Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel opened on February 10, 1966. Despite the attempted intervention of organizations like PEN International, Daniel was sentenced to five years and Sinyavsky to seven years of hard labor in prison camps.14

  Svetlana was appalled. This was grotesque, ugly, unconscionable. She came home each night to Singh with tales of the kind of meetings that were going on at the Gorky Institute, and he would ask, “But why? Why? . . . Seven years of prison for writing books? Just because a writer writes books?”15

  By this time, her friend Alexander Ushakov had become secretary of the Party organization at the Gorky Institute. The atmosphere was tense. Even before the so-called trial, organizations like the Union of Writers were required to condemn Sinyavsky and Daniel in mass proclamations, as in the old days when Stalin had established the system of collective condemnation and shunning. After the trial, Party committees at the various institutes circulated an official letter to the Literary Gazette approving the sentences. Campaigns were launched against those who abstained from signing.

  Ushakov remembered chairing the meeting of the Party bureau at the Gorky Institute. “Suddenly Sinyavsky was arrested. No one knew. . . . We had to take some kind of stance about this.” Ushakov said to the Party members, “We should not think this is our doing. Everything is so turbulent in our country and this is the context in which Andrei existed,” the implication being that Sinyavsky knew what he was getting into by publishing his books outside the country. Ushakov then described Svetlana’s sudden entrance.

  Svetlana came in. She was not a member of the Party bureau. She came to the Party bureau and after I made my speech, it was understood that I supported the idea of keeping everything inside the Institute. Suddenly she gets up and delivers a political speech in defense of Sinyavsky. And I say, “Who invited you?” I say, “There’s the door. We did not invite you here.” Later she told some of my acquaintances, “Sasha [Ushakov] has become rude. He kicked me out of the Party bureau.” I was not rude, but she should have known. She could go to Red Square or write a letter to the TsK [Central Committee]. As if anything depended on us!16

  Svetlana was no dissident. She avoided what she called politics, but for the second time, she made a public protest, saying in her speech defending Sinyavsky that the Gorky Institute should have publicly supported him and the staff should never have been forced to sign an open letter denouncing him. It was shameful that those who had refused to sign were subjected to a witch hunt.17 Fed up with the brutal hypocrisy of it all, that summer she quit the Institute.

  Singh was very worried. The Politburo was spearheading the return to Communist Party orthodoxy. Tensions in Moscow between the old guard and the reformers were building and were splitting families and friendships; ideological battles raged. Singh, who always encouraged Svetlana’s writing, said that she must send her manuscript of Twenty Letters to a Friend abroad. Any apartment could be searched by warrant, any manuscript confiscated. Everyone knew by now that the KGB (the Russian initials of the Committee for State Security, the omnipresent secret police and spy agency, so renamed in 1954) had raided Vasily Grossman’s apartment and taken away not only his manuscript of Life and Fate, but also his carbon copies, his notebooks, and even the typewriter ribbons. (A surviving typescript of the novel was microfilmed, smuggled out of the country, and published in the West in 1980, sixteen years after Grossman’s death.) Singh arranged to get a copy of Svetlana’s manuscript to Ambassador Kaul, who took it with him to India in January 1966, safely carried in his diplomatic pouch.

  After the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, at least ten well-known Moscow intellectuals were arrested, and one disappeared. The wife of V. V. Kuznetsov reported that on November 1, 1966, at 6:00 a.m., her husband was seized and driven in a police car to the Moscow Regional Psychiatric Hospital.18 She hadn’t heard from him since. Singh had every reason to be concerned.

  Now the isolation of Singh began. He had fallen under the shadow of the government’s displeasure, and old Indian friends stopped visiting. His nephew, Dinesh Singh, who had risen to become deputy minister of the Department of Foreign Affairs under the pro-Soviet government of Indira Gandhi, stopped corresponding. Only his brother Suresh Singh continued to write from the village of Kalakankar. Only Singh’s old friends, Ambassador Kaul, and Ambassador Murad Ghaleb from the United Arab Republic, continued to visit.19

  Soon Singh’s work as a translator at his publishing house, Progress, was called into question. The chief editor of the English Division, Vladimir N. Pavlov, who had been Stalin’s translator at Yalta and elsewhere and had been in charge of Stalin’s correspondence with Churchill, questioned Singh’s capabilities. The chief editor of the Hindi Division corrected his Hindi translations. It was clear that forces were at work to discredit Singh as incompetent so as to rescind his legal right to stay in the USSR. Clearly Svetlana had been correct. Only if he were married to her would Singh be safe from expulsion.20

  But all these political machinations soon became irrelevant. It was clear that Singh was terminally ill. He was admitted to the Intourist Polyclinic, where he was wrongly diagnosed with tuberculosis. Finally Svetlana got him back into Kuntsevo Hospital. He made multiple visits, each time more ill. Rules had changed even at Kuntsevo. Foreigners were now isolated on a special floor, and friends had to secure official passes to visit. Still, his friends the ambassadors came.

