Did Stalin have any mistresses? "Muses" and Stalin's wives. Why was the opera singer registered as the leader's mistress? Joseph Stalin and his women

Favorite women of Joseph Vissarionovich

...We don’t want heavenly truth,
It is easier for us to lie on earth.

Joseph Dzhugashvili.
1896 poem in translation
from Georgian F. Chueva

When Stalin’s second wife passed away on the night of November 9, 1932, by pressing the trigger of a miniature Walther, he was not yet fifty-three. For a man - a blooming age. From 52-year-old Ivan the Terrible, who was one of the idols of the “leader of all nations,” his seventh wife gave birth to Tsarevich Dimitri, and the restless tsar sent his ambassador to England to woo his eighth wife.

Joseph Vissarionovich did not marry a third time, but it would be unfair to believe that he turned into a misogynist. Although he carefully hid his personal life from prying eyes.

Those who had the opportunity to communicate with Stalin almost unanimously note his charm, and many considered him handsome. “I also liked Stalin in everyday life, if I met him at his dinners. - Khrushchev recalled after he had debunked Stalin’s “cult of personality.” “They were such casual family dinners, with jokes and stuff.” Stalin was very humane at these dinners, and I was impressed by this.” “In his personal life, Stalin was very modest, dressed simply,” adds Mikoyan, who only fell out of favor with him towards the end of the leader’s life. “Civilian clothes suited him very well, emphasizing his simplicity even more.” “He has a lovely smile,” notes Korney Chukovsky, Barmaley’s creator. “Stalin knew how to charm people,” Beria’s son testifies. “In general, Stalin was handsome,” states Molotov, the second person in the Stalinist hierarchy. “Women were supposed to be attracted to him.” He was a success."

And he really was successful with women. And in 1918 in Petrograd, one of them awarded him with a venereal disease (presumably gonorrhea). When Molotov was asked about this, he smiled:
- Well, it was like that.

Ekaterina Georgievna, the mother of Joseph Dzhugashvili, unhappy in her personal life (her husband, a shoemaker, drank like a shoemaker), predicted a career for her son as a clergyman and until her last days she blamed him for his disobedience. Having already become the “autocrat of All Rus',” he rarely saw her, although he repeatedly visited the Caucasus on vacation. His letters to his mother, also infrequent, are written as if according to a template, and rarely in any of them do notes of filial love break through:

“September 29, 1933.
Hello, my mother! How do you feel, how are you living? I received your letter. It's good that you don't forget us. Now I feel good and healthy. If you need anything, let me know. Whatever you instruct, I will do. Yours Soso.”

One can’t help but recall the description given to his idol by “Stalin’s People’s Commissar” Kaganovich: “Stalin did not recognize any personal relationships. For him there was no love, so to speak, for a person as a person. He had a love for faces in politics.”

And one more thing. During the autopsy, doctors found that the left hemisphere of Stalin’s brain, responsible for the thought process, was larger than the right hemisphere, which forms emotions.

Stalin surrounded his mother with care, but with the care of strangers. He settled her in Tbilisi in the former palace of the Governor-General, where she, deeply religious and alien to luxury, occupied one small and dark room. My son was here only once, in 1935. Is this the kind of concern that old Kate expected? God knows.

Stalin did not come to the funeral of his mother, who died on July 4, 1937: the closed trial over Marshal Tukhachevsky, army commanders Yakir, Uborevich, Eideman, Kork and Putna. They were shot. Next in line were Bukharin, Rykov... Things were up to their necks.

A wreath was placed on the grave of Ekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili, located on Mount David next to Griboedov’s grave, with the inscription on the ribbon: “To my dear and beloved mother from the son of Joseph Dzhugashvili (from Stalin).”

I was there. There is a funicular from Tbilisi to the mountain. An unremarkable grave of a simple Georgian woman who gave birth to the evil genius of the 20th century. Even Churchill stood before him.

In his personal archive, Stalin kept only documents to which he wanted to limit access or which evoked in him some unknown associations and feelings. For example, in the drawer of his desk under old newspaper They found a note from Bukharin written before the execution. “Koba,” Nikolai Ivanovich addressed his old friend, “why did you need my life?”

Among other papers, Stalin kept in his archive a letter from a woman who was completely unknown to him. literate woman, although thousands and thousands of letters were received in his name, finding rest in the folders of the archives of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, ministries and departments. The letter was received by Stalin’s secretariat in April 1938 from Muscovite M. Mikhailovskaya, who, as follows from the rather confusing text, is concerned about the fate of a certain Praskovya Georgievna Mikhailovskaya, the wife of her nephew. She disappeared in broad daylight in Moscow, where she had come from Saratov region to fulfill the behest of her recently deceased mother: to give Stalin her childhood photographs.

“I met Pasha and her mother,” writes Mikhailovskaya, “in the first years of the Revolution. She was a tall, slender, black-eyed Georgian beauty. To my question to her mother - why is Pasha so black, because... the mother was bright, Pasha’s mother answered: her father is Georgian. But why are you alone? To this question, Pasha’s mother replied that Pasha’s father devoted himself to serving the people, and this is Stalin.

If you remember your youth and early youth (and this is never forgotten), then you, of course, remember the little black-eyed girl whose name was Pasha. She remembers you well. Your mother spoke Georgian, and Pasha remembered these words: “Dear dear child.”

I looked carefully at Pasha and see that she has your face, Comrade Stalin. The same general expression of an open, bold face, the same eyes, mouth, forehead. It became clear to me that Pasha is close to you by blood.”

In the “first years of the Revolution” Pasha was 18 years old. This means that she was born in 1899, when Stalin was expelled from last class Tiflis Theological Seminary. Is this a coincidence?

On March 20, 1938, Praskovya Georgievna handed over a letter addressed to Stalin and her children’s cards to the reception of the Central Committee of the party, and a few days later she disappeared. “She left me at 10 a.m. yesterday and didn’t come back. I waited for her all day and all night. I'm terribly worried that something bad has happened to her. She could have been hit by a tram; Wanting to get a date with you, she, driven by the futility of this, could commit suicide. By your order, it is not difficult to find Pasha.”

But it is difficult to say what happened to Praskovya Georgievna and M. Mikhailovskaya, given that Mikhailovskaya’s letter to Stalin came from the NKVD with a “top secret” covering note. Either the leader caressed the fruit of his sinless youth, taking a vow of silence in return, or he erased it into the camp dust along with his aunt, who learned what she was not supposed to know. But he kept her letter, just as he kept Bukharin’s note.

