alliluyeva, Redens' widow, mother's sister. Returned from Kazakhstan

people who survived, who survived. These returns are great

a historical turn for the entire country - the scale of this return

people to life is difficult to imagine... To a large extent, and my

my own life became normal only now: how could I

used to live so freely, move around without asking, meet with anyone

Want? Could my children have previously existed so freely and outside

annoying supervision, how do they live now? Everyone breathed more freely,

a heavy stone slab was pulled away, crushing everyone. But unfortunately,

too much has remained unchanged - too inert and traditional

Russia, its age-old habits are too strong. But even more than bad,

Russia has something invariably good, and with this eternal good, perhaps,

she holds on and retains her face... All my life she has been next to me

my nanny Alexandra Andreevna. If this huge, kind oven had not

warmed me with its even, constant warmth - perhaps long ago I would have

gone mad. And the death of the nanny, or “granny” as my children and I called her,

was for me the first loss of something truly close, in fact

a deeply dear, beloved, and person who loved me. She died in 1956

year, waiting for my aunts to return from prison, outliving my father,

grandfather, grandmother. She was a member of our family more than anyone

other. A year before her death, they celebrated her seventieth birthday - it was a good

a cheerful holiday that united even all my people who were always at odds with each other

yourself, relative

c - everyone loved her, she loved everyone, everyone wanted to say good things to her

word. Grandma was not only a nanny for me because she

natural qualities and talents that fate did not allow her to develop,

extended far beyond the duties of a nanny. Alexandra Andreevna

was from the Ryazan province; their village belonged to landowner Maria

Alexandrovna Ber. A thirteen-year-old girl also came into service in this house.

Sasha. Ber were related to the Goerings, and the Goerings had a nanny's aunt in their employ

Anna Dmitrievna, who raised Pushkin’s great-great-grandchildren, with whom

Recently she lived in a writer's house on Plotnikov Lane.

My grandmother lived in these two families and with their relatives in St. Petersburg -

as maids, cooks, housekeepers and, finally, nanny. For a long time

she lived in the family of Nikolai Nikolaevich Evreinov, a famous theater critic and

director, and nursed his son. In the photographs of those years - grandma

a pretty metropolitan maid with a high hairstyle and erect

collar - there was nothing rustic left in her. She was very

a smart, quick-witted girl and easily absorbed what she saw

around you. Liberal, intelligent housewives taught her not only

dress and comb your hair well. She was also taught to read books, she

opened the world of Russian literature. She didn't read books the way people read

educated people - for her heroes were living people, for her everything was about

it was written, it was true. It was not fiction - she did not for a minute

I doubted that “Poor people” were like Gorky’s grandmother... Once,

Once Gorky came to visit his father in Zubalovo - in 1930, still

with mom. My grandmother looked out into the hall through the crack of the ajar

door, and she was pulled out by the hand by Voroshilov, to whom she explained that

“I really want to see Gorky.” Alexey Maksimovich asked her,

that she read from his books and was surprised when she listed almost

everything... "Well, what did you like best?" -- he asked. --

“Your story about how you delivered a woman’s child,” answered the grandmother. This

It was true that the story “The Birth of Man” struck her most of all... Gorky was very pleased and shook her hand with feeling - and she was happy for the rest of her life and loved to talk about it later. She also saw Demyan Bedny in our house, but

somehow I didn’t admire his poems, but only said that he was

“a big ugly person”... She lived in the Evreinovs’ house before the revolution, after

to which the Evreinovs soon left for Paris. She was very invited to come with her, but she

I didn’t want to leave. She had two sons - the youngest died in hunger

twenties in the village. For several years she had to live in her

village, which she could not stand and scolded with a feeling of familiar

city ​​women. For her it was "dirt, dirt and dirt", she was now horrified

superstition, lack of culture, ignorance, savagery and, although she is magnificent

knew all types of village work, it all became uninteresting to her. Earth

she was not drawn to it, and then she wanted to “teach her son,” and for this she had to

to earn money in the city... She came to Moscow, which she despised

life; Having gotten used to Petersburg, she could no longer stop loving it. I remember,

how happy she was when I first went to Leningrad in 1955. She

told me all the streets where she lived and where she went to the bakery, and where "with

I was sitting in a stroller,” and where on the Neva in the cage “I took live fish.” I brought

She received a pile of postcards from Leningrad with views of streets, avenues, embankments. We

we looked at them together with her and she kept being touched, remembering everything... "

But Moscow is just a village, a village compared to Leningrad, and never

it won’t be equal, no matter how you rebuild it!” she kept repeating.

