The 1932 suicide of Stalin's wife has been made public for what is believed to be the first time in the Soviet Union.

In an interview in the newspaper Moskovski Komsomolyets, a playwright, Mikhail Shatrov, implied that Stalin drove his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, to kill herself.

She committed suicide as famine swept the Soviet Union during Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture.

''His relations toward women? I know little about this question,'' Mr. Shatrov said in the interview. ''We know about the suicide of his wife. In any case, Stalin was always crude.''