Was Rosa Kaganovich Joseph Stalin's Third Wife?

In recent years I have frequently heard the claim that one Rosa Kaganovich – daughter of prominent jewish Bolshevik leader and friend of Stalin Lazar Kaganovich (aka ‘Iron Lazar’) – was Stalin’s third wife. I knew that the literature on Stalin held that Stalin had no third wife and my initial suspicions about where the origins of the claim were both proven right as well as then proven wrong.

My guess about where the claim came from was Stuart Kahan’s 1987 biography of Lazar Kaganovich called ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’. Kahan’s biography of Kaganovich is notoriously unreliable and presents a lot of controversial (and just weird) claims that are supposedly based on interviews conducted by Kahan (nobody else has ever heard them or seen the notes he took), but which make little to no sense, while the book itself claims to be non-fiction: it is written in the form of a quasi-novel.

The literary form of the Kahan’s ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’ doesn’t necessarily mean the information contained within it is ipso facto incorrect, but it is a significant red flag as few intellectually serious authors can pull off a non-fiction book in the form of a quasi-novel and even then, usually, they pointedly caveat their words using references/citations. (1)

However, the numerous strident and unsourced claims by Kahan’s ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’ should ring alarm bells for any serious student of the Soviet Union. A good example to illustrate the point is Kahan’s claim that Kaganovich instituted pogroms against the jews to facilitate his position throughout the 1930s. (2)

The problem with this claim is twofold in that in the first instance we may presume Rosa Kaganovich outlived Stalin, but yet her father was probably slated to be purged by Stalin as part of the ‘Doctor’s Plot’ investigation between 1951-1953 (3) which would suggest not that Kaganovich was ‘plotting against jews’, but rather that Kaganovich was plotting against Stalin which resulted in his eventual expulsion from the Communist party by Nikita Khrushchev in 1957 when he clashed with him as Stalin’s successor. (4)

This is a problem because one of the central arguments of Kahan’s ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’ is that Lazar Kaganovich was manipulating Stalin and that one of his principal methods of doing this was via his pretty daughter Rosa Kaganovich, but yet if Rosa was so powerful and more or less controlled Stalin via sex – which is basically what Kahan asserts (again without evidence) – then why did her father nearly fall victim to Stalin’s purges between 1951-1953 during the ‘Doctor’s Plot’?

He was only saved of course by the timely death of Stalin about which I will write in a future article.

In the second instance, Kahan is ascribing to Kaganovich a distinctly Zionist historical view of the Great Purges that are also being viewed in the light of purge of the ‘Rootless Cosmopolitans’ from 1948-1953 (but really started in 1946) and the ‘Doctor’s Plot’ from 1951-1953.

In essence Kahan has Kaganovich confirming the idea that the Great Purges of the 1930s which impacted so many jews were a deliberate anti-Semitic pogrom rather than a Communist purge which happened to arrest and kill a large number of jews because jews were so disproportionately (and heavily) involved in the bureaucracy, organizations and apparatus’ of the Soviet Union. (5)

This later view has become increasing common among historians of the Soviet Union as well as some jewish historians (6) and reflects a tendency by historians since the late 1980s to question often unchallenged claims and assumptions (i.e., the jewish ‘helpless victim’ narrative) made by primarily jewish historians especially as regards Russian and Soviet history. (7)

This then illustrates that Kahan is almost certainly not speaking of the historical Kaganovich in ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’ but is instead promoting a svengalian version of Kaganovich, who is pandering to an ‘anti-Semitic Stalin’ neither of whom seem to have been true-believing Marxists according to Kahan’s telling of the story which is the opposite of what is known about Stalin historically.

Thus, we can see that Kahan is not a good source and that ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’ is more a work of fiction than of fact.

Never-the-less Kahan provides an extensive passage where he narrates the story of Rosa Kaganovich’s marriage to Stalin and how it came about which I will quote at length.

To wit:

‘She looked at people the way her brother did: how they might be useful to her. She had learned well, and whatever Lazar told her would have to be reevaluated in that way. She, too, understood the words of Uncle Levick: “Whatever is good for the Jews.”

