According to her, the soul of Nadezhda Alliluyeva is condemned to Earth for eternity since she committed suicide, and that care should be taken while reading about her or thinking about her, or she'll visit you in your dreams with her face covered in blood.
What fascinated me was that it sounded like a stereotypical old legend about wronged queens in Western Europe (Bloody Mary, for instance), but with the queen replaced with a modern, Bolshevik revolutionary and the wife of Stalin, who himself have repeatedly been compared to the old Czars (he also liked to compare himself to the Iranian Shahs).
If this really is a widespread myth, are there other weird hybrids between folklore and the collective memory of Soviet statesmen and -women?
While I can't speak on this specific legend, the short answer to your question is: yes, several pieces of folklore were re-worked under the the genre of socialist realism. See: Politicizing Magic-An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales by Marina Balina, Helena Goscilo, and Mark Lipovetsk.
A couple specific examples mentioned in Politicizing Magic:
All of which you should be able to find with a quick search. Moreover, many Soviet tales took familiar plot lines (e.g. the heroes quest) and motifs (e.g. repetition of the number 3) from folklore and put a Soviet spin on them, such as replacing the gain of personal wealth with the advancement of society as a whole. So while they weren't direct retelling the similarities are fairly easy to see when compared. I don't want to speak too much on this since I've only had one class on it a few years ago, and hopefully someone who's more informed can chime in.
I can't speak specifically of this case, nor can I address the specific question of folklore and collective memory of Soviet statesmen and women. It's a great question and topic, and I suspect a great deal could be made of it.
What I can do is provide some context, drawing on a couple of excerpts from my Introduction to Folklore. First, a general comment about suicides - a situation that many believed, following Europe tradition, required a special type of penance. Here is a paragraph from my Introduction:
"European folklore includes the idea that the time of death was pre-determined. There was a general feeling that a certain number of tasks or obligations must be completed before a person could die. Those who had committed suicide were forced to walk the earth as ghosts until the appointed time of their natural death. In addition, the place of burial was predestined. North American culture preserves the older European tradition of interpreting a sudden shiver as evidence that someone has just walked over one’s final resting place – a location that is as predetermined as the time of death."
And then there is a question about souls condemned to walk the earth because of some extraordinary sin. The sins Nadezhda Alliluyeva exceeded suicide because of her association with widespread murders in Stalin's period, so it should not be surprising to find folk belief that places her in the larger tradition of souls condemned to linger in a perpetual state of earthly penance.
What I don't know is if this is a single person's imagining, placing Nadezhda Alliluyeva in a larger context of folk belief - that she concluded that Stalin's wife SHOULD be wandering the world and therefore she does. Or whether this is part of a larger specific tradition that has transformed the tortured life and death of this historical figure into a folk motif of legend. We need to hear from someone who can specifically address that question.
Of the possible condemned souls, this instance you raise fits into #4 and #5 below. The story you cite FEELS like a real tradition, perhaps because it fits neatly into a context of folk belief. But whether it is a real traditional folk legend, as I have indicated, remains to be seen.
Here is a second excerpt:
Europeans were fascinated by the idea of condemned souls, either of individuals or groups of people, who could not find rest. These unfortunates were forced to exist in a nether world, appearing occasionally before the living as evidence of their hideous or peculiar plight. Such motifs have been favorites with artists and writers. It is possible to identify six types of these beings.
The “Wild Hunt” is probably the oldest, occurring in ancient Greek sources and Scandinavian mythology. A cluster of stories refers to ghostly riders who race across the landscape or the night sky, questing for some phantom quarry that they can never catch. Legends tell of people seeing this eerie phenomenon. There are occasional references to the leader as being the god of death.
The “Sleeping Army” is a motif that appears in a variety of stories telling of a group of warriors killed in combat, who haunt the battlefield or wait inside a mound for some future conflict. People often believe such an army serves as a matter of last resort, a supernatural force that will rise up if their country is threatened with destruction. King Arthur’s knights are often regarded as sleeping in this way, waiting for the return of their king, healed from his wounds after recuperating in the western island of Avalon.
The “Flying Dutchman” is one of the better known and often used motifs of the condemned souls. This motif describes a phantom ship of ghostly sailors who travel the seas but never find harbor or rest. Their only respite comes every one hundred years, when they are allowed to anchor at a legendary port. Their ship is seen in bad weather. The story seems to be of medieval origin.
The “Wandering Jew” is also a motif belonging to this class. Like the Flying Dutchman, the Wandering Jew appears to be of medieval origin. The legend tells of Ahasverus, a shoemaker of Jerusalem who refused to allow Jesus to sit while carrying his cross to Calvary. His fate is to wander the world, longing for rest.
The Will-’o-the-Wisp is described in Chapter 4. The character was not good enough for heaven and made himself feared by the devil, and so he was exiled from hell. He carries a burning ember, a relic from the time when he briefly entered the abode of Satan, and with this phantom light, he lures nighttime travelers away from their destination. This character is common in Britain.
There are also various legends of medieval origin about cities that sank underground or into the sea because of some collective sin committed by the inhabitants. These towns return to earth every hundred years for a few hours, only to sink back to their eternal existence in perpetual limbo.
New here. Is this a valid question for this subreddit? Not about any historical facts, more just a speculation of current superstitious beliefs?