Two Last Conversations - Svetlana

Svetlana Allilueva

I think it is appropriate to now recall two events that took place during the winter of 1952–1953 — events that preceded and followed the death of my father. I did not write about them in my earlier books. Also the significance of these events becomes clearer in retrospect with the passage of time. Now it appears to me that I can see a certain connection between these events, something that I did not see clearly at that time when I wrote ‘Twenty Letters’. In both these events one and the same person was involved in a very strange manner. Precisely because during my visit to the USSR in 1984-1986 I heard improbable versions of my father’s death, I assume that it is imperative for me to make additions of the following facts to my old book.

The last conversation with my father I had in January 1953. He suddenly called me and asked directly ‘was it you who passed the letter to me from Nadirashvili?’ I had not passed on anything. Besides there existed an iron rule not act as a ‘post box’. However, he wanted to know who was it that passed on the letter to him. ‘Do you know him?’ — ‘No, papa I don’t know him’. ‘Alright’ — and he put the receiver down.

I remembered this conversation because it was the last one. In March I was summoned to him when he was already unconscious. Possibly because the conversation was the last one that I remembered this name: Nadirashvili. It is a very common Georgian name.

In March when father died and we stood for hours in the Column Hall, looking at all the people filing past I involuntarily noticed a tall Georgian man who was dressed like a worker who was filing past along with the delegation from Georgia. He stopped, making others behind him stop too, took off his cap and started to cry, smearing his face with tears and wiping them off with his shapeless cap. It was not possible not to notice or not to remember his large figure.

After a day or two there was a ring at the door of my apartment. I opened the door and saw this very man. He said with a heavy Georgian accent ‘Good morning. I am Nadirashvili’. ‘Come in’ I said. How could I not let the stranger in when I had so recently heard about him?

He came in holding his folder and his bag that was filled to the brim with papers. He sat down in my dining room, put his hands on the dining table and broke down. ‘It is late! Late!’ is what he could only mutter. I listened but did not understand anything.

‘In here there is everything!’ He said, pointing towards the folder with the papers. ‘I have been collecting them for years, I have collected everything’. Beria wanted to kill me. He put me in jail and certified me as deranged. I escaped. He will not catch me — Beria will never catch me! Where does Marshal Zhukov live? Or Voroshilov.’

I began to understand what the matter is. It means that Nadirashvili wrote to my father about Beria and somebody passed on the letter. The letter reached my father — was passed on but was it read? This is what the bitter words ‘late, late’ were related to. Why does he need Zhukov? Voroshilov lives in the Kremlin, you can’t get through to him.

‘Zhukov lives on Granovsky Street, in the large government building. I don’t know in which apartment’, I said.

‘I must meet Zhukov. I must pass on everything to him. I have collected everything regarding this man. He will not catch me.’

He was breathing heavily, evidently of exhaustion, and again started to cry. Simple and rustic folk cry like children. The intellectuals never.

I knew that I am inevitably falling into a net of mysterious events, but I could not refuse this man. He left after wishing good bye.

The next day, or perhaps on that day itself, my telephone rang and I came to know to my surprise that the person calling was nobody else but Beria himself. This had never happened, though I had known him and his family for a long time. He began very politely by telling me that the ‘government has decided a few things regarding you — like pension and so on. If you need anything do not hesitate to call me as you would call a…-- he fumbled for a second – your brother!’ I couldn’t believe my ears. And then immediately asked me ‘this man, Nadirashvili, who visited you, where is he staying?’

In the USSR we always knew that telephone conversations were being tapped, but this was a real technological miracle! They knew even about people who visit me. I told him in all earnestness that I did not know where Nadirashvili was staying. This was my last conversation with Beria.

One and the same person figured in both of these last conversations of mine — the mysterious Nadirashvili.

I called up E.D. Voroshilova and asked if I can see her husband. She invited me to her apartment in the Kremlin. When I told Voroshilov about the unexpected visit he turned pale. ‘You!’ he said ‘do you want to get into big trouble? Do you not know for everything concerning Georgia your father had put specifically Beria in charge?’ ‘Yes’ I said ‘but …’

Voroshilov simply waved his hands — he was either angry, or extremely frightened, and perhaps both. I finished my tea, thanked the hostess and came home.

But, evidently, I had got myself into big trouble. For the next few days I was searched for at the Academy During 1951-1954 I was writing my dissertation on Russian literature at the Academy of Social Sciences of the CC CPSU. and a very frightened and intrigued secretary of the Party organisation told me that I am being asked to go to the Committee on Party Control (CPC) and meet Com. Shkiryatov. No reasons were given, however, but the secretary knew that something unusual has happened.