When Anna Alliluyeva, the sister of Stalin’s second wife, and Evgenia Zemlyanitsyna, her brother’s wife, were arrested in 1948, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana asked her father about the reasons for the arrest. “They knew too much, they talked too much. And this plays into the hands of the enemies,” replied Joseph Vissarionovich, whom Bukharin called “Genghis Khan with a telephone.”
According to the memoirs of contemporaries, Ekaterina Svanidze, Stalin’s first wife, “looked at her husband as if he were a demigod.” Although there seemed to be nothing special about it. “Height is two arshins and a half inches (that’s about 160 cm - L.B.). Average build. The second and third toes of the left foot are fused. Hair, beard and mustache are dark. The nose is straight and long. The forehead is straight and low. The face is elongated, dark, with pockmarks.” This is how he, twenty-three years old, appeared to police officials at the beginning of the twentieth century. But in the personal file of Joseph Dzhugashvili, aka Ryaboy, aka Koba, aka Zakhar Milikyan, aka Nisharidze, aka Stalin, who was arrested in 1912, his height is determined to be 1 meter 74 cm, which is by no means small for that time. And in the photographs he doesn’t look short. However, women have their own ideas about the merits of men.

Catherine, about whom little is known, was from the same village of Didi-Lilo near Tiflis, where Stalin’s father was from. In 1904, the already famous revolutionary Joseph Dzhugashvili fled from his first Siberian exile and settled in his native Georgia, where he soon secretly married his father’s countrywoman and herself beautiful girl village of Didi-Lilo. Judging by the few photographs that have survived, Ekaterina Svanidze was indeed a woman with an extraordinary appearance. Apparently, Stalin sincerely loved her. But in 1907 she died: either from typhus, or from pneumonia, or - there is such a version - from transient consumption (Stalin in the twenties was diagnosed with old, no longer active tuberculosis, which he acquired underground and could give it to your wife). Stalin took the loss seriously. “He was very sad. The pale face reflected the mental suffering that the death of a faithful life friend caused to this so callous person,” recalled a contemporary.

However, he also experienced the death of his second wife just as hard. “They thought then that he would commit suicide or go crazy,” testifies Stalin’s niece Kira Pavlovna Politkovskaya. The leader was a monogamous man, and it was difficult to part with what he was used to, and if he parted, it was without regret. Including clothes. “There was nothing to bury him in,” said Molotov. “The frayed sleeves of the uniform were hemmed and cleaned...”

Ekaterina Semyonovna Svanidze was buried Orthodox rite. In the photograph depicting her in the coffin, Stalin, still with a small beard, stands at the head of the bed, his head lowered in unruly curls.
“This creature softened my stony heart,” Joseph Dzhugashvili said to his friend in the cemetery. “She died, and with her the last warm feelings for people died.

Kato left baby Jacob to her husband, who experienced the tragic fate of being the son of a “great leader and teacher.” He got to know his father closely only in 1921, when, as a fourteen-year-old teenager, he was sent from Georgia to Moscow. Before that, he lived serenely in the family of his maternal aunt Alexandra Svanidze.

The brother of Stalin's first wife and his wife, initially welcomed by the leader, were then repressed. They were arrested together in 1937. Alexander Semenovich, who was often called by his relatives by his underground nickname Alyosha, died in prison in 1942, and Maria Anisimovna, who idolized Stalin, died on a distant island of the Gulag archipelago. Their son, named Jonrid in honor of the American journalist John Reed, author of the famous book about the October Revolution, “Ten Days that Shook the World,” did not escape arrest and exile.

Between the death of his first wife and his second marriage, Stalin lived as a bog for twelve years. The uneventful life of a professional revolutionary was diversified only by arrests, exiles and escapes. And it’s not for nothing that they say: being single is like being mad. When in 1912 once again Joseph Vissarionovich, who escaped from exile, settled in St. Petersburg in the same apartment with Molotov, then he took away his girlfriend Marusya from Vyacheslav Mikhailovich, which Stalin’s minion did not fail to remember at the end of his life.

Lazar Kaganovich, after whom it was originally named Moscow metro and for whom Stalin forever remained an infallible idol, having already exchanged his tenth decade of life, he once said to the poet and collector of Stalin’s people’s commissars Felix Chuev:
- And that perhaps Stalin had some kind of attachments. His wife died before the revolution. And he married Nadezhda Sergeevna in 1919. Until I was nineteen, I had the right to love anyone.

For the second time after his escape, exiled at the end of 1910 to the small Arkhangelsk town of Solvychegodsk, Stalin settled in the house of the widow Matryona Prokopyevna Kuzakova, who had five children from a legal marriage. All of them were fair-haired, and the sixth, illegitimate child, had raven hair. He was named Konstantin Stepanovich Kuzakov.

“I didn’t immediately ask my mother about my father,” Kuzakov recalled. “She was a kind woman, but with an iron character. And very reasonable - until her last days. When I finally gathered my courage and asked if what they were saying about me was true, she replied:
- You are my son. Never talk about the rest to anyone.”

Indeed, a reasonable woman. Unlike the talkative relatives of Joseph Vissarionovich’s wives.

Stalin did not forget about his Solvychegodsk passion. He, as the Count of Monte Cristo, secretly supported his second son. Konstantin Stepanovich rose to high positions in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, edited the speeches of delegates at party congresses (then to retreat on the podium from the text approved by the editorial commission is the same as “a step to the left, a step to the right is considered an escape”). When clouds gathered over him, and clouds that smelled of lead (his deputy in the party Central Committee, for whom he vouched, was accused of transferring Soviet nuclear secrets to the Americans), Stalin delivered a verdict:
- I see no reason to arrest Kuzakov.

And although Konstantin Stepanovich saw his great father close many times, but, being also reasonable person, did not dare to speak to him.

After Stalin's death, Kuzakov was appointed editor-in-chief of television. And the leader’s niece, Kira Politkovskaya, who returned from exile, worked here as an assistant director. The relatives met.
“But Stalin’s children showed no interest in me,” said Kuzakov.

In February 1913, Stalin was arrested by the seventh and last time and were exiled to the Turukhansk Territory - first to the camp (small settlement) Kostino, and then to the very Arctic Circle - to the camp of Kureika (now in the Krasnoyarsk Territory). After this arrest and this exile, the time will come to arrest and exile him. By the way, the daughter of Marina Tsvetaeva served her Soviet exile in the same place as Stalin, and heard from the natives about his connection with one of the local peasant women.

