Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 2, Number 25, DeMotte, Jasper County, 12 January 1933 — Stalin's Wife Gave Life to Save Mate [ARTICLE]

Stalin's Wife Gave Life to Save Mate

Officials Believe Poison Was Intended for Dictator.

London. —Throughout the length and breadth of Russia agents of the dreaded G. P. U., the Soviet secret service, have their ears to the ground in the hopes of getting some clew to the persons who are believed to have fatally poisoned the wife of Joseph Stalin while seeking the life of the dictator himself. This is the report which has' trickled out of Russia past the ritid censorship which Moscow exercises over all news. It bears out previous reports that Mme. Stalin —although she never abandoned her maiden name — had succumbed to a deadly drug in

pursuance of her habit of tasting food intended for her husband some hours before it was served to him. Explains Puzzle. If true, it explains the puzzle of why “Comrade Nadeja Sergeivna Alliluieva,” as she was officially known, was given the most impressive funeral, marked by pomp and ceremony, accorded any individual under the Soviet regime although in life she was retiring, self-effacing and insignificant in< the,general Soviet scheme. ' Comment outside of Russia was aroused when the official announcement of Mme. Stalin’s death failed to mention the cause. It was a terse statement, signed by the seven officials highest in the Soviet government and their wives. It referred to her by her maiden name and only as the “friend and devoted aid of our Comrade Stalin” and as “our comrade and friend and the finest person.” It served to recall that when Stalin suddenly leaped into the dictatorship after a ruthless and stormy career of violence under his predecessors it was said that his wife had made herself 4iis “official taster” to test all his food as part of the precautions to protect him against the constant plotting of his enemies. Her close friends relize that

taking such a duty upon herself would have been in keeping with the romance which began when she was merely a school girl, daughter of a locksmith in Georgia, and Stalin, part Georgian, part Mongolian, fell in love with her, parted from his first wife and waited until the girl reached adolescence to marry her at seventeen. Rarely Seen in Public. Public appearances of Mme. Stalin were very rare despite the high position of her husband. They and their two children, a boy of eleven and a girl of six, and a twenty-three-year-old son of Stalin’s first marriage lived in Spartan seclusion. So little known, in ’fact, was Mme. Stalin that for a year she attended an industrial academy to take a course in artificial silk making without her identity becoming public until she was posted for “cutting” classes, a demerit which she made up in time to graduate last June.

That some weighty reason lay behind the pomp of Mme. Stalin's funeral is indicated by the fact that Stalin permitted it, for the dictator is a man of simple tastes, of almost Puritanical ideas where his home and family are concerned and inclined to frown upon any display of rank. Yet he permitted his wife's body to lie in state - in a red coffin, amid white chrysanthemums—Russia's mourning Hower —and threw open the doors that 100,000 persons might file past the bier in silent tribute to her. He could have forbidden, but did not, the miles lohgfuneral procession in which infantry and cavalry marched past a million civilians banked along the route, but he and his fellow officials followed the red hearse on foot. It was a marvelous display, but why should the Soviet’ bestow it upon a woman whose only claim to fame was that she was Stalin’s wife? Was there some secret, known only to a few, why it should wish to bury her In splendor among those of royal blood? Did Mme. Stalin die a martyr to her devotion to her world-famous husband? Did she sacrifice her life that the dictator might live?