The Real Joseph Stalin: The Paedophile/Child Molester

One thing about Joseph Stalin that was first verified in 2012 that I rarely if ever seen mentioned by anti-communists is the fact that we know that Stalin – unlike Adolf Hitler who has had the charge falsely levelled against him but not by any of his biographers nor with any evidentiary support as I have previously spent time explaining – (1) actually had a long-term sexual relation with a thirteen year old girl between March 1914 and October 1916.

I quote his noted biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore’s lengthy commentary on this in an article that he wrote for the British newspaper the ‘Evening Standard’ back in 2012 based on 2007 biography focusing on Stalin’s under-researched pre-revolutionary years ‘Young Stalin’.

Montefiore writes that:

‘It was claimed that when he was in his 30s and before he became leader, Stalin had raped or seduced, even fathered a child with, a girl who was just 13 years old - and had been indicted for the under-age seduction by the police.

The tale had long been dismissed as just another piece of Western anti-Stalin propaganda.

It had first surfaced soon after he took over from Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924, appearing in the "scurrilous" tabloids and emigre journals in the West that were banned in the newly-formed Soviet Union.’ (2)

We can thus see that generally the assumption had been – and quite reasonably so – that the rumours and allegations that Stalin had sexual relations – and had fathered a child - with a thirteen-year-old girl while he was in his 30s was ‘anti-communist gossip and propaganda’.

Yet Montefiore describes he discovered plenty of hard evidence of just such a relationship in his archival research on Stalin when he writes how:

‘But on his death in 1953 it had resurfaced. And now Khrushchev, having heard the story of the under-age girl, had commissioned his KGB boss General Ivan Serov to investigate in great secrecy.

As Stalin's biographer, I had heard the story but it seemed so outrageous as to be incredible: like most historians, I simply believed that it was mere propaganda.

It did not sound like the Stalin we knew: he was married twice but usually he was portrayed, somewhat like Hitler, as a freakish inhuman monster, so unnaturally obsessed with power that he was uninterested in sex.

Yet more than 80 years on from when the rumours first appeared, I found myself examining a most extraordinary document among Stalin's papers in the so-called Presidential archives in Moscow, while researching for my new book on the young Stalin.

Marked top secret and signed by the KGB boss Serov, it was addressed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo.

It was dated 1956 - three years after Stalin's death - and spelt out the results of General Serov's investigation.

Serov reported back to Khrushchev that, amazingly, the entire story of Stalin's affair with a 13-year-old was true. Khrushchev showed it to the Politburo (including Stalin's long-serving henchman Molotov), who all signed it and then filed it in the deepest recesses of the archives where it has remained until now.’ (3)

So put another way Nikita Khrushchev had the rumours about Stalin’s relationship with the girl investigated by the newly minted KGB and its first chairman Ivan Serov and discovered a lot of information about what had gone on and confirmed that it was indeed true.

Now some apologists for Stalin might try to claim that this was a de-Stalinization witch hunt or prospective smear campaign by Khrushchev along the lines of the ‘Secret Speech’ that he delivered on 25th February 1956. However, the problem with this claim is that there is no indication that Khrushchev or Serov had any inclination to use this information to defame Stalin at all, but rather it seems to have been simply a case of ‘we need to know if this is true’ before (or soon after) Stalin was officially knocked off his personality cult pedestal in the Soviet Union. Since there was a risk that if it were true – and it turned out to be – that confirmatory evidence for it might somehow surface in the West and Khrushchev – who had recently deposed Stalin’s short-lived successor Georgy Malenkov so was sitting uncomfortably on his newly acquired throne – couldn’t afford to be caught off guard and forced to scramble for an answer.

Additionally, it is quite clear that Khrushchev and Serov buried this investigation pretty deeply within the Soviet archives so that it would have never come to light had not Montefiore discovered not only Serov’s investigative report but the wealth of other evidence which had been filed away in the previously tightly closed Soviet archives.

To wit:

‘I was also able to find in the archives the memoirs of the girl herself, who was called Lidia. She wrote them during Stalin's reign, which is why they make no mention of any sex or the children she had by Stalin - that would have been suicidal.

Using all these and other archive documents, I constructed an astonishing picture of an unknown Stalin - one that painted him as a promiscuous and faithless serial seducer and libertine.

The picture was confirmed by the reminiscences of villagers who lived in the isolated hamlet that was the 13-year-old girl's home in Siberia.

In March 1914 Josef Stalin - a Georgian cobbler's son known to friends as Soso and comrades as Koba - was sentenced for his revolutionary activities by the Tsar to exile close to the Arctic Circle in a tiny hamlet named Kureika.

The place was a freezing hellhole, an isolated twilight world cut off from humanity in winter by the daylong darkness.

In Kureika, only the reindeer, snowfoxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone wore reindeer fur.

The hamlet contained 67 villagers - 38 men and 29 women - all packed into just eight ramshackle izbas or wooden peasant shacks.

Among them were seven orphans from the same family - the Pereprygins - of whom the youngest was 13-year-old Lidia.

