Lidiya Pereprygina

Legacy

Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's only daughter, was told that her father had a son with a Siberian peasant girl, writing in her book Only One Year (1969): "My aunts told me that during one of his periods of exile in Siberia he [Stalin] lived together with a local peasant woman and that their son now lives there somewhere, poorly educated and preferring anonymity." Yuri said of his grandmother, Lidiya: "My father's mother, Lidiya, told him about this many years after her affair with Stalin. I only saw my grandmother when I was little. She was thin and dark-skinned. She had dark hair and dark eyes, and was of medium height. They both kept it a secret."

In his 2018 biography of Stalin, Stalin: The Lord of Terror , German historian expressed scepticism about the authenticity of the relationship. connected the allegations of Stalin's relationship with Pereprygina with the fact that Stalin was reported to enjoy his exile, stating "while a costly war raged in Europe, Stalin apparently enjoyed hunting, fishing, and roaming the taiga as much as the close and sometimes rough community with the ordinary local population, who were decidely not composed of political dissidents or intellectuals". Creuzberger found it "therefore hardly surprising that rumors circulated during this period about an affair with a minor".

Russian historian Vladimir Dolmatov, discussing the Serov memorandum, argued that "apart from these documents, there are no credible others attesting that Koba cohabited with Lydia Pereprygina. Neither oral nor written." Dolmatov contests Serov's claims:If Serov is to be believed, their first child was born in 1913, but Dzhugashvili was sent to Kureika in 1914. Another matter is that criminal convicts in exile had lived there before him; might this be the result of their escapades? […] Molotov stated in conversations with Chuev that Khrushchev and Mikoyan had, at one point, gone so far as to want to fabricate documents discrediting Stalin. […] Perhaps the purpose of Serov’s memorandum was precisely to use the revelation of one fact – concerning the security services – to convince the reader of the veracity of another – regarding Stalin’s illegitimate children? That would explain why the memorandum bears no signature from the ‘client’ – Khrushchev. However, according to historian Robert C. Tucker, Stalin had left Kureika in October 1916.