Stalin: A Biography полностью

Kapler made Svetlana feel desirable as a woman, and she fell head over heels in love with him.¹⁵ Stalin, on hearing about developments from Vlasik, knew how things might turn out. Hadn’t he himself seduced girls in Siberia? Hadn’t he taken a woman half his age off to Tsaritsyn in 1918 and exploited his mature charms? Something had to be done. Stalin decided that the best thing — for once — was not to have the man arrested but to send him as a Pravda correspondent to the front at Stalingrad.¹⁶ It was mere coincidence that Kapler was to be sent to Stalingrad where Stalin and Nadya Allilueva had spent several months. Stalin wanted to give Kapler a fright by assigning him to the vicinity of direct military conflict. After the Great Terror such an intervention from the Kremlin was enough to scare the daylights out of anyone, but Kapler carried on regardless. Far from crumbling under the pressure, he sent articles to Moscow with obvious hints at his relationship with Svetlana. ‘At the moment in Moscow,’ he wrote in one of them, ‘doubtless the snow is falling. From your window is visible the jagged wall of the Kremlin.’ Such recklessness brought Svetlana to her senses and she cut contact with Kapler.¹⁷

But her heart remained with him and when he returned from Stalingrad they started to see each other again. They kissed and cuddled despite being accompanied by Uncle Klimov. Poor Klimov felt damned if he reported this and damned if he didn’t. On hearing what was happening, Vlasik angrily sent an official to order Kapler out of Moscow. Extraordinarily enough, though, Kapler told him to go to hell.

Stalin at last intervened. ‘I know everything,’ he said to Svetlana. ‘All your telephone conversations, here they are!’ He tapped his pocket, which was full of transcripts. He had never spoken so contemptuously to her. Glaring into her eyes, he shouted: ‘Your Kapler is an English spy; he’s been arrested!’ Svetlana shouted: ‘But I love him!’ Stalin lost his self-control and sneered: ‘You love him!’ He slapped her twice in the face. ‘Just think, nanny, what’s she’s come to! There’s such a war going on and she’s tied up with all this!’ A torrent of obscenities flowed from his lips until his anger had subsided.¹⁸ She broke with Kapler, and her father seemed to have got his way. But his victory was illusory. No sooner had she dropped Kapler than she turned her attention to Beria’s son Sergo. Sergo’s father and mother were horrified by the dangers which could arise from such a relationship, and told him to keep away from her. Sergo’s mother Nina was frank with Svetlana: ‘You are both young. You must get a job first. And he looks on you as a sister. He’ll never marry you.’¹⁹ Svetlana recognised reality and looked elsewhere. In spring 1944, after a brief courtship, she married one of her brother Vasili’s friends, Grigori Morozov. This time Stalin was more restrained. Although he refused to invite Morozov to the Blizhnyaya dacha, he let the marriage go ahead.

He could not control absolutely everything and, while a war was going on, did not try. Disappointed in his family, he let his thoughts turn back to Georgia and to his boyhood friends. He had never forgotten them despite years without direct contact. From the thousands of rubles in his unopened pay packets he made a money transfer to Petr Kapanadze, Grigol Glurzhidze and Mikhail Dzeradze. (He was characteristically precise: 40,000 rubles for the first and 30,000 each for the others.) The Supreme Commander signed himself Soso.²⁰

He had gone on seeing old friends and relatives after Nadya’s suicide, but everyone noticed how lonely he was becoming. He welcomed the Alliluevs and Svanidzes to the Blizhnyaya dacha until the late 1930s. The Great Terror changed this. Stalin had Maria Svanidze arrested in 1939 and sent to a labour camp. Her husband Alexander Svanidze also fell victim to the NKVD: he had been arrested in 1937 and was shot in 1941. Alexander behaved with extraordinary courage under torture and refused to confess or beg for mercy. Although Stalin did not yet touch the closest relatives of his deceased second wife, their spouses were not so lucky. Stanisław Redens, Anna Allilueva’s husband, was arrested in 1938.²¹ Anna got permission to plead his case along with her parents in the presence of Stalin and Molotov. But on the day of their meeting her father Sergei Alliluev refused to go with them. Stalin took this badly and Redens’s fate was sealed.²² Even those among Stalin’s outer family who escaped incarceration lived in continuous dread of what might happen to them. Yet like everyone in the Kremlin elite, they were moths flying near to the light source; they were incapable of pulling themselves out of their orbits.