Simon Montefiore - Stalin

Happily and lovingly reunited, Molotov and Polina remained un-apologetic Stalinists: Svetlana wrote that visiting them was like entering a “palaeontological museum.” The prickly disdain between Molotov and Kaganovich lasted until their deaths but was as nothing compared to their loathing for Khrushchev. He admitted being “up to his elbows” in the blood of his victims and “that burdens my soul.” He defied his successors by dictating his selectively honest memoirs, dying in 1971. Andreyev died the same year: the commemorative plaque on the wall outside Granovsky makes him the last of Stalin’s butchers to be celebrated. Mikoyan wrote frank but equally selective memoirs until his death in 1978.

Three others survived into another era: while Polina died in 1970, Molotov left his remorseless reminiscences to posterity in conversations with a sympathetic journalist. He survived to see the ascension of Gorbachev, passing away in 1986. Malenkov remained a Stalinist but enjoyed the poetry of Mandelstam and rediscovered the Christian faith of his childhood that may have been a sort of repentance. In 1988, he was buried beneath a cross and the (utterly inappropriate) statue of the “lion of justice,” sculpted by his grandson. Kaganovich, ever the most cautious and pusillanimous, outlived everyone to witness the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union that he had helped build, dying in 1991.

Their families have enjoyed mixed fortunes and take very different views of Stalin and their parents’ roles: most became editors, architects or scientists. Vasily Stalin was sent to prison, released, remarried and finally died tragically of alcoholism in 1962. His son Alexander, who uses his mother’s name, is a respected theatrical designer in Moscow but his two children by Marshal Timoshenko’s daughter both died young—of alcoholism. Svetlana Alliluyeva defected and returned to Russia and then left again, married an American by whom she had a daughter, lived in Harvard and Cambridge, made and lost a fortune with her beautifully written memoirs, finally found herself without means in sheltered housing in Bristol, England, and is now living alone in obscurity in the American Midwest. Having embraced liberalism and rejected Stalinism, she has displayed both her father’s intelligence and his paranoia. Her Russian children, Joseph Morozov and Katya Zhdanova, are both doctors in Russia.

Yury Zhdanov remarried and returned to academia, becoming Rector of Rostov-on-Don University where he still lives as an honoured professor emeritus, admirer of Stalin and defender of his father. Artyom Sergeev remained in the military, rose to Lieutenant-General and lives outside Moscow. The rest of the Alliluyev family remains close: Kira Alliluyeva worked as an actress and is as irrepressible today as she was when she refused to climb under Stalin’s billiard table in 1937.

Stepan Mikoyan flourished as a test pilot and also rose to Lieutenant-General. His younger brother Sergo edited a magazine on Latin America. Both live in Moscow. Kaganovich’s daughter Maya married and had children and cared for her father in old age, only outliving him for a few years.

Sergo Beria and Martha Peshkova were released and moved to Kiev with Beria’s widow Nina, who never stopped loving her husband. In 1965, Martha divorced Sergo who continued to work as a missile scientist under his mother’s name, Gegechkori. Shortly before his death in 2000, he published his memoirs and appealed to the Russian Supreme Court to rehabilitate his father. The Court upheld the trumped-up charges against Beria. Martha, who has kept her looks, still lives in her large dacha on the old estate of her grandfather, Gorky. Beria’s charming grandchildren, who use the Peshkov name, are an interior decorator, an art academic and an electronics expert.

Lilya Drozhdova, Beria’s “last love,” never betrayed him. She lives in Moscow and, in her early sixties, remains beautiful.

Budyonny’s third wife still lives in his apartment on Granovsky filled with life-sized paintings of the Marshal on horseback. The apartments there are now worth over a million dollars so that the Molotovs rent out theirs to American investment bankers, perhaps proving right Stalin’s suspicions of Vyacheslav’s “Rightist” tendencies. Molotov’s grandson Vyacheslav Nikonov was one of the leading liberals of 1991, who helped open up the KGB archives and became one of President Yeltsin’s top advisers, serving on his re-election team in 1996. He now runs one of Moscow’s most respected political think tanks and is writing his grandfather’s biography.

Perhaps Stalin was right about the Mikoyans too: Anastas’s grandson Stas became a Soviet rock star, set up his own record label during the nineties and is now the leading Russian rock impresario, their Richard Branson. Beria’s hope that his grandchildren would study at Oxford was not realized but his great-grandson has just left the English public school Rugby and now mixes easily in London high society. Malenkov’s daughter Volya, an architect, followed her father’s later religious journey to become a builder of churches in her old age: her business cards feature pictures of the churches she has built. She and her brothers, both professors of science, remained convinced of their father’s innocence.

Stalin’s confidant Candide Charkviani survived to see an independent Georgia in 1991 and wrote his unpublished memoirs. His son Gela served as the chief political adviser to President Shevardnadze from 1992 to his overthrow in 2003.

To this day, the friendships and feuds of Stalin’s reign survive among the children of the magnates. The families of the grandees who remained in power, Mikoyans, Khrushchevs and Budyonnys, are regarded as a Soviet aristocracy even now. Nina Budyonny, still a Stalinist, is best friends with Julia Khrushcheva, who is not. The friendship of Marshals Budyonny and Zhukov is enjoyed not only by their daughters but by their grandchildren too. Stepan Mikoyan remains friends with Natasha Andreyeva even though the former is a liberal, the latter a diehard Stalinist. Artyom Sergeev remains in contact with those close pals, Nadya Vlasik and Natasha Poskrebysheva. But the Malenkovs and Andreyevs still despise Khrushchev.

It is only natural that all defend their fathers’ parts in the Terror. The Khrushchevs and Mikoyans have the courage and decency to admit the truth, reflecting their fathers’ attempts to correct the worst of Stalin’s (and their own) atrocities. Nonetheless, many of the magnates’ children still enthusiastically defend the Terror and many prefer to blame Beria for Stalin’s own crimes.

Martha Peshkova, who was brought up with Gorky in Sorrento, who still believes her grandfather and father were murdered, who as a child played with Stalin, reflects that “Stalin was as clever as he was cruel. Politics in Stalin’s time was like a closed jar with intriguers fighting one another to the death. What a frightening time! But if Beria had had his way after Stalin, he’d have improved the lifestyle of the country and we’d probably have avoided the destruction and poverty of today!”

Vladimir Alliluyev (Redens), whose father was shot on Stalin’s orders and whose mother lost her mind in his prisons, insists he was a “great man with good and bad sides.” Natasha Poskrebysheva, whose mother was shot by Stalin, admires him enormously and claims to be his daughter. Natasha Andreyeva, who lives in straitened circumstances in an apartment filled with her father’s art deco Kremlin furniture, remains the most aggressively Stalinist. “I have inherited my mother’s intuition,” she warned this author during his interview for this book. “I can see an Enemy by their eyes. Are you an Enemy? Are you afraid of the Red Flag?” She still supports the Terror: “We had to destroy spies before the war.” Despite the bulging file chronicling her father’s murderous spree in 1937, she asserts his innocence and claims, “Khrushchev’s dirty hands killed far more in Ukraine!” The “system,” not Stalin, were to blame for any “mistakes,” Andreyeva concludes. “But you Western capitalists have killed many more in Russia with your AIDS than Stalin ever did!”