“He needs someone like you more than ever,” Lazar said. He didn’t have to explain who the “he” was. Rosa had been in the examining room when Stalin was brought in after his collapse. She had already heard the whisperings around the clinic. She knew that when it came to women, Stalin was in a vacuum. His first wife, Catherine, died of tuberculosis after only three years of marriage. Now his second wife had died after fifteen years of marriage, and under more tragic circumstances.

The whisperings continued to center on Stalin’s need for lusty women, but on a part-time basis. He seemed to desire the company of men more.

She looked into her brother’s eyes. They held few clues as to the thoughts behind them.

“What is his need?” she asked.

“Needs, Needs in the plural.”

Lazar had seen what was happening at the Kremlin. The first symptoms of persecution mania had already appeared in Stalin just as they had appeared in Ivan the Terrible after the death of his wife. It was on this fact that Lazar must base his plan.

“First, he needs a physician and someone he can trust. He knows you. He got you accepted into the clinic, and he trusts me. Thus, he will trust you and your medical knowledge,”

Rosa nodded.

“Agreed,” she said. She had no choice. Personal physician to the Soviet leader meant being able to listen and encourage. She could do that.

“Second,” Lazar held two fingers in front of her, “He needs a more stable family life. Svetlana is six. She needs a parent. Stalin is not that. We need to establish a family relationship for him.”

Rosa nodded again, and Lazar could see the same determined mood and understanding that he had seen decades ago when Sasha would return to the house only to find that Moisev had given the dinner away.

Sasha would set her jaw firmly, shake her head as if to accept the inevitable, and then go out to barter something for the family’s evening meal.

"Finally, you must be there as an anchor, not someone for him to argue with, not someone he can bully, but someone he will call and come to as almost a haven. You understand this is to be totally apolitical?”

Rosa listened intently. She would be given full latitude to do what she felt best, and perhaps this would also give more substance to her own life, which up to now had been mired in a past that was horrendous, a present that was barely passable, and a future that looked mundane.

Lazar studied her. He needed her badly. The opportunity was golden.

He just had to seize it with the right people at the right moment. Rosa fit the bill perfectly. He had never liked her when she was small. Now he did. But, then again, back in Kabany, he never needed her.

She did more than she was told. Stalin’s dacha at Gorinka was completely modernized. She brightened the colors, brought in new furniture, and began to entertain. Twice a week she held receptions there, receiving her friends from Nizhni Novgorod, first and foremost being Nadezhda Bulganin, a doctor like herself. Rosa had become a gracious hostess in a number of ways, and as the focal point of his life, Stalin found his most devoted disciples at the Gorinka dacha:

Molotov, Bulganin, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, and, of course, Lazar.

But Lazar went an extra step. Recognizing Stalin’s penchant for security, he had several buildings constructed near the dacha to house the fifty new members of his bodyguard.

Machine guns were placed in turrets, and large Russian wolfhounds patrolled the grounds twenty-four hours a day. Even a signal system was installed along the road from the dacha to the Kremlin. The system wended its way along the Arbat and was used to inform the police of Stalin’s car and guards constantly. Now Lazar could keep tabs on him with little effort.

No, Rosa had done what was expected and then some. Within a year, she was known as Rosa Stalin.’ (8)

From this lengthy passage you can already see what I mean about how Kahan styles Kaganovich as a Svengali-like character who is the one really controlling the easily led and weak-willed Stalin, but we can also see how he gives his daughter Rosa to Stalin to become his third wife.

I won’t go too much into why Kahan’s work is one of fiction constructed on a factual framework, but evidence of just this is provided by the fact that Stalin’s third wife being Kaganovich’s daughter is mentioned extensively in primary and secondary literature on the Soviet Union.