At the CPC, I was taken to M.F. Shkiryatov, who I had, until then, only seen at my father’s table and that too a long time ago. ‘So my dear how is life?’ Shkiryatov asked me in a rather friendly manner. In Party circles it was well known that if Shkiryatov calls you ‘dear’ it means that you are in a trouble.

‘So, my dear, just sit down and start writing’ he told me without wasting any time ‘and write about everything. Wherefrom do you know this slanderer Nadirashvili, why does he visit you and how do you help him. It’s not a good thing, my dear, not a good thing. You have been in the Party for a short while and you are inexperienced. We will take that into consideration. But would you please tell the whole truth. Here’s a paper, go and sit there’. ‘I do not who this Nadirashvili is. I saw him in the House of Columns and later at my doorstep. Not to let him in would have been rude. And I don’t know in what manner and for what I have helped or supported him.’

‘He is a vicious slanderer — Shkiryatov interrupted me. ‘He is vilifying the government. So you are refusing to give explanations? ‘There is nothing to explain. I don’t know anything about him.’ ‘All the same, just sit down and write.’

This was a whole procedure.

This comedy i.e. when you write a complaint against yourself continued for some days, after which I was given a severe reprimand with a warning ‘for helping a known slanderer — Nadirashvili.’ The secretary of the Academy’s Party organisation reacted in a friendly manner and told me: ‘Not to worry. Everything will be well. First they reprimand you and then they give you a clean chit. Something very unusual has happened in your case. Even it was not explained to me what happened.’

Another old friend of mine who always let me know of the news concerning the government and the Party also advised me not to worry too much. ‘Matters are so going to take such turns that there will be no end to surprises. I request you not to be surprised at any turn of events. All right? And please stop worrying.’

I was busy completing my dissertation and thanked God that he gave me a lot of good friends. In the meanwhile, my entry permission into the Kremlin was cancelled by informing me that there are no reasons any more for me to go there. I obviously made no claims regarding the ‘property’ — I had no such inclinations. So I went to submit the pass to the commandants office. A young officer there looked at me wide-eyed — it appeared to him absurd that my entry into the Kremlin is banned. He muttered something to the effect that it is ‘a misunderstanding’. ‘Not to worry’ I laughed ‘I know that it is not a misunderstanding but a decision’. He took my entry pass still trying to control his distress and I went home to my apartment where I had been living for the past few years with my children.

Very soon I came to know that my brother Vasilii has been arrested. His daughter told me that ‘papa had been drinking with foreigners and we had warned him not to do so’. Later his third wife (the one who was a champion swimmer and the best and most earnest of all his wives) called me up and told me that he has been arrested. I wasn’t surprised as my friend had advised me. Vasilii was a major general of aviation and had access to the highest echelons of the Party and the army. With his character being what it was he got into big trouble. He was capable of doing so.

The whole of the spring and the beginning of summer of this year of 1953 I read books, took care of my children and sat as quietly as possible and didn’t move around much. When suddenly sometime in the beginning of July a friend of mine called me and, out of breath from excitement, said ‘Do you know what? The drivers are saying that it has been ordered to take down all the portraits of Beria. Tanks have been positioned on the Sadovoi Boulevard’. This how we get news: through most unexpected sources. But the drivers from the government’s garage is a reliable source.

Later the whole incredible picture of Beria’s arrest, his detention in the basement of the Moscow Military Area, the urgent sitting of the tribunal and execution of the verdict there and then became clear from the stories of many of my friends.

It was narrated to me by Alexander Alexandrovich Vishnevsky, the late chief surgeon of the army who knew well all the highly placed people in the military. ‘Just imagine,’ he repeated ‘just imagine, he begged on his knees for his life to be spared. This man whom everybody so feared! They were in such a hurry to execute the verdict, they feared him like fire. Terrible, terrible!’

And then the reading of the letter of the CC CPSU about Beria began, where he was called ‘a foreign spy’, ‘a counter revolutionary from the times of the Civil War’, ‘a pervert’ and so on and so forth. The CC did not shy away from giving the details of the love affairs of the now neutralised, defeated and shot head of the KGB, intelligence, counter intelligence and all other secret services. Very little of concrete substance was mentioned about the activities of this man or about his victims, especially from Georgia and Moscow.(1) and a very frightened and intrigued secretary of the Party organisation told me that I am being asked to go to the Committee on Party Control (CPC) and meet Com. Shkiryatov. No reasons were given, however, but the secretary knew that something unusual has happened.

