Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Real Wives of Dictators | Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin's Wife

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

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 [e-mail] 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 survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. 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,

poking by adults, to other adults, about adulty things and an adulty thing and an adulty thing. And an adult too, do you feel safer? I'm glad you feel safer. I certainly feel safer. Right. On with the show!

They say they're behind every great man. There's a great woman. 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? She was certainly young at the beginning. She was drawn to the flame. Absolutely. Or were they enablers? She famously defied the judges, calling them fashion. and she said, I was Mao's dog. I bit who he told me to bite. She's aware of the anti-Semitism. It's not that she looks the other way. She doesn't think it's a problem. She

doesn't need to look the other way. What was their life like behind closed doors? She's grown up in a revolutionary family and she married a revolutionary, so you can assume that she's on the revolutionary side. And were any of these women thirsty for power themselves? The rest of the leadership was dead set against it. They sensed her ambition. They had an instinct about her. I'm Kate Lister, and these are the real wives of dictators. Episode 3, Nadja Alleluiva, wife of Joseph Stalin.

What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing you. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful time. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheets,

the history of sex scandal in society, with me, K. Lister. Growing up in a family of revolutionaries, you could say that Nadja Ali Luiva'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 Nadia would follow into the rank. 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, who is going to help us get to know this woman a little bit better. So without further ado, let's crack on. Oh, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets.

It's Odely Sheila Fitzpatrick. How are you doing? I'm doing well, thank you. 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. 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?

It's just after 8pm. And it's just after 9 a.m. here. So we'll both be kind of sleepy and possibly slightly drunk. But we are... That's not true. It'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? First name is Najeejadir, or Nadja, if you want to make it a bit easy. easier, that's a shortening. And the last name is Alleluiva. It's a bit like Hallelujah. Alleluia. A bit like Halal. So kind of like Nadja, Hallelujah, kind of. Okay. Kind of. Yeah. Can I ask you, what brought you to study this particular area of history?

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? Well, I started off as a historian. That is, I was his 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 short of presumption that Russian history ended in 1917

with the revolution that established the Soviet Union. 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 and 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? 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 a political bureau of the Communist Party. But it was sort of like the top body, top ruling body in the Soviet Union. And that also, by the way, that brought me to start.

in his sort of familial and social milieu, of which his wife, Nadia, was naturally a path while she was alive. And so were his colleagues. He was one of these people who socializes with colleagues. His whole life, he doesn't have friends that he goes off and plays golf with. He goes to the Dutcher. In Russia, you go to the Darcher. That means your weekend place. So they had, after their, 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 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. So, Nadja, 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? Well, her father was a revolutionary like Stalin. Oh, that'll do it. Right. 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 Najah'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 mountainous area. And Stalin comes from that area, from the Caucasus, from Georgia. He was a Georgian. Najee's father was actually a Russian. but he went down to the caucuses for the purpose of making a revolution. And that's where he met Stalin. And that's where Niger 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. So she'd have been really young when she first met him then? Oh, I think so, yes. Yeah. Wow. And so 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 up. I'm going to guess. Yes, it wasn't great.

No, it wasn't great. In 1904, 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 1905, 196, which is called the 905 revolution. and it very nearly overthrew the Tsar. He survived but only just. So this is really the whole of Najah's life,

which is born about 1901, I think. So this is 1905, which is a tiny girl as that. That's a year of instability and uncertainty is the regime gone to survive. Then it more or less stabilizes a bit, but then in 1914 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 1917. 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. then that's from their point of view, no good. 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 mentioned before. The leader of this new government, Lenin, is 10 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 relationship between them,

but not all that closer one. So what the situation in 1917 is you've got revolutionaries who've spent that time either being in prison or in exile or living in Europe, sitting in cafes, hoping that the revolution comes. And suddenly they're in charge of a government. Wow. And this is just about the time that Nadia and Stalin get together. A very young Nadia, a 16 or 17-year-old. 16. Oh.

Do we have any idea of what she was like as this young girl? I mean, was she ambitious? Was she politically minded? Was she introverted? What was she like? I think we don't have anything much except back reading. If we look at her as a young woman in the 20s, she's quite introverted. You see the pictures of her. I mentioned they were all meeting at the Dachar.

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. Nadia is never doing any of these things 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 20s. 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 health either. and exactly what was wrong is not entirely clear. It seems that if some of it was probably gynecological. She and Stalin had a child very quickly,

1921, I think the first one is born Vassia. 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 1926. It 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.

Why do you think she married him? What was the appeal, do you think? Oh, glamorous revolutionary. Ah, right. Glamorous Caucasian revolutionary. Yes, with a spy. 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, 10, 15 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 lived with the Stalin's, with Nigerian Stalin in the 20s. Plus they had another, somebody else's child as well. 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 comrades. He leaves a child, you take him in. Anyway, so Nya 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. Wow. However, I don't want to suggest that she was spending her time sort of looking at, 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. I'll be back with Sheila and Nadja after the short break. 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 that this was going to go. 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 are in power. You are 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. Yeah. 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 think of the civil war. 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 intervene. 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 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 20s. Collectivization meant peasants, the 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 modernizes 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 will be economy of scale and so on. Peasants do not listen to that. So in 29, 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. And what was Nudge's role in any of this? Was she politically involved in the party? Was she, wasn't she Stalin's secretary at one point? 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. Yeah, yeah. Now, we also, I think, have no indication of her 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 Blaine. 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. We don't have any such signals from her, I'd say. 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 from the beginning. And they had set up what they were going to do. As I said, they're modernizers. They want to modernize 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 20s 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, etc. What was the Bolsheviks view on the role of women at this time? What was their idea on what women should be doing? Is it stay at home and have lots of babies to ensure the future? No, absolutely the opposite. They were pioneers of women's emancipation. Oh, that's complex. Really? No, no. They're the world leaders on this, actually. I mean, not only giving women the forward and abolishing all the sort of legislation that, 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. Wow. They did the whole revolutionary package of women's emancipation. They did everything they could to get women into the workforce. Okay. 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, he 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. 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? 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. 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 did have problems. it's clear that she was jealous of Stalin and that she resented the fact that he wasn't around a lot.

