#23 - RW 3-18-05 - RW Home
RIA Novosti
March 15, 2005
THE UNKNOWN STALIN
By Anatoli KOROLEV, RIA Novosti writer

Joseph Stalin (Dzhugashvili) remains an iconic figure in world history. A book, "Stalin", released in the United States earlier this month extends still further the long list of Stalin biographies available. Its author, the British historian Robert Service, examines the Soviet leader from an unusual perspective. As one critic has pointed out, Service attempts to reconsider the popular view of Stalin as a ruler to whom all was fair in politics. According to Service, the man's power was not without limits and his belief in being surrounded by enemies was not completely unfounded.

But most in Russia will probably find it difficult to share the British historian's take.

Millions of Russians who lived under Stalin still regard his autocratic, heavy-handed rule as the way to govern this vast country. A recent sociological survey has reaffirmed the prevalence of such a positive appraisal of Stalin's legacy: about half of those interviewed assess his dictatorship as effective, despite the millions of human lives it claimed.

Stalin did not deviate from that autocratic style even in relations with his daughter, Svetlana, the only surviving family member after the suicide of her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. It would perhaps be fair to say that Stalinism began with the man's oppression of his own child.

I knew Kira Alliluyeva, a member of the Dzhugashvili dynasty and Svetlana's childhood friend. She told me that Stalin had strictly controlled even the length of the dresses and skirts worn by his daughter. Once, while vacationing in a seaside pioneer camp together, the girls had themselves photographed in brand-new short dresses and mailed the picture to their parents. A week later, a storm broke out. The girls were summoned to the camp director's office. With a frightened look on his face, he handed them an envelope from the Kremlin. The letter had come all the way from Moscow via express air mail. On breaking the stamp open, Svetlana saw a photo of herself sporting the new dress. The picture was crisscrossed with a red crayon while on the reverse, the word "prostitute" was inscribed in bold type, with her father's signature below.

In a book of memoirs, "Twenty Letters to a Friend," Svetlana Alliluyeva recalls Stalin getting angry at her wearing shorts for a PE class (she was ten years old). He said it was disgraceful for girls to wear clothes exposing their bodies. He then took two of his fine cambric shirts out of the closet and asked Svetlana's nanny to make bloomers from them, to be worn with dresses below knee level. "Dad," I pleaded, "No one goes out like this now." But Father was implacable.

In the ideology of total power espoused by Stalin, there were no zones free from control-not even when it came to his daughter's life. He feared that otherwise, everything would come tumbling down.

In her memoirs, Svetlana recalls a day when she suddenly came to realize that her father had become a leader no one would dare to defy. Once, in the early 1930s, Stalin came back to his Kremlin apartment late at night. Dinner was waiting for him on the table, with a boiled chicken as the centerpiece. With the words "Chicken again!" an annoyed Stalin grabbed the poultry from the plate and threw it off into the open window so fiercely that one could hear it crash against the pavement at a sentry's feet. The sentry didn't move an inch.

Stalin was no heir apparent to Vladimir Lenin, who died on January 21, 1924. Leo Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, and Grigori Zinovyev were prominent in the Communist Party in those days, but none of the three proved bold enough to claim the leadership role for himself.

In his memoirs, Trotsky explained why he did not seize the opportunity to challenge Stalin at a crucial moment during Lenin's fatal illness. Such a step would have been interpreted as an encroachment on Lenin's dominant position in the party and the state. "I couldn't help shuddering at the thought," Trotsky wrote.

Stalin wasn't as scrupulous. He was the type of person that would stop at nothing to achieve his ends.

One would normally expect dictatorships to provide simplistic solutions, overlooking the nuances. Paradoxically, however, they sometimes display deeper insights than the brainstorm of a public debate may.

In his book about Stalin, Service cites Winston Churchill's memoirs. Churchill, who met his Soviet counterpart at the summits of Allied nations' leaders in Tehran and Yalta during WWII, was struck by the man's ability to accurately predict military developments and to offer instant solutions. He was also taken by the intuition and ingenuity with which Stalin made the most of his authority. Impressed, Churchill famously described the Soviet ruler as the greatest dictator of all times, who had transformed his country from an agricultural backwater into a nuclear power.

Kira Alliluyeva also told me about how she and Svetlana had rushed from the Crimea to Moscow in June 1941, eager to join the Soviet army in its fight against the Nazis. They feared the war would end before they had a chance to contribute.

The journey was a long and exhausting one; despite being Stalin's daughter, Svetlana enjoyed no privileged treatment. When the girls finally made it to Moscow, Svetlana immediately called the Kremlin from a public phone in the railway terminal. Kira was standing by, and could hear Svetlana utter the secret password for a contact with her father. At long last, Stalin got on the phone. Svetlana began the conversation by asking him to send her to the frontline as soon as possible, before the war was over. Suddenly, she burst into tears and hung up. "Father yelled at me, saying we would be at war for four years," she explained. Four years? That sounded staggering.

A car then arrived at the terminal to pick Svetlana up and the friends parted, not to see each other again until after theend of WWII. The war continued precisely for as long as Stalin had predicted it would.

It's no secret that as he addressed the nation at the Nov. 7, 1941 military parade, Stalin said the war would last for no longer than a year. That time around, he was lying. He just did not want the public to know what he had angrily screamed into his daughter's ear.

Service will have a hard time persuading his Russian readership to change their perception of Stalin. In Russia, he will always be remembered as the brightest exponent of ruthless dictatorial rule.