ABSTRACT
In 1930, Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Allilueva enrolled in the Industrial Academy to study textile manufacturing. The director of the academy was the only one there who knew that she was Stalin’s wife. The GPU placed two agents in Nadezhda’s class; other agents drove her to school and let her out a block away from the academy.1 Stalin at that time ordered a campaign of forced collectivization of the peasantry. From her classmates Nadezhda learned about the horrors of executions and mass deportations of peasants, the systematic extermination of the kulaks, famine in the Ukraine, Northern Caucasus and other areas of the country. She learned about hordes of orphaned children searching for food and shelter, women who sold themselves for crumbs from the tables of privileged party bureaucrats. She told Stalin about what she had heard, but he dismissed the accounts as ‘Trotskyite rumors’. When, on another occasion, Nadezhda told him about cases of cannibalism in the Ukraine, Stalin became enraged and accused her of spreading ‘anti-Soviet propaganda of the enemies of the people’. He ordered Karl Pauker, the chief of the GPU Operations Department, to arrest the students from whom she had heard of these conditions. He also forbade Nadezhda to attend classes, but she resumed her studies when Avel Enukidze, Stalin’s close friend and the family’s ‘good uncle’, intervened and changed Stalin’s mind.2
