Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Even though she had long ago abandoned that edifice, Svetlana was still the princess in the Kremlin and an object of intense scrutiny. In the early days of the Revolution, women, like men, were often freewheeling in their sexual behavior, but now Svetlana’s hungry, searching, self-directed sexuality made her vulnerable to gossip. Ironically, it was her father who had ushered in this bourgeois puritanism. People gossiped about her two marriages and her “numerous” sexual affairs.

  She actually did have a brief love affair with Yuri Tomsky, the son of Mikhail Tomsky, a trade union leader who, when faced with arrest by the NKVD in 1936, had committed suicide. Yuri was raised as an orphan in the Gulag. The gossip regarding them was cruel but showed the degree of contempt she’d inherited as Stalin’s daughter. The writer Boris Runin described the affair in his memoir:

  Suddenly, yesterday evening, Svetlana Alliluyeva rolled into Koktebel on her “Pobeda” with Yuri Tomsky. Long ago, young Tomsky was in the same Young Pioneers groups with Svetlana. Obviously—in the Kremlin. And now, after years of serving his time in the camps, he is, apparently, in a marital union with her. Shortly after they married, Svetlana put him in her car and brought him here, to the sea. However, The House of the Arts did not allow them to stay there without a vacation package. They spent the first day on a shore, still empty at that time. They spent it in their car—and what could they do—they had to carry out basic tasks. Svetlana tried to cook something, wash something. And the rumor started going around the House of the Arts which quickly gathered lots of curious onlookers on the shore: a Princess doing chores.17

  Runin was wrong. Svetlana was not married to Tomsky, and the delight taken in her humiliation was mean-spirited: the princess reduced to washing her linen in public while the audience leered.18

  Many believed that Svetlana changed after her father’s death. Her cousin Vladimir remarked, “It took [Svetlana] a while to understand that the majority of people who sought her out did so [not sincerely] but as a means to their own opportunistic ends. . . . All this fuss and commotion that revolved around her left a negative imprint on her character. Gradually, she understood that she would never experience sincere human feelings and began to search for entertainment and to treat people as if they were toys.”19 Her cousin Kyra concurred. “Svetlana was regarded as a means of achieving a certain goal . . . and she knew this. She was barred from the real feelings of people.”20

  However, there were other versions of Svetlana. Thinking about Svetlana’s marriages and love affairs, Stepan Mikoyan would write:

  I am sure she was genuinely in love, or believed herself to be in love, with each of them. Every time she got carried away with someone she would say that “this time it is real,” and then be disappointed a few months later. When it happened, she would come to our place nearly every day . . . and cry it all out on Ella’s shoulder.21

  In the late 1950s, Svetlana met the Jewish poet David Samoilov and fell deeply in love. Only six years older, he was handsome, with an open, remarkably candid face that often bore an ironic smile. He had already garnered a reputation as something of a sage and playboy and would become one of the best poets of the postwar generation, writing some poems about the war but also some expressing an almost mystical sense of nature that must have appealed to Svetlana.

  Their first encounter occurred when Stepan Mikoyan’s wife, Ella, gave a birthday party to which she invited Boris Gribanov, her coworker at Children’s Literature Press. Ella and Stepan lived in a five-room apartment in the House on the Embankment. Gribanov decided to invite his close friend David Samoilov, who was keen to see how the elite of the country lived.

  At dinner, Samoilov was surprised to find that his seating companion was Svetlana Alliluyeva. He found her exceedingly attractive, but couldn’t rid himself of the idea that he was actually speaking with Stalin’s daughter.

  With Anastas Mikoyan at the head of the table, according to Gribanov, Svetlana and Samoilov were soon engaged in a passionate flirtation:

  After only 15 minutes, without paying any attention to Mikoyan himself—for Svetlana it was more than natural; she was used to seeing her father’s comrades as her servants, and for Samoilov the poet, ranks didn’t mean anything at all—in short, after 15 minutes they were kissing passionately. My wife and I left, leaving my friend to his own devices.22

  The image of the couple kissing passionately in public is not in keeping with the rather demure image of Svetlana that most others paint, and Stepan Mikoyan did not recall such an erotic encounter,23 but whatever happened, Samoilov and Svetlana went home together. The next morning, Boris Gribanov received a phone call at his office. Samoilov was on the other end of the line, “giggling.”