twenties, however, she had to live in Moscow, first with her family

Samarin, and then Dr. Malkin, from where she was somehow lured away

my mother, in the spring of 1926 due to my birth. In our house she

I adored three people. First of all, my mother, who, despite her

youth, I respected it very much - my mother was 25 years old, and my grandmother was already forty-one,

when she came to us... Then she adored N.I. Bukharin, whom

everyone loved him - he lived with us in Zubalovo every summer with his wife

and daughter. And also grandma

I hugged our grandfather Sergei Yakovlevich. The spirit of our home - then,

in front of my mother, he was close and sweet to her. Grandma had a great

Petersburg school and training - she was extremely delicate with everyone in

home, hospitable, cordial, did her job quickly and efficiently, did not interfere

into the affairs of her owners, respected them all equally and never allowed herself

gossip or criticize out loud the affairs and life of the “master's house”. She

never quarreled with anyone, amazingly able to do everything

some kind of good, and only my governess, Lydia Georgievna, did

an attempt to survive my grandmother, but she paid for it herself. Even grandma's father

respected and appreciated. Grandma read my first children's books aloud to me. She

she was the first literacy teacher - both mine and my children - she had

wonderful talent to teach everything fun, easily, and by playing. There must be something

she learned from the good governesses with whom she had previously

live side by side. I remember how she taught me how to count: balls were made

made of clay and painted and different colors. We put them in piles,

connected, separated, and thus she taught me four

operations of arithmetic - even before the teacher appeared in our house

Natalia Konstantinovna. Then she took me to preschool

musical group in the Lomovs' house, She must have taken it from there

musical game: we sat down at the table with her and she, having a natural

ears, she tapped the rhythm of some familiar song with her fingers on the table

songs, and I had to guess which one. Then I did the same - and

she was guessing. And how many songs she sang to me, how wonderful and fun she was

did, how many children's fairy tales, ditties, all sorts of village songs she knew

jokes, folk songs, romances... All this flowed and poured out of her,

like a cornucopia, and listening to her was an unheard of pleasure... Language

hers was magnificent... She is so beautiful, so pure, correct and clear

spoke Russian, as you rarely hear anywhere now... She had some kind of

a wonderful combination of correctness of speech - it was, after all, St. Petersburg

speech, not rustic, - and various funny

Of witty jokes that she got from God knows where - maybe

Maybe she composed it herself. “Yes,” she said shortly before her death, “it was

Mokei has two footmen, and now Mokei is a footman himself...” and she laughed herself...

In the old Kremlin of the 20s and early 30s, when there were a lot of people and

full of children, she went out for a walk with my stroller, children - Eteri

Ordzhonikidze, Lyalya Ulyanova, Dodik Menzhinsky - gathered around her

and listened to her tell stories. Fate gave her a lot to see.

At first she lived in St. Petersburg, and knew well the circle to which

belonged to its owners. And these were outstanding people of art -

Evreinov, Trubetskoy, Lansere, Musins-Pushkins, Goerings, Von-Derviz...

Once I showed her a book about the artist Serov - she found there

many faces and surnames familiar to her - it was a circle of artistic

intelligentsia of the then St. Petersburg... How many stories did she have in

head about everyone who visited their house, how they dressed, how they went to

theater listen to Chaliapin, how and what they ate, how they raised children, how

the owner and the hostess started affairs, who separately and quietly asked

her to pass notes... And, although, having mastered modern terminology, she

called her former mistresses "potbelly stoves" - her stories were

good-natured, on the contrary, she remembered Zinaida Nikolaevna with gratitude

Evreinov, or old Samarin. She knew that they not only took from

her - they gave her a lot to see, learn and understand... Then fate

threw her into our house, in what was then still more or less democratic

the Kremlin - and here she recognized another circle, also “noble”, with other

orders. And how wonderfully she later spoke about the then Kremlin, about

"Trotsky's wives", about "Bukharin's wives", about Clara Zetkin, about how

Ernst Thälmann came, and his father received him in his apartment in the Kremlin, about

the Menzhinsky sisters, about the Dzerzhinsky family - my God, she was alive

chronicle of the century, and she took a lot of interesting things with her to the grave... After

mother's death, when everything in the house changed, and mother's spirit quickly

was destroyed, and the people she had gathered in the house were expelled, only grandma

remained an unshakable, constant, stronghold of the family. She spent her whole life with

children - and she herself was like a child. She remained level at all times,

kind, balanced. She got me ready for school in the morning, fed me

breakfast, fed me lunch, when I returned, I was sitting in the next room

room and minded my own business while I was preparing my homework; Then

put me to bed. With her kiss I fell asleep - "berry, gold,

little bird," these were her kind words to me; with her kisses I

woke up in the morning - “get up, little berry, get up, birdie” - and the day

began in her cheerful, dexterous hands. She was completely deprived

religious, and generally all hypocrisy; in her youth she was very

religious, but then she moved away from observing rituals, from “everyday”

