Stalin: Most Think Ruthless — One (Jewish) Woman Thought Lover
Joseph Stalin murdered millions of Soviet Jews, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped him from having an affair with a Jewish woman, possibly marrying her, and caring for her daughter until the day she died. The Communist government kept the love affair secret for over fifty years, but a historian recently discovered a letter in the basement of the Russian Communist party’s headquarters that read:
Dear Comrade Malenkov!I am the daughter of Ana Rubinstein, the former wife of Comrade Stalin.
As he is in ill health, I ask you to let me see him. He knows me since I was a child.R. Sveshnikova (Kostiokovski). If it is not possible to see him, I ask you to grant me an audience on a very urgent matter.
Date: 04.03.55
Ignoring the fact that he murdered 20 million people, Stalin still wouldn’t have been the ideal lover. He was short, his face was covered in pock mark scars, and his arm was crippled from a childhood accident. His personality, as you might have guessed, wasn’t much better. He was severe, easily angered, and extremely paranoid.
Yet Rubinstein apparently loved him anyway, and this discovery raises questions: Could it be that Stalin’s Jewish lover had something to do with his creation of the first Jewish homeland? Did the tyrant create a wannabe Zion just to impress his girl?
If not, Stalin’s motivations for creating a Jewish state in Siberia are hard to pin down. It could be understood as a good-intentioned act, gifting the Jewish people independence and a state of their own–which certainly doesn’t seem characteristic for a ruthless leader. Or, it could be seen as an anti-Semitic plot to rid Russia of Jews by pushing them far away, into the middle of nowhere.
Either way, his plan failed. In Search of Happiness is a poetic documentary that looks at what life is like in modern-day Birobidzhan, the capital of this Soviet Jewish state, where the small population is ever-dwindling. The film offers poignant cinematography that shows swampy farmland and little boys playing soccer around a community cow. Blending these contemporary shots of the backwards society with archival footage of hopeful Jews rushing west, the film shows how a community, that never really blossomed, has devolved into a disappointment.
Stalin’s love-life, like a homeland in Siberia, didn’t fare much better. His first wife died two years after they were married, and his second wife committed suicide. Historians speculate that Stalin and Rubinstein met in between these two marriages, in Saint Petersburg around 1917. At the time, Rubinstein was already divorced, had a daughter, and was working for the Bolshevik underground.
As years passed, their relationship must have sweetened, because, while hundreds and thousands of Jews were being deported and murdered by Stalin’s government, Rubinstein was living a comfortable life on Vasilievsky Island, next door to the home of the nation’s leaders. Years later, when her daughter applied for a job as an engineer at a classified institute, she was hired immediately — despite the fact that a secret KGB decree had just been issued not to hire Jews.
There’s more to suggest that Stalin and Rubinstein had a thing. To this day, the Russian secret service won’t give up the name of the street that Rubinstein’s daughter lived on in Moscow.
And nothing screams sexy-Stalin affair like governmental secrecy.
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