#from mikoyan's memoirs

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[alliluyevas]

What do you think is the funniest fact about Joseph Stalin or Joseph Smith (or just mormon leaders in general)? And do you have a favourite photo of Nadezhda Alliluyeva?

Going to start off with Stalin and Nadya and then do Mormon leaders in a reblog! Sergo Beria's memoir is an absolute treasure trove of stories about Stalin acting absolutely bizarre, as is Nikita Khrushchev's. (You have to take a lot of Sergo's editorialization about his father with a hefty grain of salt, but I do think a lot of what he says about Stalin is likely quite accurate.)

Anyway, Sergo has a great story about Stalin going into his house when he was a kid, asking his (Sergo's) mom to make him a snack, and then wandering around in the house and acting pissy that they didn't have a photo of him on display and then Sergo's mom had to like. show him a bunch of art that then-elementary-school-aged Sergo had drawn of him (Stalin) to placate him. Which is kind of horrifying but I do honestly crack up when I think about this because quite frankly it is the behavior of a barnyard animal.

There's also a vignette from Khrushchev's memoirs about him and Mikoyan walking somewhere with Stalin and Stalin suddenly said "I think I might actually be a bad person" or some such comment and him and Mikoyan were just completely silent because they could not figure out how to respond to that and then eventually Stalin just went back to talking about whatever he was talking about. Again dark humor but I absolutely HOWL picturing what their faces must have looked like.

I guess these are more stories than facts, but hopefully that works.

These are my favorite photos of Nadya! In part because of the stories behind them. There actually aren't really a ton of photos of her sadly. the photo on the left is really rare, I've never seen it published online. I saw it for the first time when I went to the Alliluyev apartment museum in St. Petersburg which is where Nadya and her family were living in 1917 when the October Revolution happened and is preserved as a small "house" (or in this case apartment) museum with original furniture. They also have a photo album you can look at which has a ton of not-widely-available family photos and when I opened it up and saw this one I was honestly so moved by it I teared up. I like that she's looking right at the viewer and I think her expression looks very sweet. Of the available photos of her, I think in a lot of them she looks pretty stiff or formal and I think this one comes off as a little bit more relaxed.

The photo on the right has a really interesting backstory and I used it for the opening hook to my undergraduate biographical thesis. She's posing as Tatiana from Eugene Onegin, and there was a matching photo where Nadya's sister Anna was playing the role of Tatiana's sister Olga (side note: I think it's very interesting that the Alliluyev girls "cast" Nadya as Tatiana, because in the poem Tatiana is the older sister and irl Anna was older than Nadya. I do think that personality-wise they got the better fit, though.) It was also really powerful for me to see this photo because it was taken in the aforementioned Alliluyev apartment and they still have that piano.

[smolpebble]

From the memoirs of Anastas Mikoyan - Soviet statesman

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[alliluyevas]

Y’ALL LOOK WHAT I FOUND AT THE OTHERWISE HIGHLY CURSED BOOKSTORE AT THE WWII HISTORY MUSEUM