Kureika, with only eight houses and 67 inhabitants, is the only place of exile from which Stalin did not escape. Although there were conditions for this, which he himself indirectly admitted in 1930. They intended to dispossess his former Kurei guard Mikhail Merzlyakov. He wrote to Stalin, recalling his friendly relations with him in the pre-revolutionary years. Joseph Vissarionovich rescued the former gendarme from trouble by sending a note to the party control commission: “In “friendly” relations with Mikh. I couldn’t be Merzlyakov. However, I must testify that if my relationship with him was not “friendly,” it was not hostile either. Mich. Merzlyakov did not spy on me, did not bully me, did not find fault, and turned a blind eye to my frequent absences.”

At first, Joseph Vissarionovich and Yakov Mikhailovich Sverdlov, the future chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, who was driven into Kureika with him, settled in one hut, but soon quarreled. “My friend and I are now in different apartments, and we rarely see each other,” Sverdlov wrote in May 1914. And this despite the fact that they were the only political exiles among the illiterate aborigines.

Stalin moved to the poor hut of the Pereprygins, where there were no adults, and only orphaned teenagers and children lived. But there are a lot - two girls and five boys. The tenant occupied an extension, the entrance to which was only through the hut. “A small square room, in one corner there is a wooden trestle bed, opposite there is fishing and hunting gear: nets, whetstones, hooks. Not far from the window there is an oblong table, littered with books, hanging above the table kerosene lamp. In the middle of the room there is a small “potbelly stove” stove with an iron pipe,” this is how Stalin’s home was remembered by an exiled Bolshevik who once visited him in Kureika.

When in 1956 Khrushchev began “the fight against the cult of personality and its consequences,” he instructed the then chairman of the KGB of the USSR, Serov, to delve into Stalin’s past. The security officers reported, among other things: “According to the story of citizen Perelygina, it was established that I.V. Stalin, while in Kureika, seduced her at the age of 14 and began to live together with her. In this regard, I.V. Stalin was summoned to gendarme Laletin to face criminal charges for cohabitation with a minor. I.V. Stalin gave his word to gendarme Laletin to marry Perelygina when she became an adult. As I told you in May of this year. Perelygina, she had a child around 1913 who died. In 1914, a second child was born, who was named Alexander.”

But it struck February Revolution, the gendarmes were outlawed, and the honest revolutionary word given to one of them lost its force. Stalin moved to Petrograd to make a socialist revolution, and Perelygina (aka Pereprygina - passports were not issued in Kureika, and surnames were recorded by ear) married a local peasant Davydov, who adopted the third of Stalin’s surviving sons.

Unlike the Kuzakovs, Joseph Vissarionovich did not take any part in the fate of Lydia Perprygina and Alexander Davydov. Although Alexander’s son Yuri claimed (after his father’s death in 1987) that Stalin tried twice – at the end of the Civil War and in the early thirties – to drag his father to Moscow. But without an illiterate mother.

The KGB memo was read and endorsed by members of the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee, but not one of them, even on their deathbed, said a word about this episode in the biography of their defeated idol. For, as Kaganovich said, “the personal has no public significance.” The Bolshevik leaders were not puritans. Sergo Beria, the son of Stalin’s Malyuta Skuratov, who chose concubines, including young children, on the street through the windows of a limousine, recounted Stalin’s memory from the first post-revolutionary years: “I was in one of the offices of the Central Committee, when I suddenly saw Krupskaya approaching, all in tears . To my perplexed question, she answered: “Vladimir Ilyich slept with all the girls in the secretariat, but this was not enough for him. Now he has chosen other places. I demand that the Central Committee take action, since with his unworthy behavior he discredits the entire government.” I was stunned, although I knew that Vladimir Ilyich was bleeding at that time. Then the leader was not particularly concerned about the indiscreet views of his guards.” At the meeting of the Central Committee, the men roared with laughter and “came to the conclusion that he was certainly guilty, but Krupskaya was even more guilty: having assumed numerous party responsibilities, she ignored her marital duty. We release her from all assignments and remind her that the main party task is to be the wife of Vladimir Ilyich. Krupskaya left the meeting room, loudly slamming the door.”

Somehow during the Great Patriotic War The chief political commissar of the Red Army, Mehlis, asked Stalin: what are we going to do - one of the marshals changes “front-line wives” every day. The Supreme Commander-in-Chief paused sternly, and then grinned:
- We'll be jealous!
“The favorite of the party,” according to Lenin’s definition, forty-year-old Bukharin became attached and tied to himself a fourteen-year-old girl, who married him, although she was already twenty.

Stalin screwed his second and last official wife in 1917. He was almost thirty-eight, she was almost sixteen. He did not wait for her to come of age and made her his wife without allowing her to finish high school, although they officially registered their marriage only in March 1919, when Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva turned eighteen.

The daughter of a revolutionary, she was born and spent her childhood in Georgia. Her mother, Olga Evgenievna - either a Georgian or, according to family legend, a gypsy - was a passionate woman and more than once cuckolded her husband. However, having learned about her daughter’s connection with Joseph Vissarionovich, whom she deeply respected and regularly sent him parcels to Kureika, she called her a fool. Father, Sergei Yakovlevich, an old friend of Stalin, this strange marriage did not resist, rather was proud: “a wonderful Georgian,” as Lenin described Joseph Vissarionovich in one of his letters, became one of key figures in the political arena.

Although not a beauty, Nadezhda Sergeevna was pretty and charmed with her youth and large dark eyes. “They say Nadya was a very cheerful girl, a laugher. But I didn’t see that anymore,” her niece recalled.

In 1918, Alliluyeva joined the Bolshevik Party and, together with Stalin, as his secretary, went on a special train to defend Tsaritsyn (then Stalingrad, and now Volgograd) from the Whites. Endowed with extraordinary powers by Lenin, Stalin showed remarkable organizational abilities and his usual cruelty. Were it not Nadya’s “long, dry fingers,” as her daughter remembered them, who printed Stalin’s dispatches similar to ultimatums to Lenin: “I will myself, without formalities, overthrow all the commanders and commissars who are ruining the cause. This is how the interests of the matter tell me.” The “overthrown” commanders and commissars were loaded onto a barge, and the barge was sunk in the Volga.

The bloody honeymoon ended, Nadezhda Sergeevna returned with her husband to Moscow and entered the secretariat of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars Lenin, who got the newlyweds an apartment in the Kremlin. A romantic schoolgirl, who grew up, although in a revolutionary, but quite wealthy family, brought up on Chekhov, having touched the mysteries of big and dirty politics (“She was entrusted with work of the most secret nature,” and Lenin, giving “highly secret” assignments, said: “Let it will do Alliluyev, she will do everything well"), withdrew into herself, fencing off her fragile inner world from harsh reality (“Mom was very secretive and proud,” her daughter Svetlana believed).