  “Borya, we fucked him!”

  [Gribanov asked,] “And what do I have to do with it?” I was appalled.

  “No, no, don’t argue. I did it in both our names!”24

  But soon, what started as a “prank,” to use Gribanov’s word, turned into a love affair. Samoilov had not counted on being drawn in by Svetlana’s intelligence and obvious sincerity. And she must have found his mind thrilling: a lyric poet, a member of the left-wing avant-garde, and like her, more devoted to the muse than to politics.25

  Svetlana still aroused fear in others, however. Gribanov remembered the occasion when he, Samoilov, and Svetlana visited his friend Tak Melamid. It happened to be March 5, the anniversary of Stalin’s death. During the denunciations of Stalin that were inevitably part of the conversation, Svetlana remained quiet. As they were leaving for the elevator, Melamid’s wife asked Gribanov who was the “lovely woman” they had brought and almost had a heart attack on hearing the name Svetlana Alliluyeva.

  The next morning, she phoned Gribanov, saying hysterically that they should have been warned. She and her husband had spent a sleepless night trying to remember everything they had said. Gribanov tried to calm her, assuring her that Svetlana was a very cultured woman and was not moved by anything being said about her father, but the habit of fear was so ingrained that the Melamids would not be appeased.26

  The lovers would meet at Svetlana’s Moscow apartment or at her small dacha in Zhukovka. Boris Gribanov was an occasional witness. He usually joined them at a restaurant at the Moscow Race Course on days without races, or they lunched at the restaurant Severny (Northern) in the Maryina Roshcha district. On May 9, the two men liked to gather with their war-veteran buddies at a restaurant called Berlin to celebrate Victory Day. The celebrations would end with Samoilov saying, “Borya, I think it would be appropriate to conclude a day that began so beautifully at the Generalissimo’s daughter’s.”27

  Samoilov and Gribanov took to stopping by Svetlana’s apartment with a bottle of cognac for long quiet conversations. Gribanov noted that there wasn’t a single portrait of Stalin on the walls (by now she must have put the small silver-framed photo of her father away). There was only a huge photograph of her mother. Though both men were curious, neither of them wanted to exploit Svetlana as a source of information about her father, and he was not often discussed.

  There was one problem in Svetlana’s relationship with Samoilov, however—she wanted him to marry her. She would go to the publishing house where Boris Gribanov worked, pull him out of his office, and drive him into the country, always for the same conversation:

  “Borya,” she said. “He must marry me.”

  “Svetik [as he affectionately called her], . . . it will never happen.”

  “But why?” she asked indignantly.

  “Because he’s a poet, and you—a princess,” I answered unequivocally.28

  Gribanov would write in retrospect: “Svetlana was a very emotional, amorous person, ready to give in fully to each new love affair, ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of the man she loved. But at the same time she had an obsession: an obsession that that man, whom she loved, should marry her. This greatly complicated the relationship.”29

  Svetlana’s compulsive need to rush into marriage arose in each of he
r love affairs. It was as if, regardless of what experience had taught her, she believed marriage would provide a bulwark against otherwise inevitable loss. At core she was an emotional orphan with a tragic fragility that always threatened to sink her. How could it be otherwise? Things would crack when she pulled others into her emotional maelstrom.

  In his book Daily Notes, published years later, Samoilov wrote about Svetlana. He describes the ending of the relationship in an entry dated November 17, 1960:

  Today, Svetl. unexpectedly came over and . . . threw a glove at me. In the morning on the phone, yet again, I tried to avoid a conversation with her. It is as difficult to talk as it is to get over a sickness or to write an epic poem. She, as always, committed an act of a princess—she appeared in front of me and threw a glove, a volume of [the poet Konstantin] Sluchevsky, and an old cross of Saint George on the table—pitiful souvenirs of my infatuation.