For example, Leon Trotsky writing in 1940 before his death that year stated in his ‘Stalin’ that:

‘Stalin married the sister of Kaganovich, thereby presenting the latter with hopes for a promising future.’ (9)

Add to this the fact that the existence of Rosa Kaganovich and her marriage to Stalin as his third wife is attested by some significant biographies of Stalin – such as Robert Payne’s – and even specialist early studies of Stalin’s private life such as that of Jack Fishman and Bernard Hutton and it superficially appears that this is indeed true.

The problem - as with much literature on the Soviet Union before it collapsed between 1989 and 1991 - is that aside this is all essentially hearsay and has nothing to back it up beyond surmise and the uncritical acceptance of rumours as truth.

The eagle eyed among you might have caught a slight problem in what Trotsky actually stated though.

He said the ‘sister’ of Kaganovich not his ‘daughter’ and Kahan very explicitly says Rosa Kaganovich was Lazar Kaganovich’s daughter and not his sister.

Trotsky’s mention of the marriage between Stalin and ‘Kaganovich’s sister’ is also not as solid as it might seem given that Trotsky had been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 by Stalin and his allies and couldn’t have known too much of which he was absolutely sure about Stalin’s life since 1929, which means he was eleven years out-of-date and would have been relying on rumour and gossip – which he then presented as fact in typical Trotsky fashion – as well as the openly published Soviet sources to make his comments and observations about Stalin.

We know that such rumours about Stalin having married a ‘Roza Kaganovich’ were already swirling around Soviet dissident circles and within the Soviet Gulag system in the 1930s from former inmates of that system at the time such as Elizabeth Lermolo.

Lermolo wrote in her autobiographical ‘Face of a Victim’ that:

‘Yenukidze engaged in an indiscrete conversation (revealed by a tape recording) in which he referred to Stalin and his wife Roza Kaganovich as the “Kremlin maniacs.”’ (10)

We also learn from Lermolo that ‘Roza Kaganovich’ was supposedly a good friend of jewish NKVD chief and mass murderer Genrikh Yagoda – (11) which places her marriage to Stalin before March 1938 (i.e., before Yagoda’s arrest and execution for diamond smuggling) and is also likely a principal source of Kahan’s otherwise unsourced claims about ‘Rosa Kaganovich’s’ role within Stalin’s regime – and the link between Kaganovich and Yagoda sounds rather like a tacit observation by Soviet dissidents – later picked up and repeated as fact by Trotsky – that Stalin’s Soviet Union was a jewish dictatorship and in their view Stalin was just a non-jewish figurehead controlled by the real (jewish) masters of the communist party and the Soviet Union itself.

That ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ is really an anti-jewish rumour – and probably originally based on observations about how jewish Stalin’s Soviet government and its chosen agents frequently were – is illustrated by Stalin’s own daughter (from his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died in 1932) Svetlana Alliluyeva when she unequivocally stated her in 1969 autobiography ‘Only One Year’ that:

‘Nothing could be more unlikely than the story spread in the West about 'Stalin's third wife' – the mythical Rosa Kaganovich. Apart from the fact that I never saw any 'Rosa' in the Kaganovich family, the idea that this legendary Rosa, an intellectual woman ... and above all a Jewess, could have captured my father's fancy shows how totally ignorant people were of his true nature.’ (12)

In other words, how does Stalin’s daughter not know about ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ or that she was married to her father as his third wife sometime between 1932 and 1938 as is suggested by some of the sources?

More than that she was in the right place at the right time and didn’t significantly fall out of favour with Stalin till he died in 1953: so, what reason would she deny Rosa Kaganovich’s existence?

Well, the simple fact is there is no compelling reason to suggest Svetlana Alliluyeva is lying and further evidence that she is not.

That evidence came in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union when Kahan’s ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’ was published in Russian translation and the Kaganovich family read it and were understandably upset.

One of the principal issues they took with the book in their open letter - which is available online - (13) is the claim about ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ who the family declare: (14)

A) Never existed as Kaganovich’s daughter (born 1919) was Maya Kaganovich not Rosa Kaganovich and wasn’t married to Stalin and was married in 1939 to someone else (outside of the 1932-1938 timeline for Rosa Kaganovich’s marriage to Stalin per Lermolo).

