Ana Rubenstein: Stalin’s Jewish Mistress/Wife?

Back in 2007 in a widely cited article ‘The Jewish News of Northern California’ posed an interesting question of:

‘Did Stalin have a Jewish wife and stepdaughter?’ (1)

They write that:

‘The communist tyrant Joseph Stalin was known as an anti-Semite who planned wide-scale purges against the Jews in his latter days.

But that may not have prevented him from having an affair with a Jewish woman and of taking care of her daughter until her mother died. According to some evidence, Stalin may have even married the woman.

The affair was disclosed recently following the discovery of a letter by historian Nicolai Nada. The letter, placed on the desk of the general secretary of the communist party Georgi Malenkov in 1953, the day Stalin suffered a stroke, was kept in a classified party file for decades.

A few months ago, officials in charge of the file were persuaded to reveal the letter, which reads:

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

If it is not possible to see him, I ask you to grant me an audience on a very urgent matter.’ (2)

Now in the first instance Stalin wasn’t an ‘anti-Semite’ in the slightest as this is – ironically – Zionist atrocity propaganda against him that has been widely believed and written about largely – in my opinion – because these same writers deny the historical reality of Judeo-Bolshevism and thus have to ‘explain’ why Stalin’s various purges – i.e., the ‘Great Purge’ of 1936-1938 and the ‘Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign’ of 1948-1953 – laicized, deported, imprisoned and/or executed so many jews.

So they seize upon a few statements/offhand comments by Stalin – who was a functional alcoholic and so bad that even Winston Churchill thought he drunk a lot – often taken out of context to claim that Stalin was an ‘anti-Semite’ and thus his purge laicized, deported, imprisoned and/or executed so many jews in the Soviet Union not because jews dominated the Soviet Union but rather because Stalin was ‘an anti-Semite’ and was ‘going to launch a second Holocaust’. (3)

Now the letter that Nada has found that was ‘placed on the desk of the general secretary of the communist party Georgi Malenkov in 1953’ – on the day Stalin died no less – is interesting because it is the first connection with something like evidence to suggest that Stalin may have in fact had a jewish wife named Ana Rubenstein and a daughter named Regina Sabashnikov (nee Kostiovsky).

So, let’s examine the thesis more closely shall we?

‘Jewish News’ continues by summarizing Nada’s theory:

‘It is unknown what the writer sought to tell Stalin, or what the “urgent matter” she wished to discuss with the general-secretary of the communist party was about. Instead, Nada focused his research on the identity of Ana Rubinstein, “the former wife of Comrade Stalin,” and uncovered the following information:

It appears that Ana Rubinstein was born around 1890 in Ukraine. In 1910 she married a Jew named Zalman Kostiovsky, and on Sept. 28, 1911 they had a daughter named Regina. The marriage broke up and a year later Ana came to Saint Petersburg with her daughter but without her husband.

Nada believes Stalin met Ana Rubinstein as early as 1912. He used to visit Saint Petersburg often, where Rubinstein was affiliated with the city’s Bolshevik underground. The affair apparently developed later, because in 1913 Stalin was apprehended by police and deported to Siberia, returning in the spring of 1917. Regina Sabashnikov — whom Stalin knew during “her childhood” — was 5 in 1917.

It’s still not clear if this was just an affair or whether the couple actually married because all documents pertaining to Stalin’s personal life were confiscated in the 1920s, and Stalin personally destroyed “incriminating” documents.

The official version of his biography, published in the U.S.S.R., mentions two women: Yekaterina Svanidze, who died of tuberculosis, and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide. Indirect evidence shows that Rubinstein may also have been a legal wife.’ (4)

Now firstly I think it is fairly obvious what the ‘urgent matter’ likely was which was this letter was written to Malenkov in 1953 at the height of both the ‘Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign’ and its most famous element: ‘The Doctor’s Plot’. Both of which are widely and falsely – as previously pointed out – claimed to be ‘anti-Semitic’ because they significantly impacted jews (although not exclusively which is what jews won’t tell you) and it isn’t much of a stretch to believe that Sabashnikov was writing to Stalin to either pledge her loyalty as a jewess (and thus escape the suspicion of being a ‘Zionist agent/saboteur’) or to try to intercede with Stalin on behalf of another jew (or jews) who had been arrested by the MGB (which was the successor to the NKVD as of 1946).

