overturned, and the money paid back to her. Her lawyer said that it was important that the Franco name be free of this taint.
In 1988, her mother died. Ten years later, her husband, Dr. Martínez-Bordiú, died. His medical career had come to an unhappy end: In 1984, he was forced to resign his hospital position after a patient died in controversial circumstances. In addition to being a heart surgeon, Martínez-Bordiú was a plastic surgeon—and this leads me to an aside (and a somewhat rude one at that): Much plastic surgery has been conducted on Doña Carmen. This is not a matter of a nip here and a tuck there—her appearance has been dramatically altered, as can be seen in photos, taken down the years.
She and her family have suffered various indignities (as well as tragedies). In August 2008, one of Carmen’s granddaughters was getting married at the Pazo de Meirás, the family’s summer estate in Galicia. Protesters massed outside the home, demanding that the house be opened to the public. They yelled “Fascists!” at arriving guests. Later in the year, the family was indeed made to open the home to the public, four days a month. In due course, Doña Carmen won the right to spend August in the house, free of any public visits.
Also in 2008, the town council in Ferrol, Franco’s birthplace, acted against the family. It took back the honorary titles the town had bestowed on Francos over the years. For example, Franco would no longer be called a “favorite son”; and Carmen would no longer be a “daughter of Ferrol.” One official said that maintaining those titles would be “glorifying an oppressive regime.”
At about this time, an interesting and unusual book was published: Franco, mi padre, described as “the testimony of Carmen Franco, daughter of the Caudillo.” The book is the fruit of a series of interviews given by Carmen to the biographers and historians Payne and Palacios. The cover has a photo, which shows Carmen as a girl, with her father. He is in uniform and has his arm around her. He’s wearing a slight smile—uncommon for him, in photos. Carmen herself is beaming. The book made news around the world, particularly Carmen’s statement that her father feared Hitler would kidnap him, to force Spain into the world war.
Guido Mussolini, recall, wanted to have his grandfather dug up, so that an investigation could be performed. Some have wanted Franco dug up, for a different reason: They want his body removed from its place of honor in the Valley of the Fallen, a civil-war memorial. Doña Carmen has opposed this, strongly. She is ever on guard against insults to her father. In 2013, an artist made a punching bag out of Franco’s face. The work was called, simply, “Punching Franco.” The National Francisco Franco Foundation sued, alleging that the work was “grotesque and offensive.” Carmen’s deputy told the press, “It is low and vulgar, and unworthy of civilization, and of a supposed sculptor.”
To say it once more, there are three main Carmens in the Franco world: the dictator’s wife, his daughter, and a daughter of hers, her eldest. In 1972, this third Carmen—Franco’s grandchild—had her own wedding in El Pardo. The groom was even higher up on the social scale than the marquis in 1950: He was Alfonso de Borbón, a first cousin of the soon-to-be king, Juan Carlos. Alfonso was serving as Spain’s ambassador to Sweden. He was also a hard-living, fast-living type—a ski champion, for example. Once he was enmeshed in the Francos, he schemed to be moved up in the royal line of succession. His mother-in-law even entertained the idea that her daughter could be on the throne, queen. But it was not to be. Franco, who had control of such matters, put the kibosh on the whole thing.
Alfonso and Carmen had two boys, Francisco and Luis. In 1982, ten years after their wedding, the couple were divorced. It was Alfonso who got custody of the boys. (Carmen once admitted, “I have not been an exemplary mother.”) In 1984, Alfonso had a car accident, in which Francisco was killed. Luis was in the car too, but, like his father, survived. The father was killed five years later in a skiing accident. A friend of his commented, “He liked to ski fast and drive fast.”
Today, Luis de Borbón, or Louis de Bourbon, as he is more often styled, is pretender to the French throne. Imagine that: Franco’s great-grandchild, a man who would be king—the king of France. Obviously, fascist royalty and royal royalty sometimes mix.
Luis’s mother, Carmen (the third Carmen, remember), has had two marriages since her first. Sadly, she is a tabloid figure, the object of mockery. She has some of the flamboyance and outrageousness of Alessandra Mussolini—but not the taste for politics, apparently. Speaking of fodder for the tabloids, one of Carmen’s brothers, Jaime, was convicted of abusing his girlfriend in 2009. The woman declared that Jaime was a “good person” except under the influence of cocaine.
So, Doña Carmen, the dictator’s daughter, has had problems to deal with, as most people do. And, according to Stanley Payne, she is a remarkably normal person: a woman without many airs, a woman “uncorrupted” by her peculiar circumstances. As I write, she is a year away from her 90th birthday.
Two of the Mussolini sons—Vittorio and Bruno—flew for her father in the civil war. Their younger brother, Romano, did not. For one thing, he was a child during that war; for another, he played the piano. But he met Franco in 1963, as he recounts in a book. The dictator “had never forgotten his rise to power in 1939 thanks to my father’s and Hitler’s support.” Romano found him in a pessimistic mood. Franco said, according to this account, “The Communists will win because there are millions and millions of poor in the world, and the poor will always be Communists.”
Before we get to Stalin, we should have a word about Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state. He had no children. But he did have a wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. She was his comrade in Communism and life alike. Krupskaya had a medical condition that apparently prevented her from having children. Lenin had a mistress as well: Inessa Armand. She had several children, both by her husband and by his brother. For a while, Lenin, Krupskaya, and Inessa lived at close quarters in a kind of ménage. It is said that Lenin liked children, taking a paternal interest in Inessa’s. There must have been limits to his liking, however: He sent children to concentration camps.
This is what Richard Pipes, the historian, pointed out when I raised with him the subject of Lenin and children. He cited an interesting source on the matter: Alexander Yakovlev, the Gorbachev-era Communist (about whom Pipes was completing a book).
Lenin’s successor, Stalin, was second to none in sending children to concentration camps. He had three of his own, from his two wives. He sired at least two other children as well. This was during his years of internal exile in the 1910s. One of his landladies, Maria Kuzakova, gave birth to a son in 1911. His name was Konstantin. A Stalin biographer, Robert Service, writes, “There was little doubt on the question of paternity. Those who saw Konstantin as an adult recorded how like Stalin he was in appearance and even in physical movement.” Stalin never had anything to do with him, but there are a few curious details.
Konstantin Kuzakov was admitted to Leningrad University. Stalin must have had a hand in this, according to another biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore. In 1932, the NKVD (a forerunner to the KGB) made Kuzakov sign a statement swearing that he would never discuss his “origin.” He worked in the Central Committee apparat under Andrei Zhdanov, a trusted deputy of Stalin’s. Zhdanov was also the father of the man who would become Stalin’s daughter’s second husband. (We will hear more about this later, of course.) Kuzakov went on to be a television official in the Ministry of Culture. He died in 1996, five years after the death of the Soviet Union.
He and his biological father never properly met, but there was an interesting encounter. Montefiore quotes Kuzakov himself: “Once, Stalin stopped and looked at me, and I felt he wanted to tell me something. I wanted to rush to him, but something stopped me. He waved his pipe and moved on.”
In 1914, Stalin met an adolescent girl named Lidia Pereprygina. She was 13, and he was 35. He got her pregnant. The baby died not long after being delivered. Stalin got Lidia pregnant