nadya
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Characters
The given ages of characters are their ages in 1929 at the start of the series
Potential casting suggestions can be found here
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
Nadya Alliluyeva – “Totochka” (27)
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Nadya was born in Baku in September 1901 to a friend of Stalin, a fellow revolutionary, and was raised in Saint Petersburg.
In 1917 Nadya was close to the heart of the revolution and worked as a secretary for several Bolshevik leaders, including Vladimir Lenin and Stalin. Having known Stalin from a young age, she married him the following year in 1918 when she was 18. He was 22 years her senior.
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In the second half of the nineteen twenties, Nadya is the acknowledged head of the
Stalin household and indeed the glue that holds the Kremlin social scene together.
Her nickname is ”Totochka” or “Tarka”.
She is an enthusiastic and dedicated Bolshevik who rejects materialism and elite privilege. She refuses an official car and walks everywhere or catches the bus. In 1917 she idolised Stalin and the other middle-aged Bolshevik leaders, but as the twenties turn into thirties she suffers a terrible and devastating disillusionment with her husband's regime and comes to despise many of his closest associates.
She is highly intelligent, well educated and beautiful - with the looks of a southern Slav as her great grandmother on her Mother’s side was a Romany Gypsy. (Her brother Pavel was said to look exactly like Nehru.) Stalin often ridicules Nadya for being a 'Gypo'. In public she is self-controlled and disciplined but this increasingly hides an inner tension and in private she will often let rip at her drunken husband who is the cause of both her political and personal disillusion.
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Her daughter Svetlana later said that Nadya had been distant from her children. But by the time Svetlana was five Nadya was already profoundly unhappy. She also suspected Stalin was unfaithful, which he was, and which was another cause of the frequent arguments with him. After the birth of Svetlana she started using abortion as a means of preventing the birth of anymore of Stalin’s children. By the time of her death she had had 10 abortions.
She studied Music & French before starting at the Industrial Academy and it was she who plays the famous piano from Stalin’s Kremlin apartment (later sent to the Stalin Museum in Gori). But as a good Bolshevik feminist she is not content to be merely a housewife, and the mother of her children. She yearns to take an active part in industrial and political life – like her close friend Polina Molotov and her sister Anna Redens. Like many intelligent women trapped in domesticity she is being driven almost insane by the boredom and banality of being only a ‘Baba’ (housewife & mother), and the Industrial Academy is her ticket to the outside world. She initially blossoms as a student but knowledge of the outside world is ultimately to be her undoing as the horrors of her husband’s ‘revolution from above’ are revealed to her.
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Her defiance of Stalin may have been an act of extraordinary courage or infantile naivety or both but ultimately she was right of course and within ten years of her death all her friends will perish at Stalin's hands – Bukharin, Yenukidze, Ordzhonikidze, Redens, Svanidzes, even Polina Molotov will spent over a decade in the Gulag - incredibly this is whilst her husband remains Stalin's deputy.
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Joseph Stalin – “Koba” (49)
Born in Georgia in December 1878. He was General Secretary Of The Communist party from 1921 until his death in March 1953.
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Born 'Iosif Dzhugashvili' to a poor ethnic Georgian family in the town of Gori in the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire (now part of Georgia), Stalin attended the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary before joining the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.
Notoriously handsome in his youth he was a revolutionary from the earliest days of Bolshevism. He edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir
Lenin's Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles to Siberia.
This Stalin is a quietly spoken misanthrope, except when drunk when he is a loud, aggressive, crude and foul-mouthed misanthrope - and he is often drunk! (The normal routine in the Kremlin was a late dinner sometime after 9 pm and then drinking at the dinner table until 3 or 4.00 am followed by an 11 or 12 am start the next day.)
He has a working class sense of humour based on ‘taking the piss’ and pricking pomposity, which makes him simultaneously wittily sarcastic and contemptuous of all those who oppose him… and indeed many who support him. He is street-smart and tough and very popular with the working class of Russia because he is not like previous Russian leaders, even Lenin, who after all was a bourgeois intellectual and spoke like one.
He is capable of being incredibly rude (one of Lenin’s main criticisms of Stalin in The Testament) but he is also capable of great charm and clearly motivates intense loyalty from his inner-circle. He is known to his pre-revolutionary colleagues as ‘Koba’, the pseudonym he had adopted in the earliest years of the twentieth century while operating as a Bolshevik terrorist across the Caucasus. He is a voracious reader (he reportedly read 500 pages a day!) and intimately interested in poetry, drama and art.