The other likely possibility is that Sabashnikov needed some kind of personal help or assistance that only Stalin could provide such as – for example – to jump ahead of the treatment queue in terms of say a surgery or some such.

We will never know, but it is important to note the historical context of Sabashnikov’s letter and not try and view is sans context where it might be stronger evidence than it otherwise appears.

Secondly Nada has sketched out the timeline involved well in that the relationship between Stalin and Rubenstein had to have occurred in 1912-1913 but we can actually narrow it down a lot more than Nada does. If Rubenstein was in St. Petersburg from early October 1912 as Nada claims, then this coincides with Stalin’s arrival there in September 1912.

Now the big ‘if’ here is that Stalin – as one of Lenin’s principal Bolshevik underground organization lieutenants – met Rubenstein, fell in love with her, married her in some fashion and took on Sabashnikov as his own daughter between early October 1912 and January 1913 – when Stalin travelled to Vienna where he wrote his famous 1913 article ‘Marxism and the National Question’ for ‘Pravda’ – and shortly after he arrived back in St. Petersburg in late January/early February 1913; he was again arrested and promptly deported to Siberia from whence he didn’t remerge till 1917.

The problem here is time: Rubenstein and Stalin were in St. Petersburg together for at most three to four months which is a very short space of time for them to meet, fall in love, marry and for Stalin to form a strong attachment to the young Sabashnikov.

It is plausible because – if we believe Nada – Rubenstein was a member of St. Petersburg Bolshevik underground organization then Stalin could well have met her – and she would have certainly known who Stalin was – during this time but conversely it didn’t necessarily happen just because it is both possible and plausible.

Our issue here is that Stalin did a lot of massaging of his past and left us little documentation of his life before the February and October Revolutions of 1917 and as such we have to do quite a lot of detective work to piece it back together. (5)

However, where Nada’s theory gets really hazy is that he has Sabashnikov being born to Rubenstein and fellow jew Zalman Kostiovsky on 28th September 1911; where-upon Rubenstein up sticks and heads off to St. Petersburg to join the Bolshevik underground a little over a year later and then ‘meets Stalin’.

But then claims that Sabashnikov was 5-years-old in 1917 with the not-so-subtle implication that she was Stalin’s daughter, but if Sabashnikov was Stalin’s daughter then she couldn’t have been born over a year before Stalin and her mother allegedly met!

And if she were Stalin’s daughter she should have been born sometime in 1913 not 1911.

We can immediately see that if Sabashnikov’s birth year is correct then she cannot be Stalin’s daughter as Nada implies.

Now this doesn’t mean that Rubenstein and Stalin didn’t meet and have a sexual relationship – Stalin did after all have numerous affairs and love children that we know about – but rather assuming Nada’s birth year for Sabashnikov is correct then Sabashnikov was not the product of a possible Stalin and Rubenstein affair/marriage.

Moving on to Nada’s ‘indirect evidence for a marriage’ between Stalin and Rubenstein ‘Jewish News’ writes:

‘The first piece of evidence concerns the timeline.

