The World - News from March 29, 1988

Josef Stalin had the wives of two Kremlin leaders arrested and sent to prison camps while their husbands continued to be loyal servants of the dictator, Ogonyek magazine told Soviet readers. Although long known in the West, the disclosure in the magazine’s April issue represented another effort in Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign to fill in the “blank pages” of Soviet history, primarily the three decades of Stalin’s rule. Soviet President Mikhail I. Kalinin’s wife, Yekaterina, languished for a decade in a labor camp while Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov’s wife, Paulina, was held for nearly five years, the magazine reported.