Simon Montefiore - Stalin

At one of Vasily’s parties during Stalingrad, a handsome, worldly and famous screenwriter named Alexei Kapler arrived at Zubalovo. Kapler, nicknamed Lyusia, was a suave and mesmerizing raconteur and Casanova, though married: “Oh he could talk and had the gift of communication with any age group, he was like a child himself,” wrote Svetlana. Stalin himself was his patron, supervising his own portrayal in Kapler’s scripts for the films Lenin in October and Lenin in 1918 . Kapler brought a film to watch: Greta Garbo in Queen Christina . He was immediately charmed by Svetlana, imagining their situation resembled the movie. “She was the great lady and I was poor Don Alphonso. She was bold and unpretentious. I was forty and someone of importance in cinema” yet “she was surrounded and oppressed in an atmosphere worthy of a god.” To the clever but brooding Svetlana, he was like a character out of one of her Dumas novels.

“Can you do the fox-trot?” he asked. Svetlana felt awkward in her flat shoes—but “Kapler assured me I was a good dancer… I was wearing my first good dress from a dressmaker” with “an old garnet brooch of my mother’s.” She trusted him.

“Why are you so unhappy today?” he asked. Svetlana explained that “it was ten years to the day since my mother’s death yet no one seemed to remember.” The two were “irresistibly drawn to one another”—it was wartime “and we reached out to each other.” He lent her “adult” books and poetry about love which helped overcome her fear of the vulgarity of sex about which Vasily constantly told her: “I was afraid of this part of life presented to me in an ugly way by Vasily’s dirty talk.”

Their relationship was passionate but never fully sexual: “A kiss, that’s all,” remembered Kapler. Yet it was thrilling for Svetlana: “Romantic and pure. I was brought up that sex was only for marriage,” she revealed later. “Father would not think to permit me anything outside of marriage.” But the war had changed everything: at any other time, Kapler might have thought the better of seducing Stalin’s only daughter but “I thought she really needed me.”

“To me,” said Svetlana, “Kapler was the cleverest, kindest, most wonderful person on earth. He radiated knowledge and all its fascination,” introducing the schoolgirl to the exciting wartime freedoms: he took her to the theatre, lent her an illegal translation of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls . Vasily held wild parties at the Aragvi restaurant where they fox-trotted to a jazz orchestra. Svetlana breathlessly recounted her romance to Martha Peshkova at school every day: Kapler gave her an expensive brooch—a leaf with an insect on it.

This charismatic womanizer was moved by Svetlana’s plight but he also revelled in his new adventure, boasting to movie director Mikhail Romm that he was now close to Stalin. He was despatched to cover Stalingrad for Pravda, filing his “Letters of Lieutenant L from Stalingrad” in which he daringly paraded his affair with the words: “It’s probably snowing in Moscow. You can see the crenellated wall of the Kremlin from your window.” The cognoscenti were amazed at the folly of taunting a vindictive Georgian father on the front page of Pravda but to Svetlana, this was “staggering in its chivalry and recklessness. The moment I saw it, I froze” but “I sensed the whole thing might come to a terrible end.” At school, Svetlana showed Martha the article under the desk.

When Kapler returned, Svetlana begged him not to see her but, as he said, “I don’t remember who suggested the risk of that heart-rending farewell.”They met in an empty apartment near Kursk Station where Vasily’s pals had assignations. Her bodyguard Klimov sat anxiously next door.

Beria had already informed Stalin, who warned Svetlana “in a tone of extreme displeasure that I was behaving in a manner that could not be tolerated” but he blamed Vasily for corrupting her. Seething about Vasily’s debauchery, Stalin dismissed his son as air-force Inspector for conduct unbecoming, and ordered him to be locked up in the guardhouse for ten days, then posted to the North-Western Front. Vlasik, Stalin’s domestic panjandrum, suggested Kapler leave Moscow. Kapler told him to “go to hell” but arranged an assignment away from the city.

Meanwhile Merkulov handed Stalin the phone intercepts of Svetlana and Kapler’s conversations, a tool not usually available to the irate fathers of errant daughters. Stalin was enraged. On 2 March, Kapler was bundled into a car which was followed by a sinister black Packard “in which General Vlasik sat, looking very important.” At the Lubianka, Vlasik and Kobulov supervised his sentencing for “anti-Soviet opinions” to five years in Vorkuta.

The next day, already under pressure as Manstein’s counter-offensive retook Kharkov and threatened the success of Stalingrad, Stalin was so angry he got up hours earlier than usual. Svetlana was getting dressed for school with her nanny when Stalin “strode briskly into my bedroom, something he had never done before.” The look in his eyes was “enough to rivet my nurse to the floor.” Svetlana had “never seen my father look that way before.” Stalin, in a blazing Georgian temper, was “choking with anger and nearly speechless.”

“Where, where are they all?” he spluttered. “Where are all these letters from your ‘writer’? I know the whole story! I’ve got all your telephone conversations right here!” He tapped his tunic pocket. “All right! Hand them over! Your Kapler’s a British spy. He’s under arrest!” Svetlana surrendered Kapler’s letters and screenplays, but shouted: “But I love him!”

“Love!” shrieked Stalin “with hatred of the very word,” and, “for the first time in my life,” slapped her twice across the face. Then he turned to the nanny: “Just think, nurse, how low she’s sunk. Such a war going on and she’s busy fucking!”

“No, no, no,” the nanny tried to explain, fat hands flapping.

“What do you mean ‘no,’” Stalin asked more calmly, “when I know the whole story?” Then to Svetlana: “Take a look at yourself! Who’d want you? You fool! He’s got women all around him!” Stalin gathered up the letters and took them into the dining room where he sat at the table where Churchill had dined—and, ignoring the war altogether, started to read them. He did not appear at the Little Corner that day.

That afternoon, when Svetlana returned from school, Stalin was waiting for her in the dining room, tearing up Kapler’s letters and photographs. “Writer!” he sneered. “He can’t even write decent Russian! She couldn’t even find herself a Russian!” Kapler’s Jewishness especially riled him. She left the room and they did not speak again for many months: their loving relationship was shattered forever.

This is often presented as the height of Stalin’s brutality yet, even today, no parents would be delighted by the seduction (as he thought) of their schoolgirl daughters, especially by a married middle-aged playboy. Yet Stalin was a traditional Georgian steeped in nineteenth-century prudery and to this day, Georgian fathers are liable to resort to their shotguns at the least provocation. “Being a Georgian, he SHOULD have shot that ladies’ man,” says Vladimir Redens. Long after she wrote her memoirs, Svetlana understood that “my father over-reacted”: he thought he was “protecting his daughter from a dirty older man.” [215] Their age difference was twenty-four years, not much more than that between Stalin and Nadya in 1918 but this was a parallel that may have intensified his anger. The two slaps are not Stalin’s greatest crimes. Kapler’s five years were cruel but he was fortunate not to be quietly shot. On his release in 1948, he returned against his parole to Moscow, was rearrested and sentenced to another five years in the mines. He returned after Stalin’s death, remarried and was then reunited with Svetlana with whom he finally enjoyed a passionate affair. He died in 1979.