Stalin was first seen with the beautiful Alliluyeva in 1917 but married her 18 months later. In elite communist circles, it was whispered that the tyrant didn’t marry because he wasn’t divorced from his first wife. But Stalin’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, died in 1907.’ (6)

This isn’t evidence at all but rather innuendo on Nada’s part. These are unsourced/unsubstantiated rumours, and further we actually know the reason that Stalin didn’t marry Nadezhda Alliluyeva till early 1919, which was that she was the daughter of a prominent Bolshevik family who were personal friends of Lenin having hidden him during the ‘July Days’ of 1917 (7) so seducing Sergei Alliluyev’s daughter – who Stalin hadn’t met since she was a child – (8) was not really a good political move (and Stalin was all about political moves) and after the summer when they got to know each other and fell in love. (9)

Their marriage however got rather delayed by the small matter of the October Revolution and by late October Stalin was playing a significant part – although often downplayed largely thanks to Trotsky’s self-serving claims – in the famous events that followed and became ‘People’s Commissar for Nationalities’ in the Sovnarkom, played a major role in drafting the Soviet constitution and brought Nadezhda to St. Petersburg (now renamed Petrograd) to be his personal secretary and eventually they married in January/February 1919 once a lot of the initial ‘revolutionary problems’ had alleviated.

Thus, we can see Nada is creating a mystery where this is none in order to try and create evidence for his thesis.

‘Jewish News’ continues with its summation of the evidence for Nada’s thesis as follows:

‘Another piece of evidence is linked to Rubinstein herself. Documents indicate that, for dozens of years, someone in high places took care of Rubinstein and her daughter Regina. Ana’s grandson, Vitali Sabashnikov, who died recently, told Nada that Rubinstein died in the 1950s in Leningrad. Sabashnikov said she lived in an elite neighborhood on Vasilievsky Island, opposite the house where the leadership of the communist party branch lived.

Ana and her daughter stayed in Leningrad during the siege, when 1 million residents died of starvation. The two survived the siege, likely because they received food packages from the party branch.’ (10)

The problem with Nada’s evidence here is that again there is no evidence that the person supporting the Sabashnikovs was indeed Stalin and if it was Stalin – as is perfectly possible – then there is no reason to suppose – as Nada does – that it was because Stalin was Sabashnikov’s father and/or Rubenstein’s former lover.

It could just as well be that Stalin had fond memories of Sabashnikov’s mother Ana Rubenstein as an ‘Old Bolshevik’ who had worked for/closely with him when being a Bolshevik wasn’t a means for career advancement; Stalin decided to reward Rubenstein’s service by taking care of her daughter and her family by setting them up nicely in Leningrad and her status as someone close to Stalin ensured she was awarded food parcels during the Siege of Leningrad during the Second World War.

Nada’s next argument is almost a repeat of his ‘Leningrad’ argument but this time it has shifted to Moscow in 1950:

‘Later, Regina Kostiovsky married Vladimir Sabashnikov, an engineer. In September 1950, they moved to Moscow as a wave of anti-Semitism swept across the U.S.S.R.

But someone in the communist party made sure that the Sabashnikov couple be given a spacious apartment in a luxurious building near the Taganka Square, a kilometer from the Kremlin.

Also, immediately after moving to Moscow, Regina was hired as an engineer at a classified institute that developed innovative weaponry, months after the KGB issued a confidential decree not to hire Jews to work in security related institutions.’ (11)

This is the same argument with a slight twist that once again invokes the ‘Stalin as an anti-Semite’ nonsense to explain why jews might ‘not be allowed’ to work in ‘security related institutes’ which is in itself nonsense since numerous jews worked in ‘security related institutes’ right through the ‘Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign’ and the ‘Doctor’s Plot’; such as Boris Vannikov - the head of the ‘First Main Directorate’ of the Soviet Atomic Bomb Programme - and Naum Sorkin; who was appointed head of the ‘Mozhaysky Military Academy of Aeronautical Engineering’ in 1952 in the middle of a so-called ‘anti-Semitic pogrom’!

Thus, we can see that Nada’s claim is simply unfounded and as an aside it wasn’t the KBG – as they weren’t founded till 1954 – but rather the MGB Nada is thinking of.

‘Jewish News’ then continues with Nada’s last argument, which is:

‘Even after she had dispatched a letter to general-secretary Malenkov, she was not fired and continued working there until her retirement. Nada considers this proof her mother was close to Stalin — because in 1953 those who made unfounded claims of affiliation to the “people” were deported to labor camps for “offenses against the reputation of the state.”

