Real Wives of Dictators | Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin's Wife

Nadezhda Alliluyeva was born into a revolutionary family, but was it always her fate to marry Joseph Stalin? She was independent, intelligent and highly politicised. Indeed, Stalin was a hero of hers growing up. What was it like to be so heavily involved in the Communist Party and the Soviet Union? What was Stalin like as a husband to her? And was her death as suspicious as some made out? Joining Kate for this third episode of our limited series, Real Wives of Dictators, is Sheila Fitzpatrick, historian of the Soviet Union and author of books including The Death of Stalin. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 2:16Kate Lister?

  Hello my lovely betwisters, it's me Kate Lister. I am here, you are here, and we are all ready to proceed with the show. But before we can do that, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, other adults about adulty things, and an adult where you're covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Do you feel safer? I'm glad you feel safer. I certainly feel safer. Right, on with the show.

• 2:41Kate Lister?

  They say that behind every great man, there's a great woman. Hmm, I've never really believed that. But what about evil men? Are there crap and evil women behind them too? And whilst it's the men in these horror stories that seem to get the most attention, in this brand new mini-series, we are exploring the lives of four of the wives of some of history's most bloody and notorious dictators. Were they victims?

• 3:07Speaker 04

  She was certainly young at the beginning. She was drawn to the flame, absolutely.

• 3:11Kate Lister?

  Or were they enablers?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  She famously defied the judges, calling them fascists. And she said, "I was Mao's dog. I bit who he told me to bite." She's aware of the antisemitism. It's not that she looks the other way. She doesn't think so it's a problem. She doesn't need to look the other way.

• 3:32Kate Lister?

  What was their life like behind closed doors?

• 3:36Speaker 05

  She's grown up in a revolutionary family, and she married a revolutionary. So you can assume that she's on the revolutionary side.

• 3:42Kate Lister?

  And were any of these women thirsty for power themselves?

• 3:46Speaker 04

  The rest of the leadership was dead set against it. They sensed her ambition. They had an instinct about her.

• 3:54Kate Lister?

  I'm Kate Lister, and these are The Real Wives of Dictators.

• 4:00Kate Lister?

  Episode three, Nadya Alleluivah, Wife of Joseph Stalin.

• 4:07Speaker 06

  What do you look for in a man?

• 4:09Speaker 07

  Oh, money, of course.

• 4:10Speaker 06

  You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

• 4:13Speaker 07

  I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.

• 4:25Speaker 08

  Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

• 4:28Speaker 09

  Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.

• 4:36Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Growing up in a family of revolutionaries, you could say that Nadya Alliluyeva's die was cast. Add into that the fact that Stalin was a family friend from a young age, and it begins to look even more inevitable that Nadya would follow into the ranks of the newly established Communist Party. This is the woman that would go on to marry Joseph Stalin. But what was life like for her? What was it like to be married to Stalin of all people? And what were the circumstances that led to her death at a relatively young age? Joining me in today's episode is Sheila Fitzpatrick, historian and author of The Death of Stalin,

• 5:21Kate Lister?

  who is going to help us get to know this woman a little bit better. So without further ado, let's crack on.

• 5:32Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Sheila Fitzpatrick. How are you doing?

• 5:39Speaker 05

  I'm doing well, thank you.

• 5:41Kate Lister?

  Thank you so much for coming to talk to us for our little mini-series on the wives of dictators. And you are joining us, well, first of all, you are a historian at the ACU, the Australian Catholic University. So you are joining us from Australia. What time is it there at the moment?

• 5:58Speaker 05

  It's just after 8pm.

• 6:00Kate Lister?

  And it's just after 9am here. So we'll both be kind of sleepy and possibly slightly drunk. But we are, that's not, that's a terrible thing to say, Kate. We are here to talk about the wife of Joseph Stalin, who is somebody I don't know much about at all. Can we start by saying, how do you pronounce her name? I've been trying and failing. How do you pronounce it, Sheila?

• 6:26Speaker 05

  First name is Nadya, or Nadya, if you want to make it a bit easier. That's a shortening. And the last name is Aleluia.

