Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Before that, on January 20, 1938, Stanislav Redens, the husband of Nadezhda’s sister Anna Allilueva, received a new appointment: He became the NKVD commissar of the Kazakh Republic. 204In fact, this was a form of exile. Before that Redens had worked with NKVD Commissar Genrikh Yagoda and then was one of the deputies of the next commissar, Nikolai Yezhov. In December, 1938, he was recalled to Moscow, and three weeks after Pavel Alliluev’s death, on December 22, 1938, was arrested. In vain, Stalin’s sister-in-law Anna tried to see Stalin and persuade him to take pity on Redens: Stalin refused to see her. 205On January 21, 1940, Redens was condemned to death and was shot in 1941.

At the end of 1937, Stalin dealt with the family of his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze. Her brother, Aleksandr Svanidze (who was commissar of finance in Georgia), his wife Maria, and their small son (Stalin’s nephew) were arrested. 206Maria’s diary was passed to Stalin, and he kept it in his personal archive together with the Alliluevs’ documents: The diary contained too many secrets about Stalin’s relatives and Stalin himself. 207Aleksandr Svanidze was shot to death in a labor camp on August 20, 1941, and his wife was shot on March 3, 1942. 208Their son, Jony Svanidze, was released from a labor camp, where he had spent seventeen years, after Stalin’s death.

Finally, the arrest of Anna and Yevgeniya Allilueva (Yevgeniya was Pavel Alliluev’s widow) and their friends in December 1947 (Allilueva case) was a “prelude” to the anti-Semitic cases of 1947–1953, which ended up as the Doctors’ Plot case. Anna and Yevgeniya were sentenced in 1948 to ten years’ imprisonment for espionage and were released in 1954, after Stalin’s death. 209Stalin explained to his daughter Svetlana that “they knew too much and they talked too much. And it helped our enemies.” 210Both spent more than six years in solitary confinement in Vladimir Prison, the main Soviet prison for the most important political convicts (Chapter 3). For reasons of secrecy, some of the prisoners were deprived of their names and kept there under numbers assigned to them after the trials. The arrested high-ranking members of the Soviet nomenklatura were given numbers even during the investigation. Thus, after his arrest in 1938, former NKVD commissar Yezhov was put in the hospital of Sukhanovo Prison as Patient No. 1, 211and later on, arrested MGB minister Abakumov was kept as No. 15. 212The same system of numbers instead of names for victims of show trials condemned to imprisonment was introduced by the Soviet MGB “advisers” in Hungary and, possibly, in all of Eastern Europe. 213After conviction, Yevgeniya Allilueva was kept in Vladimir Prison as No. 22, and Anna, as No. 23 (Documents 1 and 2, Appendix II).

According to prisoner cards in Vladimir Prison (many of which are recorded in Appendix II as numbered documents), the accusations and terms for Yevgeniya and Anna Allilueva in 1948 differed (Documents 1 and 2, Appendix II). Yevgenia was accused of various violations of the dreaded Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code: treason against the Motherland (Article 58-1a), anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 58-10, pt. 1), and membership in an anti-Soviet organization (Article 58-11); she received ten years’ imprisonment. Anna was condemned initially to five years’ imprisonment. During this period, the transfer of these prisoners through different cells of Vladimir Prison was definitely coordinated and frequently happened on the same day (see numbers of corpuses and cells in Documents 1 and 2). However, on December 27, 1952, Anna Allilueva was retried and convicted of five more years for alleged anti-Soviet propaganda (Article 58-10, pt. 2) and membership in an anti-Soviet organization (Article 58-11). Both Alliluevs were released soon after Stalin’s death, in late April 1953. When Anna returned to Moscow in 1954, she was mentally ill and suffered from auditory hallucinations. 214Yevgeniya could not talk for a while. “All the muscles of her mouth had been idle for such a long time while she was in solitary with no one to talk with,” recalled her son. 215

Yevgeniya’s second husband, Nikolai Molochnikov, a scientist and a Jew, was also arrested and condemned as a traitor (Article 19-58-1a), anti-Soviet propagandist (58-10, pt. 1), and member of an anti-Soviet organization (58-11) to twenty-five years’ imprisonment (Documents 3 and 4, Appendix II). 216According to Ariadna Balashova, a friend of Yevgeniya who was also arrested, Molochnikov was mercilessly beaten during interrogations. 217Later he was kept in Vladimir Prison as Number 21 (Document 3, Appendix II). During interrogations, Yevgeniya Allilueva realized that Molochnikov was an NKVD/MGB agent who had for years supplied information on the Alliluev family. 218After release from prison (the case was abolished on March 20, 1954), Yevgeniya divorced Molochnikov. However, both Anna and Yevgeniya returned from Vladimir with great faith in Stalin. In the meantime, all the events concerning the relatives of Stalin’s wives had occurred with his personal involvement, and the whole case was started on his personal order. 219

On January 6, 1948, Yevgeniya’s daughter, Kira Allilueva, an actress at the Moscow Malyi Theater (her stage name was Politkovskaya), was also arrested. She was accused of “providing information about the family’s private life to persons working in the American embassy” and convicted to five years of exile in Ivanovo Region, not far from Moscow. 220

On the top of all this, Iosif Moroz (or Moroz-Morozov), father of Grigory Moroz, Svetlana Stalina’s Jewish husband at the time, was also arrested, tried, and condemned as a traitor and member of an anti-Soviet organization (Articles 58-10, pt. 2, and 58-11) to fifteen years’ imprisonment (Document 5, Appendix II). Before that, after his son had married Svetlana Stalina, Iosif Moroz became a guest at the Barvikha Governmental Sanatorium. 221Although he did not have a scientific degree, he used to introduce himself as a professor and an Old Bolshevik. He became acquainted with Molotov’s wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, Academician Lina Stern (director of the Academy Institute of Physiology), and others. In 1945, Stern hired Moroz as her deputy director in charge of the Administrative and Household Equipment Section of the institute. These connections of Moroz with the highest Jewish elite in Soviet society were later used by the MGB for anti-Semite cases.

Moroz spent five years in Vladimir Prison. It is possible that he, like the other members of Stalin’s family, was kept under a number (it is not known which prisoners had Nos. 16–20 in Vladimir Prison at that time). In April 1953, Moroz was transferred to Moscow on the personal order of the first deputy head of the MVD, Bogdan Kobulov (Document 5, Appendix II) and, evidently, released soon after that. This order had apparently been given in connection with the secret Presidium (Politburo) decision dated April 3, 1953, to stop the Doctors’ Plot case and rehabilitate the arrested. 222

It is interesting that December 4, 1951, is the last date of the transfer of all Stalin’s imprisoned relatives from one cell to another (Documents 1–5, Appendix II). Definitely, something occurred after that date. Yevgeniya Allilueva’s friend Ariadna Balashova recalled that Anna Allilueva was moved to Moscow before Stalin’s birthday on December 21. It was expected that she and other relatives would be pardoned by him. Nothing of the sort happened.