For six weeks, Regina’s letter sat on the desk of Malenkov, who was appointed prime minister upon Stalin’s death. On April 16, following a meeting attended by only a few senior leaders, Dmitry Sukhanov, director-general of the prime minister’s office, ordered the letter placed in the party presidents’ secret archives in a special file whose contents were meant to be kept confidential forever. The letter was kept in the file until the fall of the communist party and collapse of the Soviet Union.’ (12)

This is a similar argument as the previous two that Nada has offered because it is not really an argument in that it assumes that Stalin and his closest collaborators – who were very frequently jewish – (13) would want to cover up Sabashnikov’s 1953 letter ‘because Rubenstein was jewish’ when in fact it would almost certainly be for reasons of controlling Stalin’s hagiographic established biography – (14) and that letter could be viewed as undermining that by introducing a potential Stalin mistress into the equation as a third wife – which was a key consideration for Malenkov’s consolidation of power after Stalin’s death given that it was already shaky enough with several major rivals and anything that undercut Stalin’s prestige – upon which Malenkov’s rule rested – which as it happens did not survive long after his death with Malenkov being pushed out of power in February 1955.

So once again Nada is reading into something that is not there to provide himself with evidence of Rubenstein’s relationship with Stalin and that Sabashnikov might have been Stalin’s biological daughter even though given Nada’s timeline and birth year for her she cannot have been.

Now to summarise all this we have seen that the claim by Nada that Stalin and Ana Rubenstein had some kind of relationship – probably sexual if they did indeed have one – between October 1912 and January/February 1913 is possible and even probable.

Thus it can be argued – albeit we have insufficient evidence to do so – that Stalin had a jewish mistress in the form of Ana Rubenstein for 3-4 months in 1912-1913, but nothing more than that and even then the evidence is honestly insufficient for such a claim beyond making it as an educated speculation based on Sabashnikov’s letter to Malenkov in 1953.

Thus, we have to conclude that we have insufficient evidence to claim that Ana Rubenstein was Stalin’s mistress (let alone his wife), but we cannot rule it out either as they were in the same city, in the same (small) political movement and Stalin is known to have had multiple affairs so he does have form.

However, what we can say for near certain is that given the evidence presented Regina Sabashnikov (nee Kostiovsky) was indeed jewish, but she was almost certainly not Stalin’s love child with Rubenstein but rather the product of Rubenstein’s 1910 marriage with Zalman Kostiovsky.

References

(1) https://jweekly.com/2007/09/27/did-stalin-have-a-jewish-wife-and-stepdaughter/ also see https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3450203,00.html

(2) Ibid.

(3) A recent thorough debunk of the ‘Stalin was an anti-Semite’ claim is Yu Xiao, Ji Zeng, 2023, ‘Antisemitism or political purge? Stalin’s Jewish policies revisited’, Israel Affairs, Vol. 29, No. 6, pp. 1154-1166

(4) https://jweekly.com/2007/09/27/did-stalin-have-a-jewish-wife-and-stepdaughter/

(5) Geoffrey Roberts, ‘A Subversive, Not a Psychopath’, Literary Review, Vol. 492, December 2020 (https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-subversive-not-a-psychopath)

(6) https://jweekly.com/2007/09/27/did-stalin-have-a-jewish-wife-and-stepdaughter/

(7) Rosamond Richardson, 1993, ‘The Long Shadow: Inside Stalin's Family’, 1st Edition, Little, Brown and Company: Boston, p. 53

(8) Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2007, ‘Young Stalin’, 1st Edition, Phoenix: London, p. 194

(9) Ibid., pp. 345-346

(10) https://jweekly.com/2007/09/27/did-stalin-have-a-jewish-wife-and-stepdaughter/

(11) Ibid.

(12) Ibid.

(13) See Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, 'On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War', 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 63-67

(14) Roberts, Op. Cit.