• 6:35Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 6:35Speaker 05

  It's a bit like Haleluya, Haleluya.

• 6:38Kate Lister?

  A bit like, so kind of like Nadya Haleluya, kind of, okay.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  Kind of, yeah.

• 6:44Kate Lister?

  Can I ask you, what brought you to study this particular area of history? What, what first brought you to Stalin? Because he's quite a horror show of a human being. Why did you start to look at him?

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Well, I started off as a historian, that is, I was a history student in Melbourne way back. And I was interested in 20th century history and I was basically interested in the places where awful things happened. And my first choice would maybe have been Nazi Germany. But I didn't have German and they wouldn't let me do German at university because I hadn't done it at school. So I took Russian because I could start that. And once I'd taken Russian, well, then I got really interested because people weren't really writing about Soviet history. That was considered, well, really, there was a strange sort of presumption that, that Russian history ended in 1917

• 7:39Speaker 05

  with the revolution that established the Soviet Union.

• 7:42Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  So off I go to study, not initially Stalin at all, no, something much calmer. My very first book, it was about the man who was in the first Bolshevik, in the first revolutionary government in 1917. He was essentially the Minister for Education and the Arts, that's what I first worked. But of course I got interested in how does this politics work? I got interested in the people running this politics and that's how, well, decades later really. But after having been interested in Stalin for a long time, I wrote that book called On Stalin's Team, which is about Stalin and the people around him. Because we always focus on the one man, right?

• 8:24Speaker 05

  And it is indeed the fact that he was the top man and he had not absolute power, because there is no absolute power, but he was very, very definitely the top man. But he had some people around him that were essential for the functioning of that government. It was called the Politburo, that means the political bureau of the Communist Party. But it was sort of like the top body, uh, uh, top ruling body in the Soviet Union. And that also, by the way, that brought me to Stalin in his sort of familial and social milieu, which his wife Nadia was naturally a part, while she was alive, and so were his colleagues.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  He was one of these people who socializes with colleagues his whole life. He doesn't, he doesn't have friends that he goes off and plays golf with.

• 9:14Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 9:14Speaker 05

  He goes to the dacha. In Russia, you go to the dacha, that means your weekend place. So they had, after they're, once they're in power and have stopped being penniless revolutionaries, which is what they were before, they get to have rather small flats in the Kremlin, quite crowded as a matter of fact, but anyway, very grand, but very, but crowded. And they will have these country places and they're all reasonably young. They have wives, they have young families and they meet up there at the weekends.

• 9:46Kate Lister?

  So Nadia, can you give us a bit of background on where she comes from? Where was she born? What kind of family? I'm just trying to get an understanding of how she would have even met Stalin. Where did she come from?

• 10:00Speaker 05

  Well, her father was a revolutionary, like Stalin.

• 10:03Kate Lister?

  Do it, right.

• 10:04Speaker 05

  They were in the same trade. This is under the Russian Empire when the Tsar was still ruling. So there were quite a few people that were against the Tsar and they joined revolutionary organizations, notably the Bolshevik, the Marxist revolutionary organization, the Bolshevik Party. And Nadia's father was one of those people. And Stalin, younger than her father, but significantly older than her, was another one. Now, Russia was an empire, in other words, not just Russia. Russia had conquered the areas to the south of it, which are called the Caucasus, this mountainous area, Georgia and Armenia in that, in that mountainous area.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  And Stalin comes from that area, from the Caucasus, from Georgia. He was a Georgian. Nadia's father was actually a Russian, but he went down to the Caucasus for the purpose of making a revolution. And that's where he met Stalin. And that's where Nadia, at some, you know, very early point in her life, would have come to know Stalin as a person, you know, who came around visiting her parents.

• 11:08Kate Lister?

  So she'd have been really young when she first met him then?

• 11:11Speaker 05

  Oh, I think so, yes, yeah.

• 11:13Kate Lister?

  Wow. So she's, she's growing up then in quite a politically active and aware family. And of course, the situation in Russia is incredibly tense at this time of, I'm gonna guess.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  Yes, it wasn't great.

• 11:28Kate Lister?

