Nadezhda Alliluyeva

Who was Nadezhda Alliluyeva?

Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva was the second wife of Joseph Stalin. Per a December 2012 RT documentary her grave stone says she died 11 September 1932.

Nadezhda was the youngest child of Russian revolutionary Sergei Alliluyev, a railway worker, and his wife Olga, a woman of German, and Georgian ancestry who spoke Russian with a strong accent.

Sergei Alliluyev, though Russian, had found work and a second home in the Caucasus. During Stalin's time of exile, the Alliluyev family was a source of assistance and refuge, and during 1917, Stalin lived from time to time in their apartment. Nadezhda first met Stalin as a child when her father, Sergei Alliluyev, sheltered him after one of his escapes from Siberian exile during 1911. She may have always been in love with the mysterious swarthy Georgian with the yellowish-colored eyes who saved her life from drowning when she was a child.

After the revolution, Nadezhda worked as a confidential code clerk in Lenin's office. She eschewed fancy dress, makeup, and other trappings that she felt un-befitting of a proper Bolshevik.

The couple married in 1919, when Stalin was already a 41-year-old widower and father of one son, born to his first wife, who died of typhus years earlier. Nadezhda and Joseph had two children together: Vasily, born in 1921, who became a fighter pilot at Stalingrad, and Svetlana, their daughter, born 1926.