village religiosity, half consisting of rules and

prejudices. God probably existed for her after all, although she

She claimed that she no longer believed. But before her death she still wanted

at least confess to me, and then she told me everything about my mother... She had

once, before the revolution, she had her own family, then her husband went to war and

the difficult hungry years did not want to return. Her youngest died then

her beloved son and she cursed her husband forever, leaving them alone in

hungry village... Later, having learned where she was now serving, her husband remembered

her, and with truly peasant cunning began to bombard her with letters,

hinting about a desire to return - she already had her own room in

Moscow, where her eldest son lived. But she was firm, she despised her

ex-husband. “Look,” she said, “how bad it was, he disappeared, and

no matter how many years there is no hearing, no spirit. And now suddenly I'm bored! Let there be no

He’ll miss me, I need to teach my son, and I’ll manage without him.”* Husband

cried out to her in vain for many years, - she * Nanny's maiden name

was Romanova, and by her husband she was Bychkova. "In vain I call the royal family

exchanged it for beastly money," she said, but did not answer him. Then he

taught his two daughters - from his second wife - to write to her and ask for money

It’s bad, they say, live

we... Her daughters wrote to her and sent her photographs - bulging

eyes, dull faces. She laughed: “Look, what a mess!” But no matter

She took pity on the less “side-faced” ones and regularly sent them money. Who else?

She did not send money from her relatives. When she died, on

She had 20 rubles in her savings book in old money. She doesn't

saved and did not put it off... Grandma always behaved very delicately, but with

self-esteem. Her father loved her because she didn't have

there was servility and servility - everyone was equal to her - “master”,

"hostess"; this concept was enough for her, she did not go into

reasoning - whether a person is “great” or not, and who he is in general... Only

in the Zhdanov family they called grandma an “uncultured old woman” - I think

that she had never received such a disrespectful nickname among the nobles

families where she served before. When during the war and even before it, all

The “servants” of our house were militarized, and grandma also had to be “registered”

accordingly, as an “MGB employee” - that was

general rule. Previously, her mother herself simply paid her money. Granny is very

I was amused when the military certification of the “employees” came, and she

certified as... "junior sergeant". She was showing off to the cook in the kitchen, and

told him "Yes!" and “I obey, yours!” And I myself took it as

a stupid joke or game. She didn't care about stupid rules - she

lived near me and knew her duties, and how she was certified at the same time -

she didn't care. She's already seen enough of life, seen a lot of changes

- “they abolished the shoulder straps, then reintroduced the shoulder straps” - and life goes on as usual

go ahead and do your job, love children and help people live, which

whatever it was. In recent years she was sick all the time, her heart was

subject to constant angina spasms, and in addition, she was

terribly obese. When her weight exceeded 100 kg, she stopped fit

to the scales so as not to get upset. However, she did not want to refuse

herself in food, her gourmet over the years simply turned into mania. She

read the cookbook

my book, like a novel, everything in a row, and sometimes she exclaimed: “Yes!

Right! So we made ice cream like this at the Samarins, and in the middle

a glass of alcohol was placed and lit and brought to the table in the dark!”

For the last two years she lived at home, on Plotnikovovo, with her granddaughter, and

went for a walk to the Dog Playground park; the Arbat people gathered there

pensioners, and there was a real club around her: she told them how she

I made kulebyaki and fish casseroles. Listening to her, one could get enough

just one story! She named all the objects around her, -

especially food, with diminutive names - “cucumbers”, “tomatoes”,

"bread"; “sit down and read a book”; "take a pencil." She died in

ultimately out of curiosity. One day, sitting in our dacha, she

she was waiting for what would be shown on TV - this was her favorite entertainment.

Suddenly they announced that they would now show the arrival of U Nu, and I would meet him

at the airfield, and that Voroshilov would meet him. Grandma was scared

I’m curious what kind of U Well this is, and she wanted Kliment Efremovich

to see if he had aged much, and she rushed out of the neighboring

rooms, forgetting about age, about weight, about heart, about sore legs... On

on the threshold, she tripped, fell, hurt her arm and was very scared...