B) Rosa Kaganovich was Kaganovich’s niece (the daughter of his sister Rachel Kaganovich who died in 1926) and not married to Stalin and who lived in Rostov-on-Don. (15)

In essence then the Kaganovich family – including his daughter Maya - denies the marriage to Stalin and the existence of a daughter or sister of Kaganovich named ‘Rosa’ and Stalin’s daughter openly declares that she never saw nor heard anything about a ‘Rosa Kaganovich’.

Therefore, on balance we can see there is no actual evidence that ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ ever actually existed because the people who should know of her existence don’t and those who claim she existed were in no position to actually know and seem to have been relying on rumours that simply evolved, clarified and magnified over time.

Hence the fact that the sources claiming that ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ existed report alternatively that she was Lazar Kaganovich’s sister and also that she was Lazar Kaganovich’s daughter.

Thus, we cannot help but agree with Montefiore’s conclusion that ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ appears to have been an ‘anti-Semitic myth’, (16) but his claim that ‘the Nazis’ were ‘responsible’ for promoting it is also unsourced nonsense (17) as is Robert Service’ repetition of this claim without any evidence either. (18)

We can clearly see that these rumours were current in the Soviet dissident and Gulag system and were also picked up by no lesser person than Stalin’s hated rival Trotsky.

So, without evidence that ‘the Nazis’ were responsible; we must instead draw a simpler evidence-based conclusion that ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ was not a creation of ‘the Nazis’ but instead a phantasm created by the (often non-jewish) victims of Stalin’s Soviet Union to express and explain – basically ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ controls Stalin (with sex) and Lazar Kaganovich controls ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ and thus Stalin - the overwhelming jewishness of that genocidal regime without overtly observing that jewishness because that would go against their Marxist or broadly leftist beliefs.

In essence then ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ is an anti-Semitic archetype – for lack of a better term – used to express and explain the reality of Judeo-Bolshevism among Soviet dissidents which was then later picked up by Western anti-Communists and then found its way into the biographic literature on Stalin and communism in general in the West with the added stamp of Trotsky’s off-the-cuff claim in 1940 when he isn’t likely to have actually known what he claimed with any certainty.

References

(1) A good example of academic non-fiction writing in quasi-novel literary form is Douglas Starr’s 2010 ‘The Killer of Little Shepherds’.

(2) Stuart Kahan, 1987, ‘The Wolf of the Kremlin’, 1st Edition, William Morrow: New York, pp. 133-139

(3) Jonathan Brent, Vladimir Naumov, 2003, ‘Stalin’s Last Crime: The Doctor’s Plot’, 1st Edition, John Murray: London, p. 132; also implied by Isaac Deutscher, 1967., ‘Stalin: A Political Biography’, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 612-613

(4) Joshua Rubenstein, Vladimir Naumov (Eds.), 2005, ‘Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’, 2nd Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 33

(5) This is implicitly conceded even by Benjamin Pinkus, 1988, ‘The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 77-84

(6) See for example Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, ‘On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War’, 1st Edition, Profile: London, pp. 64-65

(7) Albert Lindemann, 1991, ‘The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs (Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank), 1894-1915’, 1st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, p. 131

(8) Kahan, Op. Cit., pp. 169-170

(9) Leon Trotsky, 2019, [1940], ‘Stalin: An Appraisal of the Man and His Influence’, 1st Edition, Haymarket: Chicago, p. 788

(10) Elizabeth Lermolo, 1955, ‘Face of a Victim’, 1st Edition, Harper & Brothers: New York, p. 286

(11) Ibid., p. 287

(12) Svetlana Alliluyeva, 1971, ‘Only One Year’, 1st Edition, Penguin: London, p. 330

(13) http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n2/kaganfam.htm

(14) Ibid.

(15) Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2004, ‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’, 1st Edition, Phoenix: London, p. 273

(16) Ibid.; Robert Service, 2005, ‘Stalin: A Biography’, 1st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, p. 436

(17) Montefiore, Op. Cit., p. 273

(18) Service, Op. Cit., p. 436