She immediately noticed Stalin, not just because of his good looks but also because he was hopelessly underdressed with only a light coat.

Before long, he was sporting the full local outfit - from boots to hat - of reindeer fur, all of it provided by Lidia Pereprygina.

Stalin in those days was slim, attractive, charming, an accomplished poet and educated in the priesthood, but also a pitiless Marxist terrorist and brutal gangster boss - a Red Godfather who had funded Lenin's Bolsheviks with a series of audaciously bloody acts of bank robbery, piracy and racketeering.

Lidia was a schoolgirl orphan living on the remote frontier where girls matured early.

Some time in the early summer of 1914, the 35-year-old Stalin embarked on an affair with Lidia.

While not admitting to anything explicit in her memoirs, we catch a glimpse in them of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking bout to drinking bout, because she writes of their drunken dancing and singsongs: "In his spare time, Stalin like to go to evening dances - he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance."

These memoirs of Stalin's 13-year-old mistress - recorded 20 years later at the height of his dictatorship, while she remained a Siberian housewife - were clearly constrained.

But they contain unmistakable innuendos: "He often liked to drop in on certain people," says Lidia - by which she meant herself.

"And he also drank."

Was this how he seduced her?

Stalin was guarded during his exile by a red-bearded, red-tempered policeman named Ivan Laletin.

Stalin had already escaped many times from previous exiles. Laletin soon became his enemy.

By summer, almost everyone must have known about the sexual affair between Lidia and Stalin - she started to slip more and more regularly into his lodgings.

The policeman probably saw his chance to nail the insolent Georgian and watched Stalin carefully, determined to catch him in bed with the 13-year-old.

"One day," recalled Feodor Taraseev, the only villager who dared record the story, "Stalin was at home, working and not leaving the house.

"The policeman decided to check up on him. Without knocking on the door, he burst into the room."

Stalin was "furious to be interrupted," said Taraseev.

Almost certainly the policeman caught Stalin and Lidia in flagrante delicto.

Stalin's immediate response was to attack the policeman, who drew his sabre. Stalin was wounded in the neck, which so inflamed him that reportedly "he kicked out the rogue!"

"We witnessed this scene," says Taraseev.

"The policeman was running away towards the Yenisei River, cravenly waving his sabre in front of him while Comrade Stalin was pursuing him in a state of high excitement and fury, with his fists clenched."

Back in Siberia, the affair was no longer a secret. The statutory age of consent was 14, but it is clear from the KGB report that the sex between Stalin and Lidia was consensual.

The KGB chairman Ivan Serov explained: "J.V. Stalin started living together with her" - and this, he implied, was almost as shocking as the seduction.

Soon the news became even more jaw-dropping: Lidia was pregnant.

Stalin moved into the pitiful Pereprygin two-room shack. The lavatory was an outhouse where he used to take a rifle to scare the circling wolves.

At night, Lidia would creep into his room, recounts Stalin's first biographer Essad Bey, who must have talked to fellow exiles.

Certainly she was not shy about recalling that "he wore white underwear and a sailorstriped vest," as she confided to her interviewer in 1952, when Stalin was almost worshipped as a demi-god.

Lidia's brothers were so furious about the pregnancy that they refused to eat with Stalin. Lidia had to cook for him on his own.

According to KGB boss Serov, policeman Laletin threatened "to instigate criminal proceedings for living together with an under-age girl. J.V. Stalin promised the policeman to marry Pereprygina when she came of age".

So Stalin became engaged and the family, whether gratefully or begrudgingly, accepted the relationship.

In return, Stalin "shared his fish with them" as one of the family.

Indeed he treated Lidia almost as his young wife, entertaining at home and asking her to cook for his guests.

Stalin enjoyed the company of the shamanistic Tunguses and Ostiak tribesmen and learned to hunt and fish just like them. He still enjoyed partying, too.

"At the Taraseevs' place, the young gathered in a circle for a party - Stalin danced in the middle beating time, then he started singing," recalled a visitor to Kureika, Daria Ponamareva.

He also studied his Marxism, eagerly awaiting letters from Lenin.

Kureika, with its solitary hunting, its time to read and its young mistress, came to suit Stalin.

But all the time he knew his teenage fiancee was a transitory amusement to be abandoned by the wayside of his revolutionary mission.

The pregnancy was presumably an irritant, although locals recall Lidia was in love with Stalin.

Somewhere around December 1914, Lidia gave birth to a baby who died soon afterwards: Stalin made no comment but was definitely in Kureika at the time.

He survived the winter of 1915/16 there, too, living in a sooty, fuggy room in the Pereprygin house, and continuing the relationship.

In 1916, the Georgian lodger impregnated Lidia for the second time, and then typically made himself scarce. He escaped for the whole summer of 1916: where had he gone?

Most likely, his disappearance was connected with the pregnancy: locals claim he was devising a way to avoid marrying his pregnant mistress.

During my research, I discovered Stalin already had form as a prolific lover and that he had often promised marriage, only to renege at the last minute.