“I have absolutely nothing to do with anyone in Moscow,” Nadezhda Sergeevna wrote in one of her letters in 1926. – Sometimes it’s even strange: for so many years not to have close friends, but this obviously depends on the character. Moreover, strangely, I feel closer to non-party people (women, of course).”

She sincerely believed in the cleansing mission of the revolution and tried to follow the ideal gleaned from books new woman, devoting herself entirely to the cause of the struggle for a bright future for the working people, and was deeply distressed by the inconsistency of the established cruel world order with her ideas. Stalin, who had long ago abandoned romantic ideas about the revolution, Stalin, in whom “the last warm feelings for people had died”, and only a “heart of stone” and an insatiable thirst for power remained, he could not understand his “Tatka,” as he called his wife in letters, and “really disliked” it when she interfered in his affairs.

Khrushchev, who studied with Nadezhda Alliluyeva at the Industrial Academy, recalled: “I felt sorry for Alliluyeva on a purely human level. She was so different from Stalin! She was a nice person. Yes, and a modest person in life. She came to the academy only by tram, left with everyone else and never got out as a “wife” big man" And the daughter-in-law of Kamenev, one of Stalin’s friends and enemies, had a different opinion: “Very uninteresting. Gray. Boring. She looked older than her age. In general, it was noticeable that she was a little “that one.” As they say now, with violets in your head.” “She had the skull of a suicide,” Maria Svanidze, the wife of Alliluyeva’s brother, wrote in her diary the opinion of the doctor who performed the post-mortem X-ray of Nadezhda’s body.

“Mom was never at home near us,” stated Svetlana Iosifovna. “In those days, it was generally indecent for a woman, especially a party member, to spend time around children.” But Stalin needed a wife at home. He hated women who dried themselves in the herbarium of class struggle. Stalin hated Lenin’s wife Krupskaya, an example of such a woman dried up by the revolution, and motivated his feelings this way: “Well, because she uses the same outhouse as Lenin, I should value and recognize her just as much as Lenin? "

At the request of her husband, Alliluyeva intended to leave her job in the secretariat of the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. The head of the secretariat, Fotieva, complained to Lenin.
“If he doesn’t show up for work tomorrow, tell me, and I’ll talk to him,” Vladimir Ilyich threatened.
Alliluyeva went to work. Upon learning of this, Lenin commented:
- Asian!
It was not given to Nadezhda Sergeevna to be just a wife, even the wife of “the great Stalin”. She allowed herself to have own opinion, often differing from Stalin’s opinion, and this left a painful imprint on the relationship between the two loving friend people's friend. Quarrels, interspersed with reconciliations, followed one after another. There was no reason behind it. Stalin could not talk to his wife for a month due to the fact that she, 22 years younger than him, for a long time did not dare to switch from “you” to “you” in addressing him. Nadezhda gave birth to her first child not in the Kremlin hospital, where everything was ready for childbirth, but in an ordinary maternity hospital on the outskirts of Moscow, before leaving the Kremlin determined to leave her husband forever.

But she left him forever only after eleven years.

There are several versions of the cause of the death of Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva. One of them is another quarrel at a banquet hosted by Voroshilov in honor of the 15th anniversary of the Great October Revolution socialist revolution. As if a tipsy Stalin was accurately throwing bread pellets into the neckline of the wife of either the future Marshal Tukhachevsky or the future Marshal Egorov, who was sitting opposite. Daughter Svetlana says that her mother was offended when Stalin shouted to her at that ill-fated banquet:
- Hey, drink!
- I’m not saying “hey” to you!

Molotov considered the cause of Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s suicide to be unbridled jealousy. “Jealousy, of course. In my opinion, completely unfounded. There was a hairdresser whom he went to for a shave. The wife was unhappy with this. A very jealous person." Equally, we would add, like Stalin. When one day he caught his wife walking along the path of her dacha in Zubalovo in the company of Bukharin, he crept up behind Nikolai Ivanovich and hissed: “I’ll kill you!” And he killed him as the organizer of the right-wing Trotskyist bloc.

Khrushchev, referring to the head of Stalin’s guard, Vlasik, puts forward his own version. After a quarrel at Voroshilov’s banquet, Nadezhda Sergeevna, reassured by Molotov’s wife Zhemchuzhina (later repressed), began looking for her husband by phone: he left the Voroshilovs and did not return home. I called the dacha in Zubalovo. The newbie on duty innocently reported to her:
- Comrade Stalin is here.
- Who's with him?
- Gusev’s wife is with him.

According to those who saw her, the wife of Sergei Ivanovich Gusev (real name Yakov Davidovich Drabkin), one of Stalin and Voroshilov’s associates in the Civil War, was a very beautiful woman.

The housekeeper was the first to discover Nadezhda Sergeevna’s lifeless body. Stalin's family Karolina Vasilyevna Til, who went to wake Alliluyeva up for breakfast. “Mom was lying covered in blood next to her bed; in her hand was a small Walter pistol, once brought to her by Pavlusha (brother) from Berlin. The sound of his shot was too weak to be heard in the house. She was already cold.” The rose that Nadezhda had pinned in her hair while getting ready for the banquet was lying by the door. Then it, already cast from cast iron, was placed on Nadezhda Sergeevna’s grave.

There were persistent rumors that Stalin's wife did not shoot herself, but was shot by her husband in a fit of anger. In any case, the home doctor of the Stalinist family I.N. Kazakov refused to sign Nadezhda Sergeevna’s suicide certificate, being sure that the shot was fired from a distance of several steps. Academician Boris Zbarsky, who embalmed Lenin’s body, said: “No matter what happens later, I will not embalm him (Stalin). He did not have to retract his words: he, as a “cosmopolitan,” was arrested a year before the leader’s death and released only nine months after his death.

When Larisa Vasilyeva, a researcher of the Kremlin elite, turned to the KGB of the USSR with a request to provide her with the Alliluyeva case, she was told that “Stalin gave the order not to initiate a criminal case” into the death of N.S. Alliluyeva.

It was rumored that Nadezhda left Joseph a suicide letter of a political nature. In 1932, the millstones of collectivization and dispossession were turning with all their might, and the country was gripped by famine. Dissatisfaction with Stalin's policies grew, and the person closest to the leader found himself on the other side of the barricades. But this letter, if it existed, was not read by anyone except the addressee.