  Only in retrospect can one appreciate the touching absurdity of her actions that were dictated by the intensity of her feelings, tempestuous temperament of her father, and loneliness. At that moment you experience a difficult feeling of pity, admiration, and indignation. She is a slave to her passions; inside a slave, a tyrant always dwells. . . .

  Never in my life have I been so directly shaken and captured by the tragedy of another person. And never had I had such an intense need to run from a person, from the circle of her unresolved and suffocating tragedy.30

  In 1967, when Samoilov learned the news of Svetlana’s defection, he wrote, somewhat chastened, in his diary, “She is more magnificent than I thought.” In chagrin, he added, “I understood and valued little in women who were close to me.”31

  The tragedy, according to Samoilov, was that “Svetlana was doomed to carry the cross of her origin for the rest of her life.” She could never completely renounce her father, even though she defiantly renounced his “spiritual legacy”—a paradox or duality that was impossible to live.

  Svetlana’s situation may have been even more complex than this. Surely it is one thing to be the dictator’s son but quite another to be the dictator’s daughter. The son is required to be like his father and often becomes a parody of his father, disastrously so as in Vasili’s case. But Stalin had a special attachment to Svetlana. He had given her his paternal love, such as it was—perfunctory, intermittent, crude, often cruel. It required abject submission. It was laced with contempt: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool!” Nevertheless, to her it often seemed tantalizingly real. The truth was that Svetlana did not know what love was. Some deep part of her probably believed she couldn’t be loved. She was still looking for a romanticized, idealized substitute for love. In this she was not unlike many women, though perhaps her case was extreme. She felt she needed a man to invent her or complete her. Her desperation came from the terror of being alone, but who among the men she was drawn to would bind themselves to Stalin’s daughter and take on that darkness?

  Chapter 13

  Post-Thaw

  In 1962, Svetlana converted to the Russian Orthodox faith and was baptized in Moscow’s Church of the Deposition of the Shroud. This was firmly against Communist doctrine.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Moscow was an exciting place. It was an international city—with music, film, and dance festivals, world congresses of literature, international delegations of artists, foreign student exchanges, and an exciting nightlife. Yet behind this facade of cosmopolitanism, everything was still under the control of the cultural commissars; the secret police remained active.

  Almost from the outset, Khrushchev’s Thaw invited political chaos. In March 1956, immediately after the Secret Speech, as Georgians gathered in Tbilisi to celebrate the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, student demonstrators rioted. Dozens (some say hundreds) were killed by Soviet troops. Ironically, the students were protesting Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization. Khrushchev had defamed Georgia’s favorite son. In October, Soviet tanks were rushed to Budapest to crush the uprising in Hungary, where students were demanding liberalization and an end to Soviet domination. The stability of the whole Soviet bloc was threatened. Soviet citizens waited anxiously to see what would happen.

  In Russia, a thaw means both an easing and a muddy mess. Khrushchev’s Thaw went back and forth. In its early days, no one knew just what to expect, but it was soon clear that repression was still Party policy, though now it was intermittent. Khrushchev followed zigzag policies, retreating when necessary to save his own authority.

  The fate of writers was a kind of barometer. In October 1958, when Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize, he sent a telegram to the Nobel committee: INFINITELY GRATEFUL, TOUCHED, PROUD, SURPRISED, OVERWHELMED. Four days later, the Politburo, which had banned his novel Doctor Zhivago as antisocialist and forbade its publication in the USSR, forced Pasternak to send a second telegram renouncing the prize.1 In February 1961, the KGB seized and destroyed the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. Yet in November 1962, despite objections from top Party members, Khrushchev allowed the publication in Novy Mir of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing account of life in the Gulag. No one could predict which was coming: a thaw or a freeze.

  The spring and summer of 1961 were particularly hard for Svetlana. She was thirty-five. It is not a comfortable age. If one is still alone, one believes one will stay alone. Her children, now sixteen and eleven, were at school. Katya had her compulsory Pioneer meetings, and Joseph had joined the Komsomol. Svetlana recalled, “I was melancholy, irritable, inclined towards hopeless pessimism; more than once I had contemplated suicide; I was afraid of dark rooms, of the dead, of thunderstorms; of uncouth men, of hooligans in the streets and drunks. My own life appeared to me very dark, dull, and without a future.”2 Beneath Svetlana’s carefully controlled exterior, there existed sorrows and suspicions, rages and frustrations, psychic wounds that she did not know how to face, let alone heal.