  No, it wasn't great.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  The Tsarist Empire. In nineteen oh four, they had a war with Japan, Russia. They did very badly, and that was extremely humiliating because European power should have been able to beat Asian power, that kind of thing. In the wake of that unsuccessful war, there was a revolution. This is in nineteen oh five, nineteen oh six, which is called the nineteen oh five revolution. And it very nearly overthrew the Tsar. He survived, but only just. So this is really the whole of Nadia's life, what she's born about nineteen oh one, I think. So this is nineteen oh five, when she's a tiny girl, is that, that's a year of instability and uncertainty as a regime going to survive.

• 12:12Speaker 05

  Then it more or less stabilizes a bit. But then in nineteen fourteen comes the First World War. And Russia doesn't do well in that war, and so things get yet worse back home, as you can imagine. And that leads to the first of two revolutions in nineteen seventeen. Actually Stalin, and I think Nadia's father too, were in political exile. They had been punished by being sent into exile within Russia at the time of that first revolution. All sorts of people are in it, but it produced a kind of a liberal, middle-class government. The revolution is like Nadia's father and Stalin, that's from their point of view, no good.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  You want a real socialist, working-class revolution, and that actually comes in October, when the Bolsheviks overthrow that liberal government and take power. And in that new government, Stalin becomes People's Commissar for Nationalities. That means he's essentially Minister for Nationalities. But he's also a member of the Politburo, this top policymaking body that I I mentioned before. The leader of this new government, Lenin, is ten years older than Stalin. Stalin knows him but not, I mean, he's worked with him. Is a friendly and respectful and admiring on Stalin's part, a relationship between them,

• 13:37Speaker 05

  but not all that closer one. So what the situation then, nineteen seventeen, is you've got revolutionaries who've spent their time either being in prison or in exile or or living in Europe, sitting in cafes hoping that the revolution comes, and suddenly they're in charge of a government.

• 13:55Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 13:56Speaker 05

  And this is just about the time that Nadya and Stalin get together. A very young Nadya, a sixteen or seventeen year old.

• 14:05Kate Lister?

  Sixteen, oh. Do we have any idea of what she was like as this young girl? I mean, was was she ambitious? Was she politically minded? Was she introverted? What was she like?

• 14:18Speaker 05

  I think we don't have anything much, except back reading. If we look at her as a young woman in the twenties, she's quite introverted. You see the pictures of her, I I mentioned they were all meeting at the Dacha. They they often took photographs. And they're usually a sort of cheerful company and lots of people are playing with the children, you know, not their children but other people's children. Or else they're drinking and making toast, or they're dancing, or they're listening to music or what. Nadya is never doing any of these things. She, in the pictures, she sort of stands around looking a bit, well, I have to say, a little bit sullen, actually. So it's very hard to get a picture of her. We start to know more about her, of course, in the twenties.

• 15:02Speaker 05

  But by that time, she's obviously not in great health. She's a young woman, but she's not in great physical health and she seems to be also not that cheerful and not in great psychological hea- health either. And exactly what was wrong is not entirely clear. It seems as if some of it was probably gynecological. She and Stalin had a child very quickly, or nineteen twenty-one, I think, the first one is born, Vasha. And she probably thought, that's enough. And the current method of contraception was abortion. And she, like other women of the time, had a lot of them, and that perhaps is the source of those troubles. She then had a second child in nineteen twenty six.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Doesn't seem to have wanted that second child much. Svetlana, who later became famous as for defecting from the Soviet Union, but that's another story. So she has the second child. That seems to leave her, as I say, with these gynecological problems and it seems as if either sex, she doesn't want sex, or it hurts, or whatever. Or else she's just angry with Stalin, but something happens with marital relations. It being the days when people didn't necessarily tell all to blazing from the rooftops, we don't ignore exactly.

• 16:21Kate Lister?

  Why do you think she married him? What was the appeal, do you think?

• 16:26Speaker 05

  Oh, glamorous revolutionary.

• 16:28Kate Lister?

  Ah, right.