Even in these years of penniless obscurity, he was never without at least one girlfriend - and often more.

Indeed in exile, he became astonishingly promiscuous: in Vologda, in an earlier exile, he had met a saucy runaway schoolgirl of 16 named Polia who was living with a revolutionary comrade.

Stalin and she began an affair: watching secret police codenamed her Glamourpuss.

Polia was one of the few people who understood how strange Stalin was and could tease him about it: she always called him Oddball Osip - Osip being a diminutive of Josef.

When they parted, he sent her a postcard of a couple passionately embracing and wrote: "I owe you a kiss for your kiss passed onto me. Let me kiss you now! I'm not simply sending you a kiss but am kissssssssing you passionately (it's not worth kissing any other way! - Josef."

There was not much else to do in exile except drink, feud and fornicate, but Stalin had perfected all three pursuits.’ (4)

This to be frank is pretty damning since not only has Montefiore identified the girl – Lidia Pereprygina - in question as well as validated her existence as has Kotkin, (5) but rather we have her autobiographical account of what occurred in the archives which directly and indirectly confirms Serov’s later report.

Nor was this an accident on Stalin’s part because – as we can see – he got Lidia pregnant twice not once so it wasn’t just a drunken mistake but rather something far more systematic and long-lasting, which tends to confirm the picture that Montefiore draws of a Stalin repeatedly having sex with a thirteen year old girl in the village of Kureika in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk Krai between March 1914 and October 1916.

And there is no debating he wasn’t there either since Stalin himself built a ‘Stalin Museum’ there in 1938 to commemorate and celebrate his two to three years there! (6)

But does this sound like Stalin?

In truth yes because - as Montefiore had already discussed in his earlier 2003 biography of Stalin’s years in power ‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’ - Stalin is well-known to have been a womanizer and to have bedded dozens of women – often cuckolding other Bolsheviks as it happens – (7) with no intention of having anything other than a short term fling with them to satisfy his sexual needs as the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin came first in his mind. (8)

Kotkin, however, has sounded a note of caution in that Stalin’s paternity has been attributed to Lidia’s son Alexander Pereprygina by the villagers and there is little non-witness evidence to confirm it. (9) He also notes there is a problem in that the date on which Alexander Pereprygina’s birth was registered (6th November 1917) is more than nine months after we know Stalin left Kureika (October 1916); however Kotkin also points out that this is not the good evidence against Stalin’s parentage that many a desperate apologist for Stalin would try to make it because – as is quite common in rural areas even to this day – the ‘registration could have been by remoteness or falsely reported’. (10)

There is also the possibility – not considered by Kotkin – that Lidia Pereprygina’s pregnancy could have gone on longer than the normal 9 to 9 ½ months since the longest pregnancy on record was over a year (occurring in 1945 no less) (11) and nor are longer pregnancies as uncommon as all Kotkin seems to think (12) with 8 ½ to 9 ½ being the norm, but more than 10 month pregnancies occurring at a significant rate of 1 in 20 cases. (13)

Now given that Montefiore reports that Stalin had had one child with Lidia Pereprygina previously and presumably in 1915 or early 1916 – the child having soon died – and Alexander was allegedly his second child with her; it is reasonable to suppose that the local population of Kureika – who after all knew Stalin while he was there – are probably being honest and that the timeline issue is either due to an extended pregnancy, late registration of the child – it was winter when Alexander was born after all – or simply falsely reporting the date of birth in the fear of getting in trouble or out of simple ignorance.

Or some combination of all of the above.

The truth is then that we have pretty solid evidence that Stalin did have a sexual relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl - Lidia Pereprygina – in the village of Kureika between March 1914 and October 1916 which resulted in the birth of two children: one of whom died soon after birth and the other – Alexander Pereprygina – fought for Stalin in the Second World War and died in 1987. (14)

Indeed, it fits what we know about Stalin’s character and relationships with women which is why even though Kotkin is skeptical; he is inclined to accept that it could well be true. (15)

So, while modern apologists for Stalin like accuse Hitler of being a child molester/paedophile; the truth is that that there is no evidence that this is true, but Stalin was and the evidence for it is strong while that against it is weak and based on assumptions and nothing more.

References

(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-a-paedophile-andor

(2) https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/stalin-and-his-lover-aged-13-6581841.html

(3) Ibid.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Stephen Kotkin, 2017, ‘Stalin’, Vol. 2, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 67; 922

(6) https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2013/03/06/53829-ten-tirana-v-sibirskoy-glubinke

(7) Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2004, ‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’, 1st Edition, Phoenix: London, pp. 14-15

(8) Ibid., p. 13

(9) Kotkin, Op. Cit., p. 922

(10) Ibid.

(11) https://time.com/archive/6599519/medicine-prodigious-pregnancy/

(12) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/oct/01/pregnant-for-10-months

(13) https://www.aims.org.uk/general/normal-length-of-pregnancy

(14) Kotkin, Op. Cit., p. 922

(15) Ibid., pp. 67; 922