Stalin's executioner was a doting lover. He wanted me as First Lady.

Julius Strauss in Moscow talks to the femme fatale who melted the heart of Beria, the bloodthirsty secret police chief

22 July 2004

SHE WAS a young woman from the Russian countryside with a fine singing voice and exceptional looks. He was Stalin's portly and malevolent executioner responsible for the deaths of millions of innocents.

More than 50 years ago they began a perverse and, for her part, unwanted relationship that turned the serial rapist and murderer into a doting and tender lover.

Such was his passion for her that he even groomed her as the future Soviet First Lady to stand alongside him once Stalin died, a glamorous beauty to rival the likes of Jackie Kennedy.

Nina Alekseyeva's tragic trajectory to fame was only cut short when Lavrenty Beria, who oversaw Stalin's infamous gulags, was outsmarted by Nikita Khrushchev, summarily tried and shot.

Today Nina Alekseyeva lives in a drab flat on the edge of Moscow. Now 87, she is still gently flirtatious and applies her lipstick and rouge with great care.

Surrounded by plastic flowers, a large doll and old poetry manuscripts and wearing a red silk scarf, she agreed to give a rare interview about her time as the femme fatale of 1950s Moscow and her role as the last and most treasured lover of one of Soviet history's most reviled men.

"I had so many men that courted me," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "I broke so many hearts. Don't look at me today, look at the photographs of me - how beautiful I was.

"Beria was really in love with me. He treated me like his wife. He wanted to introduce me to Stalin who was getting very old by then. He wanted me to be his First Lady."

Like many contemporary Russians, Nina Alekseyeva's life moved at the whim of the shifting political tides.

She was forced to take part in Young Communist raids on kulaks - peasants who had more than what was considered their fair share of wealth - an experience that left her disgusted with the system.

In 1932 the family moved to a small, damp, windowless room in Moscow in a communal flat. She lived with her husband, two children, nanny, parents and brother for a short while, before divorcing.

She enrolled at the Moscow conservatory. When Beria ordered the NKVD, the brutal Soviet security apparatus, to set up a choir she was put forward by her music teacher.

During the war, Nina Alekseyeva toured the front with the choir, later returning to Moscow, where she fell in love with a naval officer who proposed marriage.

Then one day as she was working at the Radio Committee opposite Beria's sprawling house in central Moscow, he saw her from the window.

She said: "At first he did nothing. Then one day he sent his henchman around. It was the man who used to pick up women for him. Of course I knew about the women he had killed, everyone did."

During his tenure as NKVD chief, as well as his many other crimes, Beria was reported to have raped and killed dozens of young women, whose bodies were buried under the building and in the grounds around.

Some accounts had Beria and his guards gang-raping girls barely in to their teens.

Nina Alekseyeva said: "When the limousine arrived, I was terrified. That very first day he went to bed with me. When we were there I could hear the guards coughing next door and I thought, `Oh no! When we're finished they're all going to have me.' Beria and I stood in front of the mirror looking at each other and I thought, `This is it - my life is over."

"But then he was so tender and told me about himself. He asked what films I liked. He asked about my life. He wasn't scary, actually he was very affectionate. He tried to seduce me, giving me gifts. He gave me a huge heart-shaped box of French perfume. He fed me stuffed partridge."

"But I never liked it. I always wanted it to be over as soon as possible and I was always a bit scared. One day I was looking for my hairpin in the bathroom and as I bent down I thought about all the bones hidden behind the walls."

For more than a year Beria sent for her regularly, sometimes several times a week, even as her husband waited at home. She said: "It was always in the daytime. At night he worked. They all worked at night because that was when Stalin worked.

"But I know I made him happy. He always smiled. He used to take me by both hands and say, `I'm so happy you've come.' I can't say I enjoyed it though. If it wasn't Beria, I would have been very nasty."

In 1953 Stalin died. Beria was arrested soon after. "I felt sorry in a way," she said. "He really loved me and I couldn't reciprocate that. I can't say I wasn't flattered that such an important man had been interested in me."

Igor Minutka, who has ghost-written a book Nina Alekseyeva has written about her time with Beria, said: "She was a real 1940s Hollywood-style beauty. And if things had worked out a little differently, she would have been Beria's wife - and the First Lady of the Soviet Union."