Who suffered from repression in the Stalin family, and Why did the "leader of the peoples" never stand up for loved ones?

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Becoming the wife of the ruler of a country is not a winning lottery ticket for a woman and her entire family? Not always. For example, being in a property with Stalin meant just as much repression as anyone else.

Stalin was officially married twice - to Ekaterina Svanidze, the mother of his son Yakov, and to Nadezhda Alliluyeva, the mother of his children Vasily and Svetlana. When he came to power and occupied the estate of the Zubalov oil owners near Moscow, the relatives of both wives constantly visited him and his children. In addition, the father-in-law and mother-in-law lived with Stalin in this house. For several years, the picture of a large family was almost idyllic. Children of the Svanidze and Alliluyev families played together and put on children's performances, adults gathered at a common table or indulged in ordinary summer entertainment together. It was impossible to believe that this idyll could be crossed out in one fell swoop.

Relatives of Jacob's son

The brother of Ekaterina Svanidze, Alexander, nicknamed Alyosha (Stalin's children called him Uncle Alyosha), was arrested in 1937. For three years, while the investigation lasted, he endured - like all repressed - the hardships of imprisonment, without any indulgences. In the end, he was charged with spying on Germany and offered to confess in exchange for his life. Having confessed, he also had to point out his accomplices. Alexander Svanidze refused to take such a step and was shot in August 1941.

Alexander Svanidze's wife, opera singer Maria Korona, was also arrested. In 1939, she was sentenced to eight years in labor camps for allegedly hiding her husband's anti-Soviet activities and conducting anti-Soviet conversations. The latter consisted in the fact that she repeatedly, in the circle of relatives and friends, spoke out sharply against repression. In addition, she was found guilty of preparing a terrorist attack to kill one of the leaders of the Communist Party and the Soviet government.

Despite the fact that Korona was sentenced to imprisonment, in 1942 she was shot - like many camp prisoners that year. At the same time, the sister of Alexander Svanidze, the namesake of his wife Maria, was shot. She was sentenced to ten years in prison on charges similar to those of Maria Corona.

The son of Svanidze, then still a schoolboy Jonrid, was interrogated by the NKVD in order to obtain evidence on the accusations of his parents and aunt. None of his relatives took him in, but he was lucky not to get into an orphanage for the children of enemies of the people - he was taken with him by his nanny Lydia Trofimovna, an elderly and very religious old maid, as Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, describes her. To feed herself and the boy, the nanny grabbed any job. But in 1945, when Jonrid became an adult, he was arrested as well. At first he was recognized as mentally ill, but then he was sentenced to five years of exile.

In 1957, Jonrid married his childhood friend, Svetlana Alliluyeva, but the marriage did not work out - both were too traumatized by the memories of their youth - and only lasted two years. Out of him grew up an outstanding Africanist, an expert on the economics of African countries. He suffered from schizophrenia and died at less than sixty years of age, leaving no children behind.

Stalin's son Yakov himself went to the front as an artillery officer. A few months later he was captured. After two years of winding through the camps, he committed suicide by throwing himself on a high voltage fence. His wife, ballerina Yulia Melzer, was arrested immediately after it became known that Yakov was in captivity. She spent a year and a half in prison. The daughter of Yulia and Yakov Galina became a specialist in literature in Algeria and a writer.

Relatives of the son of Vasily

The blood relatives of his second wife, with whom Stalin spent thirteen years, he, as you know, did not touch for a long time. And yet, the Alliluyev family was not spared by the repressions and the troubles associated with them.

The elder sister of Nadezhda Alliluyeva Anna was married to the Pole Stanislav Redens, an employee of the NKVD. He cheated on his wife, but Anna always refused to believe that her husband could do something bad - both in his personal life and at work. Redens was one of the organizers of the dispossession of the Ukrainian peasants, and later - the repressions in 1937.

At thirty-eighth, Redens was arrested and tried. He was found guilty of spying for Poland, as well as the fact that, as part of the conspiracy and on the instructions of other conspirators from the NKVD, he carried out massive unjustified arrests and executions of Soviet citizens, which deprived the USSR of cadres. Redens himself admitted only unreasonable repression, but refused to acknowledge espionage. In the fortieth year, he was shot.

Anna herself continued to believe that the family had the old, old Bolshevik relations. In 1946, she published a book of memoirs, which contained quite a lot of information about Stalin. In the press, the book was immediately crushed, but Anna was not embarrassed by this, as well as by Stalin's discontent. She was going to write a sequel and did not hide it. This is probably why, in 1948, an elderly woman was arrested "for espionage."

Anna was released in 1954 and at first behaved very strangely - she had obvious signs of a mental disorder. But then her condition improved a lot and she became an active member of the Writers' Union. By the way, she was the only one from the Union who voted against the expulsion of Pasternak. Her health was undermined by life in the camp, and Anna died at the age of sixty-four.

Her brother Pavel Alliluyev in the thirty-eighth year repeatedly raised in conversations with Stalin the issue of repression in the Red Army, because of which she was deprived of experienced officers. He also constantly tried to protect the officers he knew, but, as Stalin's daughter wrote, if her father got it into his head that someone was his enemy, he never changed his mind. In the same thirty-eighth year, Paul died of a heart attack in his office. His wife Yevgenia Zemlyanitsyna was arrested in 1947 on charges of … poisoning her own husband. When the exhumation showed no evidence of poisoning, she was imprisoned for anti-Soviet activities and for spreading slander against the government.

In the same year, her second husband, Nikolai Molochnikov, was arrested. He was imprisoned for "treason". Thanks to Stalin's death, both of them served seven years - otherwise they would not have seen freedom for a long time. Pavel Alliluyev's daughter was also arrested - also for anti-Soviet talk. This is how she recalls her arrest: “At night they came, my mother was already sitting, my brother woke me up and said:“Kira, in my opinion, they have come for you.” They came in and said, "You will dress with us." Otherwise, I can kill myself or hide something. I dressed as best I could in front of them. They only told me: "Dress warmly, because the winter is very fierce." And in fact it was a very wicked winter. I dressed up. They told me: "Take everything warm. And take 25 rubles." It was that kind of money then, not like now. I took 25 rubles, of course, my heart sank into my heels in the full sense of the word, and they took me somewhere … I was in exile for 5 years and I was in Lefortovo for half a year."

Almost all of Nadezhda Alliluyeva's friends and acquaintances fell under the repression, except for one. Kliment Voroshilov and his Golda: the only one of Stalin's falcons who saved his wife from repression.