The death of his wife shocked Stalin. At the moment of farewell before the funeral, he said with tears in his eyes:
- I didn’t save...

There is a legend that late autumn In 1941, when all the vital objects of Moscow had already been mined in case of its surrender to the Germans, and the dacha in Zubalovo was blown up, Stalin visited his wife’s grave at the Novodevichy cemetery at night. What were Joseph Vissarionovich and Nadezhda Sergeevna silently talking about?

Apparently, in the first years after the death of Nadezhda Sergeevna, Joseph Vissarionovich did not abandon his intention to get a new wife. In any case, there is evidence from Vera Alexandrovna Davydova, singer Bolshoi Theater, which Stalin loved to visit: “Stalin actually proposed to me. I refused, citing my strong marriage and my loyal love for the leader, incompatible with everyday love.” The leader was satisfied with her explanations. Vera Davydova became a People's Artist of the USSR and the Georgian SSR, a three-time winner of the Stalin Prize and died in her husband's homeland - in already independent Georgia in 1993.

Stalin made no further attempts to tie himself with the knot of Hymen. And it’s not appropriate for a “great leader and teacher” to throw a wedding in his old age: you won’t end up with rumors and slander. And this could cause irreparable damage to the image of the disinterested “father of the people”, crystallized over years of work, caring day and night for their well-being to the detriment of even his personal life. Stalin regretted that in his famous speech to graduates of military academies on May 4, 1935, when he put forward the slogan “Cadres decide everything,” he forgot to add: “Our leaders came to power as bastards and remain so to the end. They are driven solely by ideas, but not by acquisitions.”

“After the death of Nadezhda Sergeevna,” Khrushchev recalled, “I met Stalin’s young woman for some time. beautiful woman, a typical Caucasian woman. She tried not to meet us on the way. As soon as her eyes sparkle, she immediately disappears. Then they told me that this woman was Svetlana’s teacher. But this did not last long, and she disappeared. From some of Beria’s remarks, I realized that this was his protégé. Well, Beria, he knew how to select “teachers.” We are talking here about Alexandra Nikolaevna Nikashidze, the hostess sister in Stalin’s house, a lieutenant, and then a state security major. She did not know how to cook, spoke Russian poorly, but she took excellent care of Stalin’s children and relatives and pawned them to their stern father and, out of duty, to Beria. She was funny and good-natured and willingly eavesdropped on the telephone conversations of her charges. However, when Molotov was asked whether his phone was tapped, he, once the second man in the “Stalin empire,” replied:
“I think I’ve been eavesdropped on my whole life.”

Sashenka Nikashidze was replaced by Valentina Vasilievna Istomina. She, the only one, mourned the deceased leader like a human being, like a woman. Molotov recalled: “Valentina Istomina is already at the dacha. She brought the dishes. And if she was a wife, who cares?”

An officer of Stalin's security guard remembered her, a beauty, as “a sweet, charming, incredibly slender and neat woman who knew how to not only maintain tact and accuracy in everything, but also ethical standards behavior." Not knowing her position at Stalin's court, the guards tried to flirt with her. “Valentina Vasilievna came out of the situation with honor, cooling the streams of lovers’ expressions with precisely found quiet and a firm word" The state security officer was amazed that “none of the alleged suitors received penalties.” This was extraordinary in a country where denunciation had become the cornerstone of the regime.

Stalin died on March 5, 1953 at 21.50 from a cerebral hemorrhage. Beria went out into the corridor and ordered:
- Khrustalev, car!
A new era was beginning.

Svetlana Alliluyeva recalled: “Valentina Vasilyevna Istomina came to say goodbye - Valechka, as everyone called her, the housekeeper who worked for her father at this dacha for eighteen years. She fell to her knees near the sofa, fell with her head on the dead man’s chest and began to cry out loud, as in the village. For a long time she could not stop, and no one stopped her. Valechka for recent years knew much more about him and saw more than I, who lived far away and aloof. And up to last days she will be convinced that there was no better person in the world than my father.”

Svanidze Ekaterina Semenovna.

Meeting a seminarian

Ekaterina Svanidze was a noblewoman by birth, although their family was impoverished; she was born in 1885 and lived with her family in Tbilisi. Young Catherine met Joseph (Soso) Dzhugashvili through the efforts of her brother, who studied at the seminary with the future leader.

Joseph Dzhugashvili

Catherine was a real beauty and, probably, an extraordinary woman, since Joseph Dzhugashvili decided to marry for her sake.

Kato Svanidze

They were married in the best romantic traditions: secretly, at night. Only Joseph’s former classmate at the seminary decided to seal the lovers’ relationship with a church marriage. And the reason was that Joseph had already joined the Bolshevik Party and was in an illegal position.

At the time of the wedding in 1906, Kato was 21 years old, her husband was 26. It is interesting that he got married future father peoples under a pseudonym, or rather, using a fake passport, it contained the name Galiashvili.

Life with an illegal immigrant

Four months after the start of family life, the police came for Joseph. At that time, he himself was hiding in Baku, and his young wife was arrested because she showed her maiden passport to the police, although everyone already knew that Kato was married.

The woman spent a month and a half in prison; on the eve of the new year, 1907, she was released. Perhaps this happened because Catherine was in the 5th month of pregnancy and relatives interceded for her.

On March 18, 1907, Joseph Dzhugashvili’s first-born son, Yakov, was born. And with a 3-month-old baby in her arms, Catherine again had to hide with her husband; they left for Baku, since Joseph was wanted for participation in one of the raids.

This was a provocation of the secret police: the bills were marked, and then they were used to arrest the Bolshevik illegal immigrants, all except Joseph, who managed to escape. This “ex,” as the raid with robbery and expropriation was then called, would then become the reason for Stalin’s accusations that he was an agent of the Tsarist secret police.

Daughter-in-law and mother-in-law

Ekaterina Svanidze initially had conflicts with Joseph’s mother, Keke, for a banal reason: her mother-in-law refused to sit with little Jacob when the couple was hiding in Baku.

Kato was helped by her relatives, with whom Yakov Dzhugashvili grew up for many years.

Keke Dzhugashvili

And then there was also the elementary class hatred of the mother-in-law towards her young daughter-in-law. The fact is that Joseph’s mother was a simple laundress, and Catherine was a fashionable dressmaker, from whom they ordered dresses from the wives of the city elite, including the wife of the chief of police.