This was the beginning of her last illness. I saw her a week before her death...

she wanted “fresh pike perch”, she asked to get it. Then I left and

"As soon as I turned away for a minute, open the window - my grandmother asked,

And I turned to her - she was no longer breathing!" A strange feeling of despair

overwhelmed me... It seemed as if all my relatives had died, except for me.

lost, I should get used to death, but no, it hurts me so much,

as if a piece of my heart had been cut off... We conferred with her son, and

decided that grandma should definitely be buried next to her mother, on

Novodevichy. But how to do this?* I was given several different phones

bosses in the Moscow City Council and in the MK, but it was impossible to get through by phone, and how

I'll explain to them what it is

Grandma is a catcher? Then I rushed to call Ekaterina Davidovna

Voroshilova and told her that my nanny had died. Everyone knew grandma, everyone

respected. Kliment Efremovich immediately came to the phone, gasped,

was upset... “Of course, of course,” he said, “only there and

bury. I'll tell you everything will be all right." And we buried her next to

mom. Everyone kissed grandma and cried, and I kissed her forehead and hand -

without any fear, without disgust before death, but only with feeling

deepest sadness and tenderness for this dear, dearest to me

the being on this earth, which also leaves and leaves me. Me now

I'm crying. My dear friend, do you understand what grandma was to me? Oh,

how painful it is now. Grandma was generous, healthy, rustling with leaves

tree of life, with branches full of birds, washed by the rains, sparkling on

the sun - the Burning Bush, blooming, bearing fruit - in spite of everything

that no matter how you break her, no matter what storms you send on her... She is no longer mine,

grandmother, - but she left me the memory of her cheerful, kind disposition, she

remained a complete mistress in my heart, and even in the hearts of my children,

not forgetting her warmth. Will anyone who knew her forget her?

Is Good forgotten? Never forget Good. People who survived

war, camps - German and ours, prisons - royal and ours, which have seen

all the horrors that our twentieth century has unleashed are not forgotten

kind, dear faces of your childhood, small sunny corners where the soul

rests slowly all her life afterwards, no matter how much she has to suffer.

And it’s bad if a person doesn’t have these corners where he can rest his soul...

The most callous and cruel people keep, hiding from everyone, in their depths

distorted souls, these corners of childhood memories, some

a little ray of sunshine. But Good still wins. Good

wins, although, alas, it often happens too late, and so many

kind, beautiful people, called to decorate the earth, are dying

unjustified, unreasonable, and unknown - why...

* Novodevichy Cemetery is considered “government”, therefore

permission from higher authorities is required for funerals.

I want to end my letters to you here, my dear friend. Thank you

you for your persistence, - I alone would not be able to take you with

places this cart. And now, when the soul has thrown off this overwhelming

the load is so easy for me - as if I had been climbing up the rocks for a long time, and,

Finally, I got out, and the mountains were already below me; smooth ridges spread out

all around, rivers sparkle in the valleys, and the sky shines above all this - evenly and

calmly. Thank you my friend! But you did something else too. You forced

me to relive everything again, to see people dear and dear to me again,

which are long gone... Again you made me fight and break myself

head over those contradictory and difficult feelings that I always

felt for her father, loving him, and fearing, and not understanding, and

condemning... Again all this fell on me from all sides - and I already

I thought that I didn’t have enough strength to talk with all these shadows, with all these

ghosts standing around in a tight circle... And it was so sweet to see

them all again, and it’s so terribly painful to wake up from this dream - so

What kind of people they were! What integral, full-blooded characters, how many

Romantic idealism was taken to the grave by these early knights

Revolutions are their troubadours, their victims, their blinded ascetics, their

martyrs... And those who wanted to stand above it, who wanted to speed up its progress

and see today the results of the future, who achieved Good through means and

methods of evil - so that the wheel spins faster, faster, faster

Time and Progress - have they achieved this? And millions of meaningless

victims, and thousands of untimely departed talents, extinguished lamps

minds that cannot fit into either these twenty letters or twenty

thick books - wouldn't it be better for them, while living on earth, to serve people, and

not only “trampling death upon death” leave a mark on hearts

humanity? The judgment of history is strict. He will still figure out who the hero was in

the name of Good, and some in the name of vanity and vanity. I'm not to judge. I have no

such a right. I have a tol

just conscience. And my conscience tells me that if you don't see the log in

your eye, then don’t point out the speck in another’s eye... We all

responsible for everything. Let those who grow up later, who did not know those, judge

years, and those people we knew. Let the young, perky ones come,

which all these years will be - like the reign of Ivan the Terrible - so

just as far away, and just as incomprehensible, and just as strange and scary... And it’s unlikely

they will call our time "progressive", and they are unlikely to say that it

was “For the benefit of Great Rus'”... It’s unlikely... So they will finally say,

your new word - a new, effective, purposeful word - without

grumbling and whining. And they will do this by turning the page of their history

countries with a painful feeling of pain, remorse, bewilderment, and this feeling

pain will make them live differently. Just let them not forget then that Good -

eternally, that it lived and accumulated in souls even where it was not

assumed that it never died or disappeared And all that

lives, breathes, beats, shines, that blooms and bears fruit - all this

exists only by Good and Reason, and in the name of Good and Reason throughout