At the CPC, I was taken to M.F. Shkiryatov, who I had, until then, only seen at my father’s table and that too a long time ago. ‘So my dear how is life?’ Shkiryatov asked me in a rather friendly manner. In Party circles it was well known that if Shkiryatov calls you ‘dear’ it means that you are in a trouble.

‘So, my dear, just sit down and start writing’ he told me without wasting any time ‘and write about everything. Wherefrom do you know this slanderer Nadirashvili, why does he visit you and how do you help him. It’s not a good thing, my dear, not a good thing. You have been in the Party for a short while and you are inexperienced. We will take that into consideration. But would you please tell the whole truth. Here’s a paper, go and sit there’. ‘I do not who this Nadirashvili is. I saw him in the House of Columns and later at my doorstep. Not to let him in would have been rude. And I don’t know in what manner and for what I have helped or supported him.’

‘He is a vicious slanderer — Shkiryatov interrupted me. ‘He is vilifying the government. So you are refusing to give explanations? ‘There is nothing to explain. I don’t know anything about him.’ ‘All the same, just sit down and write.’

This was a whole procedure.

This comedy i.e. when you write a complaint against yourself continued for some days, after which I was given a severe reprimand with a warning ‘for helping a known slanderer — Nadirashvili.’ The secretary of the Academy’s Party organisation reacted in a friendly manner and told me: ‘Not to worry. Everything will be well. First they reprimand you and then they give you a clean chit. Something very unusual has happened in your case. Even it was not explained to me what happened.’

Another old friend of mine who always let me know of the news concerning the government and the Party also advised me not to worry too much. ‘Matters are so going to take such turns that there will be no end to surprises. I request you not to be surprised at any turn of events. All right? And please stop worrying.’

I was busy completing my dissertation and thanked God that he gave me a lot of good friends. In the meanwhile, my entry permission into the Kremlin was cancelled by informing me that there are no reasons any more for me to go there. I obviously made no claims regarding the ‘property’ — I had no such inclinations. So I went to submit the pass to the commandants office. A young officer there looked at me wide-eyed — it appeared to him absurd that my entry into the Kremlin is banned. He muttered something to the effect that it is ‘a misunderstanding’. ‘Not to worry’ I laughed ‘I know that it is not a misunderstanding but a decision’. He took my entry pass still trying to control his distress and I went home to my apartment where I had been living for the past few years with my children.

Very soon I came to know that my brother Vasilii has been arrested. His daughter told me that ‘papa had been drinking with foreigners and we had warned him not to do so’. Later his third wife (the one who was a champion swimmer and the best and most earnest of all his wives) called me up and told me that he has been arrested. I wasn’t surprised as my friend had advised me. Vasilii was a major general of aviation and had access to the highest echelons of the Party and the army. With his character being what it was he got into big trouble. He was capable of doing so.

The whole of the spring and the beginning of summer of this year of 1953 I read books, took care of my children and sat as quietly as possible and didn’t move around much. When suddenly sometime in the beginning of July a friend of mine called me and, out of breath from excitement, said ‘Do you know what? The drivers are saying that it has been ordered to take down all the portraits of Beria. Tanks have been positioned on the Sadovoi Boulevard’. This how we get news: through most unexpected sources. But the drivers from the government’s garage is a reliable source.

Later the whole incredible picture of Beria’s arrest, his detention in the basement of the Moscow Military Area, the urgent sitting of the tribunal and execution of the verdict there and then became clear from the stories of many of my friends.

It was narrated to me by Alexander Alexandrovich Vishnevsky, the late chief surgeon of the army who knew well all the highly placed people in the military. ‘Just imagine,’ he repeated ‘just imagine, he begged on his knees for his life to be spared. This man whom everybody so feared! They were in such a hurry to execute the verdict, they feared him like fire. Terrible, terrible!’

And then the reading of the letter of the CC CPSU about Beria began, where he was called ‘a foreign spy’, ‘a counter revolutionary from the times of the Civil War’, ‘a pervert’ and so on and so forth. The CC did not shy away from giving the details of the love affairs of the now neutralised, defeated and shot head of the KGB, intelligence, counter intelligence and all other secret services. Very little of concrete substance was mentioned about the activities of this man or about his victims, especially from Georgia and Moscow. At the end of the letter the Central Committee asserted that that the KGB should after all mind its business and not play the role of a ‘second government’

Everybody was waiting for this, everybody wanted this and this announcement of the government was applauded by everyone. Khrushchev managed to ‘put the KGB in its place’.

But all this began with the removal of its head.

