First Red Lady

First U. S. newsgatherer to obtain a formal interview from Dictator Josef Stalin was United Pressman Eugene Lyons (TIME, Dec. 1 & 8, 1930). First and only correspondent to chat with the grim Dictator's sweet-faced, cackling old mother was Hubert Renfro ("The Red Trade Menace") Knickerbocker (TIME, Dec. 8, 1930). Last week cheerful Ralph W. Barnes, comparatively a newcomer in Moscow and correspondent of Manhattan's Herald Tribune, was first to report Mrs. Josef Stalin, First Red Lady. He reported her:

Age: 29

Height: medium

Figure: slightly stout

Face: broad, intelligent

Complexion: clear, ruddy

Eyes & eyebrows: dark

Hair: brown, knotted behind

Only ornament: large shell comb

Name: Nadya Alliluieva

Men-about-Moscow have known for some time in a general way that the Dictator's wife was "studying," but what or where has been Mrs. Stalin's secret. Last week Correspondent Barnes discovered her in the All-Union Industrial Academy at Moscow. When Mr. Barnes entered the Academy's laboratory two male students were assisting a female classmate to heat a mess of chemicals in a small flask. The earnest female wore a laboratory smock. Intent on her experiment, she would not be interviewed. Such is the First Red Lady.

Diligent Mr. Barnes pried out of other students that Mrs. Stalin's ambition is to be named supervisor of an artificial silk factory. Specializing in the chemistry of synthetic silk, she has studied two years, completes her course this year.

Fellow students call Mrs. Stalin merely "Comrade Alliluieva," consider it right & natural that she should leave her six-year-old daughter Svetlana and eleven-year-old son Vassily at home, while she pursues "important studies." As every Russian knows, Dictator Stalin thinks that women should get out of the home and work, preferably in industry or, if they are too stupid for that, then sweeping streets, digging ditches, plowing & sowing.

First Lady Nadya is the younger daughter of one Sergei Alliluiev, a locksmith. As a little girl she looked up to Josef Stalin, a strong, violent, darkly brooding visitor who not only broke locks but held up banks and dynamited safes to secure money for Comrade Lenin and the Communist Party. Romantic, this desperate character had, however, a wife and a son only six years younger than the locksmith's daughter.

The first Mrs. Stalin, Ekaterina, died of pneumonia before the 1917 Revolution. In 1919 Josef Stalin, not yet Dictator but already high in the Soviet Government, made a dazzling visit to the still humble shop and home of his old friend Sergei Alliluiev.

Dazzled, the locksmith's younger daughter, then just 17, fell promptly in love with the fortyish Strong Man whom she had admired as a child, married him proudly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.