He was always absent. You know, he was, first of all, he was running the show for Lenin, doing a lot of the organizing stuff. And then he's competing with other people to be the top man after Lenin dies in 24. And then he is the top man. So it doesn't have a lot of time. And she resents that. And she resents that quite strongly.

And there are stories that he be. 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. 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. at government work. It's interesting.

There are letters between them. In the late 20s, 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 at 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 than they're very cold.

That's interesting. 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 looks, you would get the impression there of a very busy man and 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. Right, okay. Because he hasn't got time.

Yeah. 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. 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 he's now just kind of like, oh, just so we watch him go and skulk in the flower bed 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? The first part of violence, which involved killing, although mainly involving deep, That's collectivization at the end of the 20s. Then in the end of the 30s, there is the episode called The Great Terror,

which is sort of random terror in which lots of people were killed and sent into exile. But she wasn't around then. Oh. She died. She 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. We got to really force them. We got to terrorize them to some degree. and arrest a group of them are 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, between Najin-S Stalin-age called Nikolai Bukharan, everybody's favorite, a really nice man, fun to have Iran, spent the weekends with them often in that group that I'm talking about. Now, Bukharan is one who is saying, we're going too far, too far to fast. And at the Industrial Academy, where Nigeria is a student, most of the students are communist,

there are quite a few students who agreed with Bukharan, who are righteous. Now, they weren't in sort of big revolt or whatever, but within the students, 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 were 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 Buharan's position was because he was a friend.

Now, some people say that her suicide had something to do with her distress about collective That is speculation, unfortunately. We just don't know. We don't know. On the face of it, she committed suicide after one of her, you know, 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. She didn't leave a note, by the way.

Shot herself with a small pistol that are. 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, 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. Lots of people. drink, you know, et cetera. So she stomped out. I mean, she public, she threw something at start 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 Nadia, a sensible woman, one probably Madja didn't like that much. Anyway, she follows Najah 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 Nigra has calmed down and sort of sends her off to bed, basically.

Right. 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, every time anybody important dies of suicide, which actually has happened quite in many cases, there are always rumors 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 is 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 pliperial people who were also friends and their wives, they come in and they're looking after the children. And, you know, everybody's talking in corners and so on. But from those accounts, there's no sense of any doubt of what happened, that Nadja, who was obviously thought to be prone to depression, killed herself.

I'll be back with Sheila and Nadja after the short break. 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? Depression, I think, yes, but on the other hand, depression wasn't a sort of recognized condition. No, no. In Revolutionary Russia, you know, there wasn't even a sort of good word for it.

There's a fictionalized, but based on some data, a Kant or sort of biography of Nadia, 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 he made it up. Given Nadia's rather sort of, I mean, it is very clear, I think, that she was depressed. You know, she just sure 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. What was the public told about her death?

Well, first of all, I have to say that the Bolsheviks, their approach to the question of marriage, They were basically against marriage. Most of the, you know, it was unusual for them to be actually, you know, they regarded 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,

brother than the partner of a famous man. So therefore, there had been no, she'd never been in the public eye as first lady. There was no such concept. Right. Okay. But when she died, they flouted convention to a degree in that her death was announced, and suddenly and tragically it said, which means to us, 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 Niger. 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. They didn't go by their husband's name.

So the public must have been totally bewildered about what is this collection? of branding 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. And what about Stalin? What was the impact on him of losing?

I mean, quite suddenly it must have been, and it must have been a shock. 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 one tries to reconstruct, why would he feel betrayed if his wife kills her? So 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 this. I've got that. It's a crucial moment. and she goes and does this now. So something like that, 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 sign 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, 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 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. 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,

which is partly her relatives as well. It didn't break up immediately, but it sort of withered away. As a final question, then, there's this sort of narrative around Nadia in Nadja's death, that once she died, it took the breaks 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? 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 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 sense that he can't trust anybody.

But not long after, well, a year or so after Nadja died, one of his closest friends, a political member, was assassinated. There's a rumor that Stalin did that doesn't, I think, seem to be true. But Stalin thought it was a conspiracy for his political enemies to do it. And that's another thing that's often seen as part of the impetus pushing him towards that sort of random violence. I would think Naj's death is in there too, but by no means the only factor and perhaps not a major one. Sheila, you have been fascinating to talk to you. 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? I mean, the main thing I would probably want to tell you about is my books. And you already mentioned the most recent offer, 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 show. shortest history of the Soviet Union, do it in 50,000 words and get everything in.

It was really interesting to write. Sheila, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. You've been absolutely marvelous. Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. 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 with you and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you'd just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. 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 Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the seats, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.