• 16:29Speaker 05

  Glamorous Caucasian revolutionary. Yes, with Miss P, yeah. And from his point of view, I think, I mean, he didn't leave any statement about this. But attractive young girl who has been attached to him since she was about four years old. I mean, I think it's that kind of thing. He'd been married before, ten, fifteen years before. His wife had died of typhoid, I think, after a year of marriage, so they really, and part of that time he'd been under arrest as a revolutionary and so on. That left one child who came up and and lived with the Stalins, with Nadya and Stalin in the twenties. Plus, they had another, somebody else's child as well.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  Almost all these families had some adopted child as well as their own, which is kind of interesting. I think that's a sense of revolutionary comradeship. You know, there's a fallen comradeship. He leaves a child, you take him in. Anyway, so Nadya had her own two. And she had the child of dead revolutionary. And she had the child of first wife as well, who wasn't that much younger than she was, actually.

• 17:34Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 17:35Speaker 05

  However, I don't want to suggest that she was spending her time sort of looking after all these children. Not at all, there were nannies and so on to do that. She seems to have been quite remote as a mother, more remote than Stalin was as a father. He would play with the children, she not so much.

• 17:55Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Sheila and Nadya after the short break.

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• 21:03Kate Lister?

  I suppose you forget, like with all the value of hindsight, and we know what happened and how many millions of people died, you sort of forget that there would have been this point very early on here where it all seemed exciting and new and like they really were going to change the world and it was hopeful and optimistic, that people didn't know where this was going to go.

• 21:25Speaker 05

  Not at all. No, initially, I mean, if you've been on the side of the revolution before and a revolution is successful, wow, this is sort of terrific and suddenly you're in power, you're important, you were nobody, and suddenly you're in power and you're important, you're living in the Kremlin, for heaven's sake. That's sort of extraordinary.

• 21:44Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Speaker 05

  Now, I think, I mean, there's idealism, there's excitement, but the other thing to remember is they took power, but of course, not everybody accepted them taking power. And the result was there was a civil war. And in that civil war, all the sort of, there was a big cult of the fighting virtues. You know, the party had not been involved in physical violence particularly before, but in civil war, it comes to define it, it becomes a much more masculine party, as a matter of fact, because of this emphasis on fighting. And then they win the civil war, more success, more glamour, and Stalin comes back from the front, he was at the front, admittedly as a political commissar, but never mind, he'd been involved in the thick of the civil war.

• 22:29Speaker 05

  So he comes, then you're back in Moscow, and of course, from Stalin's point of view and all the rest of the leaders, that's when the hard stuff begins. You took power, you managed to fight an internal enemy and an external enemy because other foreign powers intervened. But then, of course, you've got to run the country and nothing has equipped you for running the country, unfortunately. You don't know how to do it. And when you put the brutality of Stalin particularly, but not only of Stalin, that's the context of it. You have people with a wish to change things absolutely radically. First of all, you try issuing some proclamations and say, let's change everything radically. Nothing much happens. And so then the temptation is to go out and say, you know, if you don't

• 23:14Speaker 05

  change things radically, I'll kill you, or I'll lock you up, or I'll beat you, or what. And so that's part of the mechanism. And the violence develops with what is called collectivization at the end of the twenties. Collectivization meant peasants, majority of the population is peasants still. These peasants have a very traditional style of agriculture on small plots. It's of course, non-economic, it's non-mechanized. The Bolsheviks are modernizers as well as socialists. So, okay, it should be bigger scale, it should be mechanized. So they try telling the peasants, okay, you should be in bigger scale collective farms and that there'll be economy of scale and so on. Peasants do not listen to that.

• 23:57Speaker 05

  So in twenty nine, they say, okay, we're going to set this up, like it or not, basically. And that's when a lot of strong-arming and force and arrest and killing starts.

• 24:10Kate Lister?

  And what was Nadya's role in any of this? Was she politically involved in the party? Was she, wasn't she Stalin's secretary at one point?

• 24:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I mean, all the wives, all the young wives were secretaries of their fathers or husbands' friends. So it's that kind of, it's a small world at the beginning. I don't think that reflects our huge competence on her part, well, she didn't stay very long in the jobs. But I think it's just, you know, it's the social circle.