A month after this I was again summoned to the CPC and now somebody else and not Shkiryatov told me that my reprimand now stands cancelled and that my organisation will be informed about it. ‘Please try to forget this unpleasant incident’, this man said with a smile. ‘Hardly, no’ I said.

The mysterious Nadirashvili, I suppose, after all did manage to somehow pass on something about Beria to Stalin. Then followed the arrests of all the people close to Stalin: General of Security N.S. Vlasik and A. Poskrebyshev, the personal assistant of Stalin. This happened in January – February of 1953. Academic V.N. Vinogradov was already in jail and he was the personal physician of Stalin and nobody except he had access to Stalin. Therefore, when in the afternoon of the 1st of March 1953 the service personnel found my father on the floor near the telephone table and demanded that a doctor be immediately summoned, no one did so.

Without a doubt, the veteran assistants like Vlasik or Poskrebyshev would have done so immediately without first informing the government and the doctor would have come. But this not happen while the service staff worried by the happenings kept demanding that a doctor be called (from the nearby building where the security staff was situated), but the top bureaucrats of the security decided to follow ‘subordination’: inform their higher authorities and ask for orders. This took many hours (father was left lying on the floor without any help), then eventually the whole of the ‘government’ arrived, in order to see for themselves that he has really had a stroke — something that was first diagnosed by Motya Butuzova, the house helper.

Even then the doctor was not summoned. During the following 12-14 hours a drama was played out at the dacha in Kuntsevo: the service personnel in a rebellious mood demanded that a doctor be called immediately, and the members of the government were trying to convince them that there is ‘no need to panic’. Beria even asserted that ‘nothing has happened. He is just sleeping’.

With this verdict the members of the government went away, only to return after a few hours — as the security and the service staff were now infuriated beyond control. Finally, the members of the government asked the sick man to be taken to the next room, undress him and put him in bed. All this happened still without a doctor and was something, from a medical point of view, totally inadmissible. A stroke patient and one who has had a brain haemorrhage is prohibited from being shifted. This was compounded by the fact that there was no doctor near at hand, and was not called for the help of the sick person.

The next morning the circus with the Academy of Medical Sciences began — as if for a diagnosis one needs to go to the Academy. Finally, not earlier than 10 o’clock in the morning, the doctors arrived, but then they were just not able to find the patient’s history file with the latest data and notes of Academician Vinogradov … somewhere in the deep vaults of the Kremlin was buried the file that was so needed at this particular moment. They never found it.

When on the 5th of March in the second half of the day my father died and his body was taken for autopsy, the evacuation of the dacha at Kuntsevo began on the orders of Beria. All the staff that demanded the summoning of the doctor were dismissed. All were ordered to keep silent. The dacha was closed and the doors were sealed. All the property and furniture was taken away. The dacha now ‘never existed’. The official communiqué told the people a lie: that ‘Stalin died in his apartment in the Kremlin’. This was done so that none of the personnel could ever complain: in such an eventuality a dacha ‘never existed’ …

They maintained their silence. But after ten years, in 1966, the housekeeper who worked at the dacha in Kuntsevo for twenty years came to me and told me the above described events. I didn’t write about them in the ‘Twenty Letters to a Friend’ because the book had been already completed before I heard of the incident related to the summoning of the doctors. I did not want to change anything in it since many people had already read it in the literary circles of Moscow. I did not want in 1967, when I had not returned to the USSR, that anyone in the west to get the idea that I had ‘run away’ due a feeling of personal resentment or revenge. It could have easily been construed to be so, if I had written all that I already knew then about the death of my brother Vasilii.

He too was ‘helped’ to die during his exile in Kazan, by attaching to him a KGB agent under the guise of a medical nurse. People at the Vishnevsky Institute, where she was working and where my brother was admitted for a while for medical checkup, knew about it and had warned me that she was on the payroll of the KGB. He had been just released by Khrushchev from jail and was admitted there as he was suffering from stomach ulcers, contraction of the blood vessels of his legs and total exhaustion. It was there that he got ‘fascinated’ by this woman, who then proceeded with him to Kazan, where she married him illegally as my brother had not yet procured a divorce even from his first wife and was indeed a man with three wives even before this last illegal marriage.

