Stalin’s Daughter and her Indian lover

If being born as a woman in Soviet Russia wasn’t miserable enough, imagine having Stalin as your dad. Svetlana Alliluyeva was Stalin’s only daughter. When Nadya, Stalin’s wife, shot herself after a heated argument with her husband, Alliluyeva was just six. For years, the Soviet machinery convinced her and the world that her mother had actually died of acute appendicitis. It was only a decade later while browsing an American magazine that she learnt the actual truth about her mother’s death. Stalin never married and the poor girl had to ‘live up’ to the expectations that her father had for Soviet women. Reflecting on how Stalin controlled her clothes, education, and romantic life, Khrushchev wrote: “His was the tenderness of a cat for a mouse. He broke the heart first of a child, then a young girl, then of a woman and a mother.”

Her first love was the film director Aleksei Kepler. Stalin didn’t approve of him and so he did what he routinely did with such characters – sent him to the Gulag. After a series of short-lived marriages, in 1963, Alliluyeva at the age of 37, while recovering from a medical procedure to remove her tonsils, befriended the much older Brajesh Singh, the Indian Communist who was on a visit to the USSR and also recuperating in the same hospital after having his nasal polyps removed.

They fell in love and Singh returned back to Moscow to be with Alliluyeva. But the rigid Soviet laws that prevented marriages with foreigners meant that Alliluyeva could never move out with Singh back to India. The ailing Singh died within a year of returning. Alliluyeva, somehow managed to get permission to immerse his ashes in the Ganges. For the first time in her life she left the Soviet Union to visit Singh’s village and immerse his ashes in the Ganges. What a dramatic moment!

In India, Alliluyeva tried for asylum especially since Singh’s nephew was a Cabinet Minister in Indira Gandhi’s cabinet. When that didn’t work out, a few days before her scheduled return to the USSR, Alliluyeva, on the pretext of stepping out for dinner, hailed a cab o the US Embassy in Chanakyapuri and sought asylum. The request was cleared and she was flown to Rome, Geneva and eventually ended up in the US. It’s not hard to imagine that her public rebuke of the USSR was also partly orchestrated by the CIA. But the fact remains that her presence in the US was one of the most damning indictments of the USSR’s repression of women’s freedom.

With the money earned through her publications, Alliluyeva built a hospital in memory of Brajesh Singh in his village in Pratapgarh, UP. She passed away in 2010.

via: Julia Ioffe’s ‘Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia,from Revolution to Autocracy‘ about which I also wrote here.