• 24:39Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Now, we also, I think, have no indication of our own. Private political views at this point. She's grown up in a revolutionary family. She's never gone against it in any way. And she married a revolutionary. So you can assume that she's sort of on the revolutionary side. But there's no inclination of her wanting to take it further. For example, she didn't, in the civil war, she didn't say, I must go to the front and fight with the men for the revolution. Some people did that. That sounds like blame when I say that. And she had a young child. So, okay, it's understandable. But the fact is that other young women made rather more definite signals of their enthusiasm for the revolution than she did. She, we don't have any such signals from her, I'd say.

• 25:25Speaker 05

  What she decides she wants to do, very typical of the young women in the new political elite, is to get more education. Education was a big thing, curiously enough, for the Bolsheviks in the, from the beginning. And they had set up, what they were going to do, as I said, they're modernisers. They want to modernise the country. And that means they want to produce more engineers, qualified engineers and managers. And she goes to the industrial academy where they're training those people. So she was actually, in the late twenties and up to her death, training to be an industrial manager, as were many of the other young second wives of Bolsheviks and the children of Bolsheviks, et cetera, et cetera.

• 26:10Kate Lister?

  What was the Bolsheviks' view on the role of women at this time? What was their idea on what, what women should be doing? Is it stay at home and have lots of babies to ensure the future?

• 26:21Speaker 05

  No, no, no, absolutely the opposite. They were pioneers of women's emancipation.

• 26:26Kate Lister?

  Oh, that's complex.

• 26:27Speaker 05

  Really? No, no, they're the world leaders on this, actually. I mean, not only giving women the vote and abolishing all the sort of legislation that of the, from the old regime that restricted their ability to have property and so on. That all goes without saying and made divorce very easy, legalized abortion. And they did the whole revolutionary package of women's emancipation. They did everything they could to get women into the workforce.

• 26:57Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 26:58Speaker 05

  Of course, this is not so easy because you can, as a government, you can try and get women into the workforce. But if the society is more conservative. You get a bit of a backlash, but that's why somebody like Nadia, who belongs to the revolutionary group, she would have felt it very strange just to stay at home with her children. That wouldn't have been what a modern woman should be doing. Much better that a nanny look after her children and she go and study to be an industrial manager.

• 27:25Kate Lister?

  Wow. Now, you alluded to her having some health problems and we can unpack that, but it's a very difficult question. Was this a happy marriage? Was she a happy woman? Was it all domestic bliss at home?

• 27:39Speaker 05

  No, I think she definitely wasn't happy, but whether she wasn't happy because of the marriage or because of Stalin, or because she wasn't a very happy person, or because she wasn't very well, or, you know, it's very hard to sort this out. And she does seem to have seen a psychiatrist at one point who seemed to feel that she did have problems. It is clear that she was jealous of Stalin and that she resented the fact that he wasn't around a lot.

• 28:07Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  He was always absent, you know, he was, he was, first of all, he was running the show for Lenin, doing a lot of the organising stuff, and then he's competing with other people to be the top man after Lenin dies in twenty four, and then he is the top man. So he doesn't have a lot of time and she resents that, and she resents that quite strongly. And there are stories that he beat her up, but I don't think we have chapter and verse on that. It's a presumption. And her resentment of him was certainly not expressed in those terms. Her resentment was that he neglected her, or sometimes that he seemed interested in other women, but that second one doesn't even seem to have been particularly right.

• 28:51Speaker 05

  In other words, he certainly wasn't one of the Bolsheviks who were notoriously carrying on with other women. I mean, he was really busy, truly busy.

• 29:00Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:00Speaker 05

  At government work. It's interesting, there are letters between them. In the late twenties, he tended to go south for summer vacation and she wouldn't, after a while, she wouldn't go with him. She stayed in Moscow, saying she had to, you know, keep up her work for school and that kind of stuff. And that's when the letters are. And Stalin's letters are quite affectionate. They're short, but they're affectionate, and hers are very cold. They're even shorter, they're very cold.

• 29:28Kate Lister?