But Masha needed the status of a wife for a very specific purpose, and the KGB and the militia helped to register her marriage. She was injecting Vasilii with tranquilisers even while he continued to drink and this slowly destroyed his body. There were no observations made by doctors: she alone was the ‘medical personnel’. The last photographs of Vasilii show that he was totally debilitated: even in jail he appeared much healthier. And on 19 March 1962 he died under suspicious circumstances. There was no medical diagnosis and no autopsy. We in the family have no idea what did he die of. There were only different rumours and improbable stories of his death. Masha used her rights as a ‘legitimate wife’ to quickly bury his body there in Kazan itself. And without a proof of the illegitimate nature of her marriage nobody could come near Vasilii’s grave, begin proceedings for exhumation and investigation into the cause of death… The court proceeding need to be initiated, bring in the first undivorced wife as the witness… this is what Vasilii’s friends wish for, this is what the children wish for… this is what I wish for. However, Gromyko did not even care to give me an audience regarding this question when I was in Moscow. It means that they do not want to reveal all the circumstances.

Vasilii, obviously knew much more about the circumstances surrounding father’s death since all the staff serving during those days in the month of March 1953 at the dacha at Kuntsevo had been talking to him. He tried to get in touch with foreign journalists at various restaurants and talk to them. He was followed and, finally, arrested. The government did not want him to stay in freedom. Later the KGB ‘helped’ him to die.

He was only forty one years old and, in spite of alcoholism, he was not physically weak.

He left behind three wives and three children and, as much as it might seem improbable, none of them harboured any bitterness towards him. He was a generous person and always helped people around him, frequently even when he himself did not have a spare shirt for himself. His property, his medals, his personal weapon and all his furniture was taken away by two women, each of whom laid claims to their ‘rights’. The son, as he put it to me, did not get ‘even a pen’ as a token. Vasilii’s place is truly in the Novodeviche cemetery next to our mother, who was always so concerned on account of his temperamental character. He loved mother so much that her death totally broke the young boys nerves. Was this the source of his alcoholism?

Official versions of Stalin’s death are, perhaps, already in existence, and the mercenary writers are already writing about ‘how everything happened’. I had already heard something about it during my stay in Moscow: the factory of lies is functioning. But some day the truth will have to be told. It will be necessary to collect all the materials from the eye-witnesses — there are the unpublished memoirs or A.N. Poskrebyshev, there are notes of N.C. Vlasik lying with his family, his colossal archive of photographs of Stalin and his family. He was associated with Stalin for a period of more than thirty years in his capacity as the head of his security staff. This archive and the memoirs of Poskrebyshev have been confiscated by the KGB. It will also be necessary to reveal the witness accounts of the staff at the dacha in Kuntsevo — of Matrena Butuzova, the helper, Valentina Istomina, the house keeper and the officers of the security staff — Khrustalev, Kuzmichev, Mozzhukhin, Efimov and Rakov. All of them have been ‘retired’ almost thirty years ago, but their notes have been preserved because the rumours persist.

These days the dacha in Kuntsevo is shown only to exclusive visitors by one Volkov, who claims that he was ‘present here’ and tells improbable stories or the official version. There never was any Volkov during those days — I know this — and the concocted stories that I hear of do not sufficiently explain the real picture. However, the furniture has been put back (the papers, books and personal belongings have not been put back) and are shown on special permission by the government and … the KGB! In the post Khrushchev era the KGB, obviously, has regained its full strength having again become ‘a second government’.

I did not want that my flight in 1967 be considered as a form of my personal vengeance against the Soviet government. I do not want that even today it to be so. That is the reason why I refrained from publishing the events described above in my first and second books. But the Soviet government was specifically afraid of this and therefore they decided to declare me in anticipation as ‘a deranged person, not to be trusted’ and even the Prime Minister Kosygin did not shy away from declaring it from the esteemed platform of the UN. The thought ‘are they really so afraid of me’ came to my head. Oh my God, what honour! But I didn’t ever consider tossing to the public any ‘sensational account about the secrets of Kremlin’. Harrison Salisbury has the following impression of my book: ‘The walls of Kremlin are not going to fall’ (as translated from Russian — translator). This betrays some disappointment, but it also means that I have no intentions of getting even with the Soviet government from abroad.

At present while completing this my fourth and the last book, I want to narrate everything about my father and my brother — so that nothing is left unsaid. Thirty years have passed since then and its time. The future historian will find my book interesting and rich with facts.

Notes

1. During 1951-1954 I was writing my dissertation on Russian literature at the Academy of Social Sciences of the CC CPSU.

2. Among the witnesses providing evidence — and their list was long — the name of Nadirashvili was also mentioned. It means that his enemy indeed could not catch him. I never heard anything of him or saw him again, but it was pleasant to know that he didn’t perish.

Courtesy: Svetlana Allilueva, ‘Kniga dlya Vnuchek’, New York, 1991. Translated from the Russian by Tahir Asghar.