Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana ends her book thus:

  We are all responsible for everything that happened. Let the judging be done by those who come later, by men and women who didn’t know the times and the people we knew. Let it be left to new people to whom these years in Russia will be as remote and inexplicable, as terrible and strange as the reign of Ivan the Terrible. But I do not think they’ll call our era a “progressive” one, or that they’ll say it was all for the “good of Russia.” . . . They’ll read through this page in their country’s history with a feeling of pain, contrition and bewilderment, and they’ll be led by this feeling to live their lives differently.27

  The book is personal, saturated with a kind of wistful lyricism, and ambiguous in its judgments of those involved. Svetlana is at once nostalgic, romantic in her idealizations of certain people, especially her mother, and sometimes biased in her testimony, yet remarkable in her clarity of memory. This is not the book one might expect from a daughter of Stalin. It revealed no state secrets. It had no political points to make, beyond the condemnation of Stalin’s regime and the repudiation of a system in which the goals of the so-called collective good, exacted through ideological conformity, made the individual meaningless. In some ways, the book is a love letter to enduring Russia, with its ancient heritage and astonishingly varied geography. Svetlana assured her friend that no one who loved Russia ever left, but it would be only four years before she did exactly that.28

  Chapter 14

  The Gentle Brahman

  An undated photo of Svetlana and Brajesh Singh, a rajah’s son and a former Communist official whom she met in 1963 in Kuntsevo Hospital.

  (Public domain)

  In October 1963, Svetlana entered Kuntsevo Hospital for a tonsillectomy. Hospitals had changed slightly under the Khrushchev Thaw. There were still government sanatoriums for members of the Party elite and their relatives and for famous actors and athletes in high-society Moscow, but now more foreigners were admitted. Each year Communist Party organizations abroad received invitations from Moscow to send patients for care. Their presence was not surprising, perhaps, but now they were often placed in the same wards as Soviet patients and even allowed to mingle without interpreters or watchers. But Soviet patients were still discouraged from too close intimacy with the foreigners.

  Svetlana noticed a small, stooped, gray-haired man roaming the halls. He was Indian and that interested her. She was reading a biography of Gandhi and wanted to ask this stranger about the Mahatma, but she was too shy to initiate a conversation with a foreigner. However, when they bumped into each other in the hospital corridor, they sat on a couch and talked avidly for an hour. They spoke in English. He asked what organization she belonged to, and when she said, “None,” he seemed pleased. Brajesh Singh was no longer the fervent Communist idealist he had been in his youth.

  He was the son of the rajah of Kalakankar in Uttar Pradesh. He had studied English under tutors at a college in Lucknow and then spent much of his life abroad. In London in 1932, he had become a Communist. This seemed to him the best way to fight for Indian independence. According to friends, he was a kind of Puck, with a mischievous sense of humor that he brought to “the game of politics.”1

  Svetlana was relieved that Singh had no idea who she was. When he began asking about life in the USSR after Stalin, she replied that, though there had been superficial reforms, fundamental aspects of Soviet society remained unchanged.

  When she finally decided to tell Singh she was Stalin’s daughter, his only response was a British-inflected “Oh!” She claimed he never once questioned her about her father.2

  Over the days of their hospital stay, they wandered the halls in their bathrobes or ate together in the hospital dining room, much to the consternation of their Soviet fellow patients, who didn’t approve of Singh and resented Khrushchev’s incursions on their privileges with his “liberal” reforms. English-speaking patients were encouraged to eavesdrop on Svetlana and Singh’s conversations, but the two went silent when anyone approached.3 For the Soviets, Singh was too ebullient. As they passed the dour officials in the hallway, laughing, Svetlana feared for him.

  Svetlana discovered that Singh was chronically ill. He suffered from bronchitis and emphysema, and his lungs were collapsing. Soon both were sent to recuperate at a sanatorium called the House of Rest in Sochi on the Black Sea. They spent their time walking on the boardwalk under the disapproving eyes of their fellow patients. More than one resident pulled her aside to say, “Your father was a great man. You wait, the time will come when he will be remembered!”4 Then they would tell her to stick to her own kind. Some even expressed shock that she had dropped her father’s name, though afterward they might ask to be photographed with her. Svetlana was certain the patients and staff were sending reports to Moscow about her bad behavior.