  That's interesting.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  So there's a disparity there. Now, this is not a big source base, you know, we're talking about, you know, a dozen letters, say. But it certainly, it looks, you would get the impression there of a very busy man in a very important job who is really tied up with his work, who is fond of his wife but irritated when she demands too much of his attention.

• 29:51Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Because he hasn't got time.

• 29:55Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  As I say, I mean, there's the children as well. Now, he does manage to find a little bit more time for the children, as a matter of fact. On at least one occasion, she took off with the children for Leningrad, which is in Petersburg now, you know, to her parents, she went back to her parents. She came back after a week, so she was making a protest against whatever fight they'd had.

• 30:16Kate Lister?

  Interesting. Now, as far as I can work out, all married couples, they sort of have things that they know that the other person is doing, but they just sort of have to turn a blind eye for a quiet life. For example, my dad is still smoking cigarettes and he thinks that nobody else knows that he's doing this. And my mother absolutely knows and she shouted at him a lot, but is now just kind of like, oh, just. So we watch him go and skulk in the flowerbed, thinking that no one else knows. Now, that's just a cigarette. What Stalin did was insane. I'm trying to imagine being his wife. Was she aware of what was going on?

• 30:51Speaker 05

  The first part of violence, which involved killing, although mainly involving deporting, that's collectivization at the end of the twenties. Then, in the end of the thirties, there is the episode called The Great Terror, which is sort of random terror in which lots and lots of people were killed and sent into exile. But she wasn't around then.

• 31:12Kate Lister?

  Oh.

• 31:13Speaker 05

  She died, committed suicide. But so we're talking about collectivization. Now, her view of collectivization would probably have been in part, at any rate, the standard Bolshevik one, that we are ruling in a very backward country. We have to make our agriculture more modern. The peasants are, of course, against this. They don't understand, and we're trying to explain it to them, but we're also pressuring. There were differences of opinion about how much force to put in this collectivization. Stalin was, at first, he was in the middle, a central position, and then he went with the people who said, okay, we got to push them.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  We got to really force them, we got to terrorize them to some degree, and arrest, arrest a group of them in every village. So he goes that way. Now, there are people in the party, including in their social circle, who say, we're doing too much, there's too much violence, we'll alienate them. They're called rightists in Soviet political violence. The main one is a man younger, but between Nadia and Stalin in age, called Nikolai Bucharen. Everybody's favorite, a really nice man, fun to have around, spent the weekends with them often in that group that I'm talking about. Now, Bucharen is one who is saying, we're going too far, too far too fast.

• 32:38Speaker 05

  And at the industrial academy, where Nadia is a student, most of the students are communist. There were quite a few students who agreed with Bucharen, who are rightists. Now, they weren't, they weren't in sort of big revolt or whatever, but within the student milieu, there would have been several points of view. The enthusiasts for collectivization, who were going out as volunteers to the villages to help, which meant getting involved in the violence, and the people who were saying, we're being too tough and too violent. So she would have been exposed to both of these views. Well, for sure, she would have known what Bucharen's position was. Of course, he was a friend.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  Now, some people say that her suicide had something to do with her distress about collectivization. That is speculation, unfortunately. Oh, is it? We just don't know. We don't know. Okay. On the face of it, she committed suicide after one of her fairly frequent fights with Stalin, based on her being jealous of him, angry that he didn't pay attention to her at a party, and jealous because she thought he was flirting with someone else. And she didn't leave a note, by the way. Right, okay. Shot herself with a small pistol that her brother had brought back from Berlin. Now, I mentioned this is quite, because of the civil war and its sort of importance as foundation myth in the party.

• 34:03Speaker 05

  Although the Bolshevik party was quite against guns for the population within the elite, you know, having a gun was not an unusual thing. Anyway, she died as a result of a shot from this pistol. And after the party, which is a party of Bolsheviks, of those people who hung out together, with lots of drink, you know, etc. So she stomped out. I mean, she public, she threw something at Stalin, and then she left. Oh, okay, a big fight. Yeah, yeah, a big, public fight, though I think not all that unusual, you know. Okay, all right. The wife of Stalin's number two man, an older woman than Nadya, a sensible woman, one probably Nadya didn't like that much.