The Old Bolsheviks regard him as a sort of gangster/bureaucrat, ‘a man who gets things done’, but who has little intellectual or theoretical talent. He resented this reputation and took secret lessons in political theory during the period of this series, later publishing works in his own name, works written by his tutor who he had shot in 1938.
He is often in physical pain; he was born with two adjoined toes on his left foot; his face was permanently scarred by smallpox at the age of 6; at 12 he injured his left arm in an accident involving a horse-drawn carriage, rendering it shorter and stiffer than its counterpart; and as an adult he suffers from Sciatica, Arthritis, Myalgia, Muscular Atrophy, Irritable Bowel, a Tubercular right lung and rotten Teeth (he had all his teeth removed in 1930).
A Georgian leading the Russian Bolsheviks; the son of a violent alcoholic whose Mother wanted him to be a priest; a short (5 feet 4 inches), disabled man with the self-chosen name of “Man Of Iron”; a man of average intelligence standing in the shadow of the theoretical giant, Vladimir Lenin. This Stalin has more internal contradictions and chips on his shoulder than a farmer carrying a sack of spuds.
AT THE ACADEMY
Nikita Khrushchev (34) Party leader of the Stalin Industrial Academy.
Khrushchev is an Intelligent, wittily cynical careerist. Although not without courage or stamina his main attribute is a smiling guile and an absolutely ruthless willingness to do whatever his masters require – or more accurately to do anything to further his own progress up the slippery Soviet pole.
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Kristina Vadimovna (22) Student
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Kristina is a student friend of Nadya’s from the Industrial Academy. She is Sasha Andreyev’s lover (see below). Today the two of them would be a sort of Golden Couple – intelligent, talented, good-looking and charismatic. However, it is Kristina who really wears the trousers in the partnership and she is more mature and knowing than her idealistically mercurial partner. That being said she is beautiful, charismatic, witty and creative and has an inner strength and courage that some find intimidating.
Elena Fyodorovich (21) Student
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​Elena is Kristina’s best friend at The Academy. She is much ‘straighter’ than her charismatic friend but her sharp intelligence and more trusting attitude make her an excellent foil to the sarcastic metro-style wit of Kristina and Sasha. Elena is as naïve in her trust in the benign motives of authority as Sasha is in his childlike ‘stick it to the man’ knee-jerk rebellion.
Sasha Andreyev (24) Student
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Sasha is a student friend of Nadya’s from the Industrial Academy. He is an intelligent, idealistic, charismatic, passionate, rebellious, courageous and perhaps reckless young man. He’s a lover of good food, good jokes, lots of vodka and his student girlfriend Kristina Vadimovna (see below). Like many young men he thinks he is immortal and thus his ‘courage’ is perhaps based on his youth and inexperience, rather than any inner strength.
THE KREMLIN GANG
Alexandra Bychkov – “Baba” (42)
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In the Spring of 1926 the 39 yr old Alexandra Bychkov (b.1886) was headhunted away from a bourgeois Moscow family by Stalin’s wife, Nadya Alliluyeva, and became the nanny to Stalin’s children. Everyone, including Stalin, called her “Baba”. Alexandra had been born a rural peasant in 1886 on the estate of Maria Behr in the Ryazan District of Russia. She became a household servant there at the age of 13 and worked for the family mainly in St Petersburg, as maid, housekeeper, cook and finally Nanny. By 1914 at the age of 28 she had married and born 2 sons. Her husband was called up to fight in the Russian army in WW1 and although he survived the war he never returned to his family, abandoning Alexandra to fend for herself and her two children.
In the famine during the Civil War she was forced to return to her village and her youngest son died in 1922. She was forced to find work in Moscow and became Nanny to the Samarin family and then Dr Malkin. After she joined Nadya in 1926 her elder son lived with her in the Kremlin.
At the time of the series she can read and write and is a lover of literature and poetry being a great fan of Gorky. She likes to laugh and dance and is very fond of the Communist Party charmer, Bukharin. She has intelligence, wit and integrity but above all she is a survivor, which in the world of Stalin’s Kremlin means she knows her place and how to keep her mouth shut. She is a pragmatist and a realist rather than an idealist and secretly has nothing but contempt for all her so-called masters – except perhaps Nadya Alliluyeva.
Abel Enukidze - "Uncle" (51)
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Nick named “Tonton”, Yenukidze, is an archetypal Old Bolshevik, a man of no-nonsense, working class bluntness who does not suffer fools gladly. But behind the bluster he is not unkind and is at heart an idealist; an idealist who knows ‘tough decisions’ have to be made but who has no doubt in the justness of the cause. He is Nadya’s Godfather.
