Narkom

Abstract

Leaving Petrograd, Stalin retained no sentimental attachment to the city of the revolution. He returned to Russia’s second city on only three occasions during the rest of his life.¹ Moscow, in contrast, became his home for life and the city on which he lavished much personal attention and the wealth of the state. He did, however, bring with him from Petrograd one souvenir of his sojourn there, a bride. This was Nadezhda Sergeevna Allilueva, who, in the spirit of the socialist emancipation of women, retained her birth-name after marriage. She was the youngest daughter of Sergei and Olga Alliluev, whom Stalin had known since 1900 and his Tbilisi days, a year before Nadezhda’s birth. Having seen the family intermittently in the following years, Stalin had made their apartment in Petrograd his home around the beginning of August 1917. Sergei was a skilled electrician who worked in a power-plant and ran a small repair business on the side, his wife working as a nurse. So the family, though ‘proletarian’ in some sense, could afford a spacious apartment on Rozhdestvennsky Street. Stalin’s room was small but large enough to contain all his belongings in one wicker basket that he had brought with him from Siberia. It probably was the most comfortable and sociable residence he had ever known, admired by the two girls of the family, pampered by their mother.