• 34:47Speaker 05

  Anyway, she follows Nadya out and she walks her around the Kremlin, it's in the Kremlin, walks around the palace, you know, those squares between the palaces, calming her down, say, you know, it's okay, you know, just, you know, Stalin's very annoying, but I mean, you know, he's got great responsibilities and, yeah. And anyway, she, the wife of the number two man, she thinks that Nadya has calmed down and sort of sends her off to bed, basically. And it's sometime in the night that she, according to most opinion, she killed herself, but there is the other story, which I'm sure you're going to ask me about, right? I might, yes. Did he kill her? No, I have to say that in Russia and the Soviet Union,

• 35:32Speaker 05

  every time anybody important dies of suicide, which actually has happened quite in many cases, there are always rumours that it was murder. It's just standard. And of course, sometimes they're probably right. In this case, I think we don't have anything to suggest that it's right. We have accounts from lots of family members, including Svetlana, who was, what, about six at this point, about the chaos in the morning when it was found that she was dead. And distress and all the, you know, the people who were also friends and their wives, they come in and they're looking after the children. You know, everybody's talking in corners and so on. But there was, from those accounts,

• 36:16Speaker 05

  there's no sense of any doubt of what happened, that Nadya, who was obviously thought to be prone to depression, killed herself.

• 36:27Kate Lister?

  I'll be back with Sheila and Nadya after the short break.

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• 37:46Kate Lister?

  Had she done anything like that before? I mean, you mentioned earlier that she'd seen a psychiatrist in Germany. Is this something she had a long history of, this depression?

• 37:55Speaker 05

  Depression, I think, yes. But on the other hand, depression wasn't a sort of recognised condition

• 38:01Kate Lister?

  No, no.

• 38:01Speaker 05

  in revolutionary Russia. You know, there wasn't even a sort of good word for it. There's a fictionalised, but based on some data, account, a sort of biography of Nadya. And that has her talking to a psychiatrist in Berlin and saying something that could imply either that she'd had suicidal thoughts or that she, you know, might even have made some attempt. But look, this is all very, it isn't clear where she got it from or if she made it up. Given Nadya's rather sort of, I mean, it is very clear, I think, that she was depressed. You know, she just has every side of a person who is depressed. But that's, I think, all we know, which is a bit unsatisfying, but there it is.

• 38:45Kate Lister?

  What was the public told about her death?

• 38:48Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, I have to say that the Bolsheviks, their approach to the question of marriage, they were, they were basically against marriage. Most of the, you know, it was unusual for them to be actually, you know, they had regarded it as a bourgeois convention involving patriarchal oppression, by the way. That was their view of it. They were very against anything like the American sort of publicity to first ladies of presidents. Their approach was, men can be high achievers, women can be high achievers. You don't just mention a woman because she's the partner, they would have said, rather than what, the partner of a famous man. So therefore, there had been no, she'd never been in the public eyes, first lady. There was no such concept.

• 39:30Kate Lister?

  Right, okay.

• 39:31Speaker 05

  But when she died, they flattered convention to a degree in that her death was announced and suddenly and tragically, it said, which means that's a code for suicide. Her death was put in Pravda, although it wasn't said who she was. I mean, it wasn't said she was Stalin's wife or partner. But then, and this is really funny, there was a letter saying how sad it was that this great person had died, that kind of letter about Nadya. And it was signed by all the wives of the Politburo, all the wives and female partners of the Politburo, some of whom were politicians in their own right. But the public didn't know who they were. And it didn't say, they usually had their maiden names or their revolutionary names.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  They didn't go by their husband's name. So the public must have been totally bewildered about what is this collection of random women, including the odd minister, who was expressing their deep regret at the loss of this devoted Bolshevik or whatever. Apart from the gossip, which was always very active in Moscow elite, so there isn't a public reaction.

• 40:38Kate Lister?

  And what about Stalin? What was the impact on him of losing it? I mean, quite suddenly, it must have been, and it must have been a shock.

