Were Stalin’s Wives Jewish?
One of the frequent claims that is made to argue that Stalin was jewish is that Stalin’s wives were jewish. The primary example of this claim can be found in the claim that long-time senior jewish Bolshevik and friend of Stalin’s Lazar Kaganovich’s daughter Rosa Kaganovich married Stalin after the suicide of Stalin’s second wife Nadia Alliluyev on 7th November 1932.
This – as I have demonstrated in a separate article – (1) is incorrect since we have no evidence that a ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ ever existed and significant evidence suggesting she did not and was in fact a rumour among Soviet dissidents and within the famous Gulag system – found as early as the 1930s – to explain the significant power of the jews within the Soviet Union and the reality of Judeo-Bolshevism without fingering the jews as a group as the principal culprits. (2)
Aside from the non-existent ‘Rosa Kaganovich’ then let’s look at the claim that Stalin’s two actual wives were jewish.
Stalin’s first wife was Ekaterina ‘Kato’ Svanidze, who was born on 2nd April 1885 in a small village called Baji in the highland region of Georgia called Racha and later moved with her parents to Tiflis where she met Stalin.
Kato was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Georgian woman (3) from an educated, cultivated and politically left-wing family. (4) Her father was Svimon - a railway worker and landowner - and Sepora; who was a descendant of minor Georgian nobility. (5)
Her brother was Stalin’s friend from the Tiflis Seminary: Alexander Svanidze. (6) She insisted on an Orthodox Christian Church wedding and Stalin agreed despite being an avowed atheist at the time, (7) which she may have insisted on (and Stalin agreed due to) because Kato and Stalin had already been having sex and Kato had fallen pregnant with Stalin’s child. (8)
There is absolutely no evidence or indication that Kato or family had any jewish ancestry whatsoever and until documentary evidence is presented to the contrary we have to conclude that Kato and her parents were not jewish in any way, shape or form.
Stalin’s second wife – after Kato died of tuberculosis on 22nd November 1907 – was Nadezhda ‘Nadia’ Alliluyev, who was born on 22nd September 1901 in the southern city of Baku.
Her father was Sergei Alliluyev – a railway electrician – and her mother was Olga Fedorenko of Ukrainian/German/Georgian/Gypsy origins. (9)
Sergei’s origins are decidedly non-jewish in that he was from a peasant family in Voronezh (10) and moved to the Caucasus to work on the Russian railways as an electrician. (11) We do however know that Sergei’s grandmother was of Romani origin, but there is otherwise no trace of anything other than non-jewish Russian ancestry. (12)
One line of argument does present itself whereby Nadia could be part jewish however because Olga – despite not being of jewish origin herself – had many sexual affairs with men other than Sergei and preferred ‘southern’ and ‘non-Russian’ men. (13) So, it is theoretically possible that one of those affairs with ‘non-Russian’ men could have been with a jew who could have been the biological father of Nadia.
However, we have no actual evidence of this, and it remains pure speculation.
We do however know that Stalin himself was one of those ‘non-Russian’ men that Olga had a sexual affair with and there was a dark rumour that Nadia was actually Stalin’s love child with Olga and that therefore Stalin had married his own daughter. (14) This rumour that first appears in 1931 and appears to have no actual basis, however. (15)
Concerning Olga’s ancestry, we know that from her daughter with Stalin – Svetlana Alliluyev – that Olga’s father Evgeni Fedorenko was of Ukrainian (his father) and Georgian (his mother) ancestry (16) and Olga’s mother Magdalena Eicholz was of German origin. (17)
Nadia probably originally met Stalin in Tiflis – (18) where he had also met Kato – when she was three in 1904 (19) or alternatively in 1914. (20)
She became Stalin’s first typist in the ‘Commissariat of Nationalities’ (21) where they became a couple and married. (22) She enthralled Stalin (23) because of her political devotion to the Bolshevik cause (she was originally one of Lenin’s secretaries) and also had a similar personality to him. (24)
Addressing the additional (and predictable) unsubstantiated claim that Nadia’s surname ‘Alliluyev’ was a ‘jewish surname’ Kerry Bolton writes that:
‘Another of the primary claims regarding Stalin’s Jewishness is that he married Jewesses. His second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva is said to be Jewish because of the patronym Alliluya (Hallelujah in Hebrew). However, Russian peasantry adopted first names as surnames. For legal purposes the first name was often combined with one’s profession, or the village where one came from was used. Therefore, trying to identify ethnicity by such means is not reliable.’ (25)
And former Jesuit and long-time writer on the jewish question Peter Myers agrees:
‘First of all you should know that Stalin was married twice: his first wife was Ekaterine Svanidze, a Georgian with whom he had a son, Yakov. There is no Jewish blood whatsoever. Second wife was Nadezhda Allilueva, south-Russians with Gypsy blood, with whom he had Svetlana and Vassily.’ (26)
We can therefore see that this linguistic root to make the claim that Stalin’s wives were jewish is also a complete non-starter.
Thus, we can see that while there is a speculative possibility that Nadia could have been part-jewish; there is no evidence for this and all the evidence we have for both Nadia and Kato unequivocally point to them as being of non-jewish origin.
References
(1) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-rosa-kaganovich-joseph-stalins
(2) Ibid.
(3) Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2007, ‘Young Stalin’, 1st Edition, Phoenix: London, p. 144
(4) Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003, ‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’, 1st Edition, Phoenix: London, p. 29
(5) Stephen Kotkin, 2014, ‘Stalin’, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York p. 753, n. 81
(6) Montefiore, ‘Stalin’, Op. Cit., p. 29
(7) Montefiore, ‘Young Stalin’, Op. Cit., pp. 164-165
(8) Kotkin, Op. Cit., p. 105
(9) Montefiore, ‘Stalin’, Op. Cit., p. 29
(10) Rosamond Richardson, 1993, ‘The Long Shadow: Inside Stalin's Family’, 1st Edition, Little, Brown and Company: London, p. 7
(11) Ibid., pp. 13-14
(12) Ibid., p. 10
(13) Montefiore, ‘Stalin’, Op. Cit., p. 29; Montefiore, ‘Young Stalin’, Op. Cit., pp. 124-125
(14) Ibid.
(15) Montefiore, ‘Young Stalin’, Op. Cit., pp. 297-298, n. 1
(16) Svetlana Alliluyeva, 1967, ‘Twenty Letters to a Friend’, 1st Edition, Hutchinson: London, p. 44
(17) Richardson, Op. Cit., p. 44
(18) Montefiore, ‘Stalin’, Op. Cit., p. 29
(19) Ronald Grigor Suny, 2020, ‘Stalin: Passage to Revolution’, 1st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 109
(20) Richardson, Op. Cit., p. 45
(21) Montefiore, ‘Stalin’, Op. Cit., p. 32
(22) Isaac Deutscher, 1967, ‘Stalin: A Political Biography’, 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: London, p. 274
(23) Montefiore, ‘Stalin’, Op. Cit., pp. 5-6
(24) Ibid., p. 6
(25) https://counter-currents.com/2012/11/was-stalin-jewish-and-does-it-matter/
(26) Quoted by Ibid.