  At the age of fifty-three (Svetlana was thirty-seven), Singh was lonely. In Vienna during the war, he had met a Jewish girl and, to help her escape the Nazis, they had married and fled to India, where they lived for sixteen years. She then moved to England with their young son. Singh joined her, but after his failure to find work in England, they divorced, and he returned to India alone.

  He and Svetlana became deeply attached. Although (or perhaps because) he was sixteen years older, she sensed that she had found a lover, a guide, and a friend. His world was far richer spiritually than hers; he seemed to have an inner peace and equilibrium. It was her capacity to think for herself that moved him. He called her Sveta, or Light; it was one of the few Russian words he knew. By the terms of his visa, after his discharge from the hospital, Singh was scheduled to return to India, but now he and Svetlana made new plans. He would return to Moscow and find work as a translator of Russian texts into Hindi. Impulsive as always, Svetlana invited Singh to live with her.

  The Indian ambassador to Moscow, Triloki Nath Kaul, had been a friend of Singh’s since his youth. It wouldn’t be hard to get a Soviet work visa. It appalled Singh that Svetlana had spent her whole life within the confines of the USSR. He would come back, and they would travel to India; he would show her Europe. It was a lovely fantasy, and this was the time of new hope, the time of the Thaw.

  Singh left for India in December. Svetlana waited, but something was wrong. A visa for Singh should have come easily. He had recommendations from Kaul and from the secretary general of the Indian Communist Party, Shripad Amrit Dange. Though Svetlana and Singh wrote to each other constantly, they soon found that their letters did not arrive.

  Svetlana suspected that reports had reached Moscow that she had consorted with a foreigner at the House of Rest in Sochi, but in fact she was mistaken. Through Ambassador Kaul, Singh discovered that a young Indian named Chandra Shekhar, secretary of a group of Indian Communists in Moscow, was reporting that Singh was unreliable. Shekhar worked in radio and supplied the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and its Foreign Division with information about India. When he visited Svetlana and Singh before Singh’s departure for India, he had laughingly said that Singh was not a Communist but a rajah.5 It was still normal for issues of ideological purity to derail a person’s career, and the best way to advance in the system was to betray another.

  Svetlana went to see Deputy Chairman Mikoyan. Mikoyan told her he had spoken with Khrushchev, who had been sympathetic. Mikoyan said that everything would be fine and she should bring Singh for a visit. He would be happy to meet him.

  The delays were excruciating for Svetlana, but in March 1965, sixteen months after his departure, Singh finally got his visa to return to Moscow. Svetlana and her son, Joseph, went to meet him at Sheremetyevo Airport on April 7. The man who stepped off the plane was ill and had aged visibly. Svetlana did not hesitate. Though Singh had been assigned a state apartment, she insisted he come home with them. Joseph and Katya welcomed him. Joseph would later say:

  Singh was a nice sort of person, cultured, kind. . . . It was very enjoyable to be with him. . . . He was calm and patient and also knew how to
look upon things with a certain sense of humour. . . . He came to live with us, and to Katya and I he was our mother’s husband, and we treated him with respect. I think she was happy.6

  Svetlana was, indeed and at last, very happy. An Indian friend of Singh’s, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, a member of the Indian parliament and head of the Socialist Party, recalled his visit with Singh. Although Singh was suffering from a painfully swollen leg and his asthma was very bad, the two men went to Lohia’s hotel. They had been friends for thirty-seven years. Lohia asked Singh about Svetlana.

  He spoke of her with great affection and respect, and I, for one, could understand that she could care deeply for him. Brajesh had a quiet charm and poise, a willingness to listen to one, which grew out of his innate sympathy. He had humor, too, and a certain something I can’t quite define in his eyes, which women would undoubtedly find attractive. . . .