• 40:44Speaker 05

  Yes, he did appear to be upset. The upsetness seems to have two parts, but again, it's very different. The closest up account we have is from the daughter Svidlana, and she's only six. And he didn't want to talk to her about it, but there seems to be grief and there also seems to be a sense of betrayal. In other words, something like if Whitman tries to reconstruct, why would he feel betrayed if his wife kills herself? Something like, you know, I have the weight of the whole country on me. I'm trying to get collectivization to work. I've got, I've got this, I've got that. It's a crucial moment and she goes and does this now. So something like that.

• 41:25Speaker 05

  He's often described as paranoid Stalin, and I would say he was by no means out of control paranoid normally. I mean, he's quite good at running a government in the way that he did it. I mean, in his own way, you may not like his way, but he was, you know, if you're truly paranoid, you really can't do something like that. However, in the months after her death, then he said some things that really start to sun off the wall in terms of paranoia. There was the one that struck me most. Remember, this is collectivization, there's resistance from the peasant, there's a famine, which has to do with the whole battle about it. And Stalin at one point said, there are people wandering around on the roads pretending to be starving peasants,

• 42:10Speaker 05

  but they are actually just acting the role. Now, that's a kind of paranoia of a kind of slightly unhinged type, which is not typical of Stalin. I think the sense of betrayal was real and the sense of, and with it, I'm sure, a degree of guilt. I mean, in fact, he expressed that later on. You know, I didn't do enough, I didn't spend enough time, you know, I. I mean, people always feel guilty about after suicides, and I think he was no exception. But it left him, if we're looking at the political impact, it left him less trusting, more suspicious of people, and above all, really lonely.

• 42:51Speaker 05

  He never linked up with anybody after that. He spent quite a lot of time with his children when they were little, but then they grew up. He really ended up a very isolated man. You know, the sort of social circle that she'd been a part of, that which is partly her relatives as well. It didn't break up immediately, but it is sort of withered away.

• 43:13Kate Lister?

  As a final question then, there's this sort of narrative around Nadia and Nadia's death, that once she died, it took the brakes off Stalin, and it was then that he became really paranoid and launched all these horrendous policies that resulted in so many people dying and the purges and all that stuff. Do you think that there's anything in that? Or is that a sort of like a popular, not quite a myth, but it's a more comforting way to read it? Do you think if Nadia had lived, it all still would have happened?

• 43:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I know, I'm not exactly saying yes, I think that. What it is, it seems to me it's complicated. I'm sure that Stalin's, the fact that he gets more and more bloodthirsty and that the justification for killing people gets worse and weaker and weaker. I think that's got to be a multi-factor thing. I think for sure it is associated with his increased sensitivity, can't trust anybody. But not long after, well, a year or so after Nadia died, one of his closest friends, a political member, was assassinated. There's a rumor that Stalin did it, doesn't, I think, seem to be true. But Stalin thought it was a conspiracy of his political enemies to do it. And that's another thing that's

• 44:25Speaker 05

  often seen as part of the impetus, pushing him towards that sort of random violence. I would think. Not just death is in there too, but by no means the only factor and perhaps not a major one.

• 44:37Kate Lister?

  Sheila, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much for fleshing out this woman a bit more. She's a very complex and intriguing figure. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 44:50Speaker 05

  I mean, the main thing I would probably want to tell you about is my books and you already mentioned the most recent of them.

• 44:58Kate Lister?

  By the books.

• 44:59Speaker 05

  Which is Lost Souls and that is about Soviet displaced persons after the Second World War and the birth of the Cold War. And then I've got the book called Death of Stalin and that is a smaller book. The other most recent thing, and this was really interesting to write, is the shortest history of the Soviet Union. Do it in 50,000 words and get everything in. It was really interesting to write.

• 45:22Kate Lister?

  Sheila, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. You've been absolutely marvelous.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation.

• 45:29Kate Lister?

  Thanks for listening and thank you so much to Sheila for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at [email protected]. We have got episodes on the murder scandal that rocked Edwardian Britain and the fourth episode in this limited series on the real wives of dictators about Chiung Ching, aka Chairman Mao's wife, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.

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