  Gradually she had drawn close to Andrei Sinyavsky, her friend at the Gorky Institute, where she worked, and turned to him for consolation. Clearly he found her compelling. They were sitting on a small bench near the Kropotkin Gate when Svetlana mentioned the subject of suicide. Sinyavsky replied, “A suicide only thinks that he is killing himself. He is killing only his body, and the soul after that languishes, for God alone can take the soul.”3 Svetlana may have remembered Grandmother Olga’s words: “You will know your soul when it aches.”

  This is an intimate conversation that suggests there were other conversations. It was a serious mistake to awaken Svetlana’s expectations. A love affair began. According to her fellow researcher, Alexander Ushakov, gossip soon circulated in the Gorky Institute that one day Svetlana showed up at a dinner party at the apartment of the writer Andrei Menshutin, carrying her suitcase and demanding that Sinyavsky leave with her.4 Sinyavsky’s wife, Maria Rozanova, later confirmed the incident in an interview:

  Once Sinyavsky and I were having dinner at his colleague’s place . . . Andrei Menshutin, who, like us, also lived in a communal apartment not far from us. Suddenly the doorbell rings three times—Svetlana Alliluyeva.

  The Menshutins had a very small room. I, together with Lida, started to scurry to get her another chair, but Svetlana declared, “I will not sit down. Andrei, I came for you. Now you will leave with me?” I asked, “Svetlana, what about me?” Alliluyeva told me, “Masha, you took Andrei away from his wife, and now I’m taking him away from you.”5

  It was as if Svetlana were still the little “hostess” in the Kremlin, commanding love and expecting her command to be obeyed. Rozanova described how her husband’s “jaw almost fell off”; she said to him coyly, “Andrei, don’t you think that while studying the history of the USSR, you’ve gone too far?” “Of course, I asked him about it, very matter-of-factly. Yes, he fucked her once. So what?”

  Rozanova found it easy to blame Svetlana. She was “a hysterical woman
—to have such a father.” Sinyavsky was just being a man. She recalled his famous joke. He used to say, “If I’m sitting in a train car with a woman, I have to make her an offer, as a polite human being.” Rozanova added that in a relationship, sexual fidelity “is not important. [This] is not what connects people. Without me he would not be able to work, nor live. To live—it is not the same as making soup.” But she would never forgive Svetlana.

  Svetlana didn’t seem to understand the sexual double standard that flourished everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the “sexually deranged” one, while the artist Sinyavsky was forgiven his sexual dalliance, necessary for his work, which had so raised her hopes. The women became rivals and enemies, while the husband stood blithely by. And Svetlana was far from unusual in believing that her only route to a creative life was adjacent to a man. She retreated once again, but it must have been embarrassing to face down the gossip at the Gorky Institute. Later she would write admiringly of both Sinyavsky and his wife in her second memoir Only One Year, never alluding to this humiliation, and would assume she could pick up her friendship with them both.

  However, Sinyavsky did have a lasting impact. As a committed Christian, he probably influenced her decision to convert to the Russian Orthodox faith. In the spring of 1962, she was baptized in a small Byzantine church named Deposition of the Shroud, beside the Donskoy Cathedral, the same church in which Sinyavsky had been baptized a few months earlier.

  A second influence was, ironically, her father. Stalin had introduced her to Christianity when she was an adolescent. She’d been rooting around in his library and had come across a book called The Life of Christ. She was appalled and, indoctrinated as a good atheist, expressed her shock to her father: “You know it’s a lie, it’s mythology.” And Stalin responded, “No, he was a real man. He actually lived.” That afternoon, calling on his training in the Tbilisi seminary, he recounted for her the life of Christ—her father, of all people! The memory of sitting on Stalin’s lap as he recounted the life of Christ hugely amused her.6