  Suddenly, it seemed, it was midnight. I wanted to go to Red Square and look around, but Brajesh said that Svetlana would be very worried by now. We took a taxi to his home. As we turned into his street, we saw Svetlana standing in the road, obviously looking for Brajesh and deeply worried. She was standing nearest my side of the taxi, and I leaped out. Although we hadn’t been introduced, I began at once to josh her out of being so upset.

  “Are you so much in love with this man?” I asked.

  Svetlana said gravely: “Things happen, you know—auto accidents and things like that!”

  I could guess at what she really meant but was not saying.

  When Lohia spent several hours the next day with the couple, he was deeply impressed by her sincerity. He told a journalist in an interview:

  I compare her to a flower, not to a rose, for roses are not so tender, but to jasmine or orchids, which have a subtle scent that doesn’t intrude or pounce on you.

  I thought her also a woman of many sorrows and that a life of sorrows had transmuted her into a quietly charming woman. In all those hours we spent together, I did not hear her speak loudly or boisterously even once. The only time I heard an edge to her voice was later, in India, when she said in a harsh, rasping tone: “I hate politics! I hate politics!7

  Even Svetlana’s cousin Vladimir concurred:

  Only a true feeling toward this very sick man can explain why a young, interesting, intelligent, passionate woman calmed her fervent spirit and movingly cared about him, a completely helpless man, until his death in 1966. There was something otherworldly about this relationship. It was love based on grace.8

  Now Svetlana had a new plan. She was determined that she and Singh must marry. Of course, there is a question as to why Svetlana was so eager to marry him, she who had so precipitately married three times before, but in this case, in addition to her usual longing for permanence, she had a very pragmatic reason. Singh needed the status of a Soviet citizen, which marriage would give him, to be safe from expulsion. At first, she had wanted to be married to him so that they could fulfill their fantasy of traveling in Europe. But now the idea of marriage became urgent. Singh was very ill. Svetlana thought that if they went to India, to a climate he was used to, she could save his life. He refused to return without her, and she needed to be his wife to travel with him.

  But the political winds that had always shaped Svetlana’s life had again shifted for the worse. In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed. He had made too many mistakes: his drinking, his mishandling of the Cuban missile crisis, his wildly unpredictable Thaw that disturbed the political status quo in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Slowly a palace revolution engineered him out. Leonid Brezhnev was elected first secretary of the Presidium, in effect the country’s leader, sharing power with Aleksei Kosygin as chairman of the Council of Ministers and Nikolai Podgorny as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Soon these conservatives stopped the minor reforms.

  Svetlana had felt somewhat invisible since her father’s death, unnoticed and anonymous as a public citizen. It had been wonderful to be almost forgotten. Now she was once again Stalin’s daughter, the bearer of the famous name and, to the conservative Communists back in power, this involved responsibilities. Even Mikoyan had forgotten what had been said about Stalin at the Twentieth Congress. One day he invited Svetlana and her children to his dacha for dinner. As they were leaving, he passed Katya a present. “Here’s a present for you—a rug. You can hang it up on your wall,” he said. When they got home and unrolled the rug, they discovered it was woven with a portrait of Stalin. Svetlana rolled it up and put it away.9

  On May 3, she and Singh visited the Moscow office where marriages with foreigners had to be registered. The very next day, Svetlana was summoned to the Kremlin. It was an eerie experience. She passed through the Spassky Gate and entered the Senate building designed by Matvey Kazakov. She had lived for over twenty years in that first-floor apartment, and it was the same dreary building, with the same red rugs, the cold wood-paneled walls, the vaulted ceilings. She entered Kosygin’s office on the second floor, the office that had once been her father’s. She faced the stranger who sat at her father’s desk. She had never met him before.

  His first question was why had she had stopped attending Party meetings. He insisted she must “rejoin the collective, occupy [her] rightful place.” She explained that she had to take care of her family and now she had a sick husband.

  At the word husband, Kosygin responded angrily. There is only Svetlana’s record of the conversation, in which Kosygin sounds like the mad dictator Alice found when she went through the looking glass—the Red King, so to speak.