Heart of stone, alias of steel

In Baku, during her forced flight from the police, Kato fell ill with consumption; the disease was transient and very malignant. The husband brought his sick wife to his family in Tbilisi and left again; it was dangerous for him to stay.

They saw each other again only the day before her death in November 1907. Son Yakov was left an orphan at only 7 months of age.

They remembered what Stalin said after the death of his wife that his heart had turned to stone, and his last good feelings for people died along with his wife. But Kamenev was already in the party, isn’t that where the pseudonym under which the son of a Georgian shoemaker went down in history, Stalin, came from?

On March 24, 1919 - exactly 100 years ago - Joseph Stalin registered his last official marriage. His wife was Nadezhda Alliluyeva. The union lasted 13 years and ended with the suicide of the wife. There were many women in the leader's life, and all his relationships were the subject of special interest to researchers.

Only the last chosen one of the leader of the peoples, who was not in a registered marriage with him, became a truly close and irreplaceable person for him.

Ekaterina Svanidze

Stalin secretly married his first wife in a church. The bride was 21 years old, Stalin was six years older. Ekaterina Svanidze was the sister of Alexander Svanidze, a close friend of Stalin. He introduced his sister to his friend. For Stalin it was, as they say, love at first sight. Only two months passed between meeting and wedding.

Marital happiness was short-lived. Stalin was very often forced to leave his wife because of revolutionary affairs. Soon after the birth of their first child, Yakov, Catherine became seriously ill (according to one version - with typhus, according to another - with transient tuberculosis). Stalin could not care for his sick wife and returned only at the last moment, when she was already dying.

The death of his young wife had a strong impact on Stalin. According to numerous testimonies, at the funeral he was inconsolable and even threw himself into the grave along with the coffin. According to another account, he ran away from the cemetery without waiting for the coffin to be lowered into the grave. The 8-month-old son Yakov was given to the care of his wife's relatives. Only at the age of 14 did he see his father for the first time, when he took him to Moscow. The relationship between them did not work out.

Maria (Matryona) Kuzakova

Collage © L!FE. Photo © Wikimedia Commons

The owner of the apartment that Stalin rented during his exile in Solvychegodsk in 1910–1911. Veteran's widow Russo-Japanese War. She was four years older than Stalin.

A few months after Stalin left, Kuzakova gave birth to a child. To prevent the child from becoming illegitimate, he was registered in the name of his late husband, but to do this he had to go to the village and lie to the priest there that the child was born in 1908 (when the husband was still alive).

Stalin’s daughter wrote in her memoirs: “My aunts told me that during one of his Siberian exiles he lived with a local peasant woman and that their son now lives somewhere, having received little education and not pretending to be a big name."

After the revolution, Kuzakova’s house was bought for a museum of exiles for a very a large sum, Maria also received an apartment in Leningrad, which was very difficult to do in the 30s.

Her son Konstantin, on a Komsomol ticket, was sent to the Leningrad Institute, and soon after graduation he was hired by the Central Committee apparatus. He was openly patronized by Zhdanov and personal secretary Stalin Poskrebyshev are the two people closest to the Secretary General. Despite his youth, Kuzakov quickly became first deputy head of the Propaganda Directorate of the Central Committee (Zhdanov’s estate), and then deputy minister of culture. According to Kuzakov himself, rumors about his relationship with Stalin have haunted him since childhood. This was facilitated by their external similarity.

Stalin never met Maria Kuzakova again. She died in besieged Leningrad in the winter of 1941.

Lydia Pereprygina

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Resident of the village of Kureyka, Turukhansky district Krasnoyarsk Territory, where from 1914 to 1916 Stalin served exile. The relationship of a 14-year-old orphan with a 35-year-old exile caused a scandal in the village. The girl’s brother, Iona Pereprygin, complained about Stalin to the competent authorities. However, after Stalin swore to marry the girl when she turned 16, the case was closed.

The wedding never came; at the end of 1916, Stalin fled from exile. For several years the girl waited for his return. After a rumor spread in the village that Stalin had died in one of the battles civil war, she married someone else. Her husband adopted the child and gave him the surname Davydov. When it turned out that Stalin was still alive, Lydia decided not to talk about their relationship.

In 1956, shortly after Khrushchev’s debunking of the personality cult, the Presidium of the CPSU Central Committee conducted an investigation into this story. According to the first secretary of the Krasnoyarsk regional committee, Averky Aristov, at the end of the 40s, Stalin’s secretary Poskrebyshev gave him instructions to find certain Pereprygins in the Krasnoyarsk region and find out their fate - and emphasized that this was Stalin’s personal request.

Aristov organized a search and soon found out that Lydia Pereprygina-Davydova was in a relationship with Stalin before the revolution, this was confirmed by both the old-timers of the village and herself. She also said that from this relationship she had a son and gave him a photograph.

Aristov was afraid to report details to Poskrebyshev, only saying that the Pereprygins had been found. Years later, Aristov outlined all this in writing to Khrushchev, and the documents were sent to members of the presidium. The incriminating evidence about the late leader was not discussed publicly. All documents on the case were sent to the archives of the Central Committee and kept secret until the 90s.

Lydia Pereprygina died in 1964. Her grandson Yuri passed a genetic test in 2016. On the part of the confirmed descendants of Stalin, Alexander Burdonsky, the son of Vasily Stalin, provided his DNA material for comparison. The test results showed 99.98% similarity in the male line.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva

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Stalin's second and last official wife. The daughter of an old friend of his. Nadezhda met her future husband when he stayed briefly in the Alliluyevs’ apartment; she was then 11 years old. The real relationship between them began in 1917, Stalin was 38, Nadezhda was barely 16 years old. For two years they lived “in a revolutionary way” - without formalizing their relationship. On March 24, 1919, they signed.

The marriage produced two children: Vasily and Svetlana. The relationship between the spouses could hardly be called cloudless: Nadezhda did not want to sit at home and be a housewife, and Stalin opposed her working. Nadezhda was offended that her husband addressed her as “you”: before the revolution, this was considered a sign of disrespect.

On November 7, 1932, the 15th anniversary of the revolution was celebrated in Kliment Voroshilov’s apartment. At the banquet, the couple quarreled again, after which Alliluyeva went home and shot herself. For Stalin, his wife’s act came as a shock. Kirov and Ordzhonikidze even stayed overnight with him to help the leader cope with the misfortune in a friendly way. Although there were rumors that Stalin himself shot his wife in the heat of a quarrel, no evidence of this has yet been found.