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Molotov is the son of a shop clerk and the daughter of a rich merchant. He was a shy and quiet boy who did well at school. But despite his bourgeois upbringing he became a revolutionary social democrat in 1905 at which time he changed his name to Molotov (Large Hammer). He is a dull, bureaucrat, with no sense of humour whose main character asset is his undying loyalty to Stalin. But this is a man who was a revolutionary at 16, who edited Pravda in St Petersburg when it was an illegal newspaper and who before the 1917 revolution was exiled to Siberia and imprisoned on more than one occasion. Molotov is clearly more than a ‘Yes Man’ by nature but whatever his motives Molotov is the one man, perhaps the only man, Stalin can rely on absolutely to undertake any order, betray any friend, any relation (even his own wife) and sacrifice any principle.
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Wife of the Premiere and Nadya’s closest friend. Polina (Maiden name Zhemchuzhina) is Molotov’s wife and a successful Jewish, career woman serving in the Narkomat (Ministry) of Food under Anastas Mikoyan. She is far sharper and brighter than her husband and brings some 1920’s glamour to the couple and to the Kremlin social scene. She also doesn’t think much of men believing wholeheartedly that behind every successful man is an intelligent and powerful woman. She believes that clever women like Nadya and herself can use their ‘feminine wiles’ to manipulate ‘the men’ into doing the right thing. She is independent, intelligent, dignified, funny and brave but like Ordzhonikidze and Uncle "Abel" Enukidze, she simply can’t acknowledge to herself what her ‘glorious revolution’ is turning into and the horrors the Kremlin elite are inflicting on the Russian people.
Sergo Ordzhonikidze (41) Chancellor
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He is married to Zinaida Pavlutskaya and has one daughter, Eteri. Like Bukharin he is a popular romantic hero. He is a volatile, charismatic, fiery, Georgian, with loyalty, courage, integrity and a mind of his own. At the time of this series he still argues passionately with Stalin, believing, like Enukidze, that he is part of a collective government.
Zinaida Ordzhonikidze. (35) Wife of the Chancellor
Zinaida is a glamorous career woman in the same mould as Polina Molitov, although she is far less witty and intelligent. She is beautiful though and loves being part of the elite although she has that underlying insecurity so often found in attractive women who are never sure if their privilege is deserved or simply due to being born beautiful.
(1894-1960)
Kliment Vorisholov (47) Defence Minister
Vorishilov is known as a very vain man and amongst the Kremlin in-crowd is renowned as an idiot. He loves to dress in full uniform or in extravagant casual wear such as tennis whites, or hunting clothes. The Kremlin inner-circle mercilessly ridicule him at every opportunity and he seems to enjoy it – or more to the point he knows his place and what his role is in the inner-circle. (A sort of Russian Karl Pilkington.) He is from a humble working class background but is a good public speaker. He is married to Ekaterina. Their Apartment in the Kremlin is next to Stalin's.
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Ekaterina Vorisholov (47) Wife of Defence Minister
Ekaterina Davidovna, is from a Jewish Ukrainian family but converted to Orthodox Christianity in order to be allowed to marry Voroshilov. They have several adopted children, including the children of Revolutionary hero, Michael Funze. She is an extraordinarily plain, plump and matronly woman for such a ‘dandy’ as Klim Voroshilov. She is unable to have children so has adopted several - along with the personae of a perfect Russian mother. But like Klim she puts on personalities and attributes with costumes, it’s just she choses the costume of ‘the nurse’ or the ‘traditional peasant’. Ultimately playing a part just like her husband and just as shallow.
Nikolai Bukharin (40) General Secretary of Comintern
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Nikolai is the life and soul of any party, and literally ‘the darling of the party’, Bukharin is almost universally liked and admired amongst the Bolsheviks. He is a prominent theorist and a man of great integrity who publicly maintains his political stance in opposition to Stalin despite Stalin’s growing and malevolent power. He is however almost drunkenly volatile, likely at any moment to burst into laughter, tears or rage and a complete lack of guile is his greatest weakness - everyone knows what Bukharin is thinking/feeling and probably before he does. But he is also eloquent and insightful with a sharp sense of reality. It is Bukharin’s public opposition to Stalin during the period of this series (1929-32) that seals his fate in 1937-8.
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Yakov Jugashvili is Stalin’s son by his first marriage; a quiet, sensitive, intelligent and courageous young man, whom Stalin very obviously and inexplicably hates. Yakov is modest, simple and hard-working and has no real desire to be the “Son of Stalin” and all that entails.