  What have you cooked up? You, a young healthy woman, a sportswoman, couldn’t you have found someone here, I mean someone young and strong? What do you want with this old sick Hindu? No, we are all positively against it, positively against it!10

  Whatever the shading of the conversation, it was now official. Kosygin, in the name of the government, refused her the right to register her marriage to Singh. It would never be allowed. As she left, she felt the Kremlin sarcophagus closing in on her again.

  Svetlana again approached Anastas Mikoyan for help regarding her marriage. He had already assisted in getting Singh a contract with the Soviet publisher Progress, but this new request became the occasion for a terrible rift between Svetlana and her close friend Ella Mikoyan.

  As Stepan Mikoyan explained it, Svetlana asked his wife, Ella, to arrange an interview with her father-in-law. Mikoyan agreed and suggested he and Svetlana meet at his dacha. However, this turned out to be the day an internationally acclaimed pianist was performing at the Moscow Conservatory, and when Mikoyan heard that Ella was attending, he wanted to go. He asked Ella to phone Svetlana to postpone the meeting until the next day. Apparently Svetlana was furious and turned her anger on Ella. Stepan Mikoyan recounted the rupture:

  Uncharacteristically raising her voice, Svetlana attacked Ella with an avalanche of accusations and insults. The gist was that Ella had plotted against her and deliberately enticed her father-in-law with the idea of attending that concert to prevent Svetlana’s meeting with him. Svetlana slammed down the receiver.

  That night, after the concert, Ella returned home to find a hand-delivered letter from Svetlana. She read it in tears and showed it to Stepan. “I could not believe what I read. It was flagrantly unjust and cruelly insulting.” Much later she showed the letter to her father-in-law. Mikoyan responded, “Her own father all over—can’t do without enemies.”11

  Was this a fair appraisal? Svetlana certainly had an imperious side. From childhood—after her mother’s death, in a world where everything was secret, too dangerous to speak about, even in such an atmosphere—Svetlana had learned her power. She knew how to get things from people. And when she was frustrated, she had no emotional blocks. Anger would well up in her and she would spew it out regardless of the consequences. People on the receiving end of her rage would not always know the cause.

  And yet, in this instance, she must have been thinking, A concert! And Singh’s life was on the line! But her respo
nse was also intemperate. She accused Ella of sabotaging her when all poor Ella was trying to do was help, and Svetlana had probably not explained the gravity of Singh’s need. Her father’s teaching: “Don’t ask. Command.”

  Apparently, despite Svetlana’s tirade against Ella, the meeting with Mikoyan took place the next day. He was unhelpful. “Why is it necessary to marry?” he wanted to know. He and his wife had lived as common-law partners for forty years. “Formal marriage has no significance in love.” He then warned against her friendships with foreign ambassadors. “This Kaul is very pushy,” he said. “Not at all like other Indians. Keep away, keep away from him.”12

  That fall, in 1965, the Gorky Institute, where Svetlana continued to work, was in turmoil. In September her friend Andrei Sinyavsky and his fellow writer Yuli Daniel were arrested for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. They were accused of allowing their novellas, depicting Soviet society as surreal and menacing, to be reproduced as samizdat—typed copies passed clandestinely among friends. They had even allowed their work to be published in the West under the respective pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. Khrushchev’s Thaw was officially over. The repressive Brezhnev era had begun. Now anyone caught with samizdat could expect to be brutally punished, and everyone was frightened.

  On December 5, Constitution Day, a few brave souls organized a public rally to demand an open trial for the writers. This was the first independent political rally in Moscow since 1929. Only two or three leaflets announcing the rally were posted at Moscow University, but soon the whole of Moscow knew. A young dissident, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, was carrying a poster: WE DEMAND AN OPEN TRIAL FOR SINYAVSKY AND DANIEL. A KGB officer ripped out the word open from the poster. “It seemed he especially disliked that word.” About fifty people gathered at the Pushkin Monument in central Moscow, though thousands stood on the opposite side of the street. They had come to see what would happen to the demonstrators. “Would they be shot then or later?”13