Valentina Istomina

The last and perhaps the main woman in the life of the leader. In 1935, 18-year-old Valentina Zhbychkina (later married Ivan Istomin and took his last name), who had recently arrived from the village in Moscow, was hired as a waiter in Zubalovo-4 (one of Stalin’s dachas).

How exactly a young girl without connections managed to get such a job is unknown, but she was able to prove herself, and three years later she was transferred to Stalin’s favorite dacha in Kuntsevo. In the last years of his life, he spent almost all his time there.

Gradually, Istomina turned from an ordinary housekeeper into an increasingly significant person and in fact became the closest and most irreplaceable person for the aging Stalin. They, as Stalin’s daughter confirmed, became so inseparable that Stalin began to take her with him on trips. Istomina was a member of the NKVD staff and even had the rank of sergeant. According to the testimony of Stalin's guards, she was the only person who had unhindered access to the Secretary General at any time of the day or night.

After the death of the leader, Istomin was the most inconsolable of all her relatives. “She fell to her knees near the sofa, fell with her head on the dead man’s chest and cried out loud, as in the village. For a long time she could not stop, and no one bothered her,” recalled the leader’s daughter.

After the debunking of the personality cult, Istomin, despite her closeness to Stalin, was not persecuted. At the age of 35, she was issued a personal pension, which was usually awarded for special services to the state. She never worked anywhere else.

Valentina Istomina died in 1995. Until her death, she observed a vow of silence: numerous attempts by journalists to interview her and find out the details of the relationship between Istomina and Stalin were unsuccessful. Istomin told almost nothing even to her closest relatives about the 18 years of life at Stalin’s dacha.

Disclaimer: Russia Beyond has a sharply negative attitude towards the actions and actions of Joseph Stalin. The following text is for historical purposes only.

Katya Svanidze: wife from a poor family

It was said about Stalin’s first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, that when her husband’s friends appeared in the house, she hid under the table out of embarrassment.

Katya met Stalin thanks to her brother Alexander - they studied together at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. 24-year-old Stalin fell in love and wanted to marry Katya, a Georgian from a poor family who was 16 years old at the time. He received consent, but with one condition - to get married in a church.

Batum Gendarme Administration; Public access

They got married in 1906, and in the same year Katya gave birth to a son, Yakov. But already in 1907 she died. According to one version - from tuberculosis, according to another - from typhoid fever. Stalin, according to eyewitnesses, was so depressed that at the funeral he jumped into the grave after the coffin.

Love, however, did not save the wife’s relatives. In the 1930s, Katya's brother and Stalin's classmate was repressed and died in custody, as did his wife Maria. She died in exile from a broken heart when she learned of her husband's death.

Maria and Lida: a romance in exile

After the death of Katya the Revolutionary, Stalin was exiled in Siberia five times, and at least twice had affairs with women from whom he rented a room. One of them was called Maria Kuzakova. In 1911, a young widow and her children allowed Stalin into her house, they began a relationship and she became pregnant. But already in 1912, Stalin’s exile ended and he continued his revolutionary activities far from Siberia. He did not wait for the birth of his son Kostya.

Public Access/Getty Images

The other woman's name was Lida Pereprygina. Peasant Lida was only 14 years old at the time of her affair with 37-year-old Stalin. He lived with her from 1914 to 1916, and during this time the girl gave birth to two children. The first one died. The second was born in April 1917 and was recorded as Alexander Dzhugashvili (under real name Stalin). In the village, Stalin was persecuted for molesting a minor, and he had to give his word that he would marry Lida. But as soon as the period of exile expired, Stalin left the village.

Both women subsequently wrote to Stalin and asked for help, but received no response from him. Instead, in the 1930s, they were forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement not to disclose the “secrets of the origin” of their children.

Nadezhda Alliluyeva: a shot in the heart

Stalin lived with his second wife for 12 years. He remembered Nadezhda as a little girl, as he spent a lot of time with her mother Olga, a married woman, in Baku. According to some accounts, he saved little Nadya when she fell into the sea from the Baku embankment.

However, they became closely acquainted when 37-year-old Joseph Stalin returned from Siberian exile. Nadya was 16 years old, she fell in love without memory. Two years later they got married. Contemporaries said that in this marriage there was love and strong feelings. But in the end it all ended in suicide. Nadezhda shot herself in the heart with a Walter pistol in 1931. The housekeeper found her on the floor next to her bed.

According to one version, she was experiencing a deep crisis due to her husband’s cruelty. “In the presence of Joseph, Nadya resembled a fakir who performs in the circus barefoot on broken glass with a smile for the audience and with terrible tension in his eyes. She never knew what would happen next, what an explosion,” her close friend Irina Gogua.

Another version that was rumored: that Stalin, during another quarrel, said to his wife, “Do you know that you are my daughter?” Journalist Olga Kuchkina, whose relatives were friends with Alliluyeva, writes about this. Nadezhda Alliluyeva herself, at the request of Stalin, had an abortion ten times.

Olga Lepeshinskaya and Vera Davydova: love from the stage

"Ballerinas and typists." So about the preferences of the Soviet elite, Maria Svanidze in her diary. They said that Olga Lepeshinskaya was Stalin’s favorite among the ballerinas, although she herself never recognized the connection. Only one thing was obvious: he loved to visit the Bolshoi Theater when her name was on the posters. Stalin gave her flowers and invited her to receptions. Many years later, in 2004, she would say about it this way: “We [the ballerinas] were all in love with him. He could be very sweet and very good, but it was probably just an illusion. Because by nature he was bad person- vengeful and angry."

There were fewer doubts about the opera singer Vera Davydova. The book “Confession of Stalin’s Mistress” with her memoirs was published in London in 1983 (but is not recognized by Davydova’s relatives). Their relationship, according to the book, lasted 19 years.

In 1932, married Davydova discovered a note at a reception in the Kremlin. It said that a driver was waiting for her not far from the Kremlin. Davydova went to a mysterious meeting. She was taken to Stalin's home. After strong coffee, Stalin invited her into a room with a large, low couch. He asked if he could turn off the light because it was better for conversation, and without waiting for an answer, he turned it off. In subsequent meetings, he could simply say, “Comrade Davydov, take off your clothes.”

“How could I resist, refuse? At any second, just one word, my career could end or I could be physically destroyed,” she allegedly reasoned. During her relationship with Stalin, Davydova received a warrant for a three-room apartment in Moscow and became a Stalin Prize laureate three times.

Valya Istomina: the last woman

Valya Istomina, Stalin's personal housekeeper, had to endure perhaps the most severe shock.

