Nadezhda Allilluyeva
In 1919, Josef Stalin got married for the second and last time to an Azerbaijan born woman named Nadezhda Alliluyeva.
Nadie was born to a rail worker named Sergei who had a Romani mother and he married Olga Fedotenko after she
refused to marry one of the sons of a family friend. Stalin knew the Alliluyevs since Nadezhda was a little girl and was
saved to have saved her from drowning. While the Bolsheviks frowned upon the idea of a couple having a wedding
ceremony (even a civil marriage ceremony), they didn't frown upon the age gap between the two that we would gag at
now. Stalin was 40 if not 41 years old (the exact date of the marriage having been lost to the sands of time) while Nadie
was barely out of her teen years. BEURK!
So with that in mind, what was their marriage like?
While Nadie (also called Nadya) was eager to see Stalin after his Siberian exile finished, the marriage wasn't so glamorous. In fact there were a lot of angry conversations and it was usually because of what Nadie wanted, a professional career. Nadie went from being a prosperous but bored student to being employed by a new revolutionary government which included being secretary and typist to the party. She and Stalin moved to Moscow where the capital had been moved from Petrograd (St Petersburg). Her biological family were committed to the party's cause and were often disrupted by revolutionary commitments. It was around this time that Nadie's mental health appeared to be shaken and both the Alliluyevs and the Stalin had yet to witness the symptoms that were to come. Stalin wanted a woman to look after his firstborn son Yakov from a previous marriage as well as perform typical housewife duties of the era despite the USSR's progressive nature in term of gender equality (as long as those involved were cisgender) but Nadie wanted to have a professional career and had nannies hired to look after not only Yakov but also the children she had with Stalin like Vasily and Svetlana, the later was cherished in the Union as their own little communist Shirley Temple. Nadie mastered decoding telegrams and transmitted secretive messages to Soviet leaders which lead to Vladimir Lenin appointing her to his personal staff. Nadya joined the communist party around this time and yet the Party didn't see her as a suitable member which led to her professional role being threatened. By the time she had started an engineering course, she was down to a candidate party member role which was a secondarv role in comparison.
Nadya had little to no contact with either of her families as Joseph
Stalin's older surviving family members refused to move north and
the Alliluyevs had a peculiar way to bring up their young that
involved having the children defend for themselves while the
parents went off with their professional lives. The Stalin's had
frequent arguments and Nadezhda had considered leaving him on
several occasions. She was also suffering from headaches, an early
menopause and horrific depressions.
On 8 November 1932, the two had one more argument at dinner
before Nadie stormed off to a quiet place where she was later
found with dead with several bullet holes in her torso. It has been
accepted that she took her own life but some suggest that it was a
murder by Stalin who had it covered up to secure his cult of
personality as appendicitis. Either way, Nadezhda Alliluyeva was
DEAD! Nadie reposed in the GUM department store where Stalin's
followers and children were caught off guard by his manly tears of
grief over being widowed for the second time. Nadie was buried in
Novodevichy Cemetery and it is said that Stalin only visited the
grave once. He remained an unmarried widow for the rest of his
days. Svetlana was angry with her father for covering up her
mother's death when she found out several years later and after
her father died, Svetlana fled the Soviet Union for America where
she remained for the rest of her days. As for Vasily, he developed
a drinking problem which cost him his life in 1962.