Initially, it was “intended” for General Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin’s head of security. But many then were in love with her and wanted to court her, including Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD. When Valya attracted Stalin himself, everyone else retreated. The girl was transferred to his Moscow dacha in Kuntsevo: she personally set the table for him and made his bed before bed.

Public Access/Global Look Press

The drama happened seventeen years later, when Stalin fell ill, and Valya did not go to see him. Then it turned out that she was forced into a close relationship by Vlasik and Beria. Having learned about the “treason,” Stalin will give the order to exile Valya to the most sinister camp in Kolyma, Magadan. Vlasik will also be arrested and sent to a camp, but Beria will not be touched yet.

Fortunately for Valya, upon arrival at the camp, she will be informed that the order has been changed and she is being returned back. They say that Stalin was too tormented by her absence.

After Stalin’s death, his daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva will write about Valya in “Twenty Letters to a Friend”: “She fell to her knees near the sofa, fell with her head on the dead man’s chest and cried out loud, as in the village. ... Until her last days she will be convinced that there was no better person in the world than my father.”

Personal life of the powerful leader of the USSR for a long time was strictly classified. People knew almost nothing about his spouses - what to say about his mistresses. Meanwhile, during the years of his revolutionary youth, and while at the helm of the country, Stalin paid attention to many girls and women.

Matryona Kuzakova

In 1909-1911, the young revolutionary served exile in the city of Solvychegodsk, Vologda province. There he settled in the house of the daughter of a local deacon, Matryona Kuzakova, who was a widow and raised her children alone. The woman had a hard time, she was forced to chop wood, clear snow, repair the fence herself...

Joseph saw that the young woman literally did not straighten her back for days on end. The man began to help Matryona with the housework. And soon he replaced her husband. As a result of this relationship, a black-haired boy was born, sharply different from his fair-haired brothers and sisters. True, Stalin never saw the child, his period of exile ended, and he continued his revolutionary activities. Matryona named her son Konstantin, and his patronymic Stepanovich, registering it as her late husband, who died 2 years before the baby was born.

When a new literary drama editor with the surname Kuzakov appeared on Shabolovka, and this was in the early 70s, colleagues whispered that he was the son of Stalin himself. Shortly before his death, Konstantin Stepanovich personally confirmed these rumors: in his interview with the Argumenty i Fakty newspaper, published in 1996, Kuzakov said that he learned the name of his real father from his mother as a child. True, he subsequently signed a non-disclosure agreement to state security representatives.

According to rumors, only kinship with the leader of the people saved Konstantin from arrest in 1947. Then he worked in the propaganda department of the CPSU Central Committee and was included in the list of those accused of “atomic espionage”; the case was fabricated by Lavrentiy Beria. But the trouble is over.

They say that having taken a high post in the Kremlin, Stalin gave Matryona Kuzakova a Moscow apartment.

Lydia Pereprygina

In 1913-1916, the future leader of the peoples served another exile, this time in the Turukhansk region. In the village of Kureika, he settled in the house of two orphans - Jonah and Lydia Pereprygin (brother and sister). Joseph began to live together with his 14-year-old mistress.

This shocking information about the seduction of an orphan girl by an adult man was revealed in 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev began collecting dirt on Stalin, wanting to debunk his cult of personality. State security officers found out all the ins and outs. It turned out that Lida Pereprygina gave birth to two children from Joseph. The first child died in infancy, and the second - son Alexander - was born after Stalin left Kureika.

Most Siberians looked at the seduction of a minor with indifference. But when her brother Jonah found out about Lida’s pregnancy, he and local resident Pyotr Ivanov contacted the local gendarmerie. Stalin was saved from criminal prosecution only by his promise to marry the girl when she came of age. But the man did not keep his word.

Subsequently, Lydia married fellow villager Yakov Davydov. And her son Alexander worked as a postman before the Great Patriotic War, was wounded twice at the front, and rose to the rank of major. Then this man was the director of a canteen in Novokuznetsk.

Like Konstantin Kuzakov, in 1935, Alexander Davydov, at the request of NKVD officers, signed a document not to disclose the secret of his origin.

Yuri Davydov, one of Lydia Pereprygina’s grandchildren, told reporters that his grandmother was a serious woman with a strong character.

Vera Davydova

Being in fact the ruler of a huge superpower, Stalin could afford secret affairs with famous artists. It was rumored that his mistresses were ballerinas Olga Lepeshinskaya and Marina Semenova, and among the singers he especially singled out Natalia Shpiller and Valeria Barsova.

But the longest relationship connected Joseph Vissarionovich with the Bolshoi Theater soloist Vera Davydova. This vivid novel described famous journalist Leonard Gendlin in his book “Confession of Stalin’s Mistress.” Although the singer’s relatives still deny the information contained in it.

According to L. Gendlin, when the relationship began, Joseph was already 54 years old, and Vera was 28 years old. For a long time they met secretly at the leader’s dacha, because both were officially married. Allegedly, only closeness to Stalin can explain all the numerous titles, awards and prizes that the Bolshoi Theater prima was awarded during her life.

Vera Davydova was a People's Artist of the RSFSR, a People's Artist of the Georgian SSR, a laureate of three Stalin Prizes of the 1st degree, and the owner of a luxurious three-room apartment in the center of Moscow.
Valentina Istomina

The last mistress of the leader of the peoples was Valentina Istomina (maiden name Zhbychkina). From 1935 to 1953, she acted as Stalin’s housekeeper: she took care of the housework, set the table, and resolved other issues related to the life of Joseph Vissarionovich. A widower needed female support.

Svetlana Alliluyeva wrote in her book “Twenty Letters to a Friend”: “New faces appeared, including the young snub-nosed Valechka, whose mouth did not close all day with a cheerful, ringing laugh. After working in Zubalovo for three years, she was transferred to her father’s dacha in Kuntsevo and remained there until his death, later becoming a housekeeper...”

Over the years of her work, Valentina became so close to Stalin that she was constantly with him. He only trusted her to serve him food and medicine. Rumors that Istomina was the leader’s mistress, as they say, were confirmed in private conversations by Vyacheslav Molotov, who headed the USSR Foreign Ministry during the Great Patriotic War.

After Stalin's death, Valentina was sent to a personal pension. A childless woman raised a nephew, whose father died at the front. She died in 1995.
Of course, we have not listed all the girls and women to whom Stalin paid attention, limiting ourselves only to the most famous, long-lasting and striking relationships. The personal life of the leader of the peoples was stormy and varied. He liked very young girls, whom he knew how to charm, and talented, beautiful artists, and homely, sincere housewives.