  Svetlana began to spend the whole day with him. When he was strong enough, they would go to the garden. She would sit at his feet, and he, eyes closed, with his hand on her head, would speak of India and sometimes read the Vedic hymns. At night at home, she would discuss his case with Joseph, who was now studying medicine at the university. Joseph would consult his books. The outlook was not hopeful. Singh wanted to return to India. Desperate, Svetlana wrote to Brezhnev, begging to be allowed to take him there. Her stay would be short. He would not live long.

  It was not Brezhnev, but Mikhail Suslov, the Party’s chief ideologue, who responded. He summoned her to the Communist Party Headquarters on Old Square. When she again asked for permission to register her marriage, he replied that her father had established a law against marriages with foreigners. It had been a good idea. He told her that she would not be allowed to go abroad. Why would she want to? It was unpatriotic. If Singh wanted to go back, that was his business. No one was preventing him.

  Suslov predicted that there would be political provocations if she traveled to India. Journalists would hound her at the airport. She was Stalin’s daughter. He demanded that she return to work at her collective; she should take up “a place suitable for [her] famous name.”21 She tried to suggest that if Singh died now, it would be a public blot on the Soviet Union. Suslov replied coolly that Singh was getting good care. If he died, he died.

  Singh only laughed when Svetlana reported her interview with Suslov. For Indians, Suslov was an internationalist, a model modern Marxist, though his wife and children had never ventured outside the Soviet Union.

  Finally Singh asked Svetlana to get him out of the hospital and take him home. On Sunday, October 30, friends and colleagues from Progress dropped by. When they were finally alone, Brajesh told Svetlana, with a calm resignation that was both disconcerting and moving, “Sveta, I know that I will die today.” He said he had had a dream of a white bullock pulling a cart. In India when you have that dream, it means death is coming.22 She did not believe him.

  At seven a.m. that Monday, he pointed to his heart and then to his head and said that he could feel something throbbing. And then he died.

  Into her mind came the memory of her father’s death, the only other death she had witnessed. She recalled her father’s outrageous struggle, his fear in the face of death, his terrifying last gesture of accusation. Singh’s death was quick and peaceful, his last gesture toward his heart. She thought, Each man got the death he deserved.

  With Singh’s death, Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had b
een drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry. She felt Singh’s comforting, benevolent presence, hovering.

  She hastily called Singh’s Indian friends. She didn’t want Singh’s body to fall into the hands of the Soviet bureaucracy. The friends came. They read some of the verses of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. They burned sandalwood. They took Singh’s body to the crematorium.

  There, on November 1, 1966, some of her friends from the Institute of World Literature showed up as she took her leave of Singh, whom they had never met. Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say good-bye. Singh had expressed a wish to have his ashes scattered over the Ganges, though he didn’t expect this to happen. As she placed his urn in her bedroom, she made a resolution. She would personally scatter his ashes over the sacred river.

  Expecting to be repulsed, she wrote to both Kosygin and Brezhnev. The morning after her letters were delivered, she was summoned to the Kremlin. Astonishingly, Kosygin told her she could go. Singh’s nephew Dinesh Singh, a shrewd politician, had intervened with Indira Gandhi to secure a traditional funeral for his uncle. Svetlana would be allowed to attend as long as the Indians ensured that she would avoid any contact with the foreign press. That night she collected her relevant documents, signed by the head of the General Department of the Central Committee, Konstantin Chernenko.23

  On November 7, she wrote an elegiac letter (in English) to Singh’s brother and sister-in-law:

  My dear Suresh and Prakashwati:

  It’s very difficult for me now to try to express my feelings and my grief. But I know about you so much from my dear Brajesh, who loved you and was attached to you so strongly. . . .

  I need . . . to spend a few quiet days at the bank of the Ganga, to see its quiet waters, to watch its great waves. I’ll have my visa for two weeks only, but even a week spent at Kalakankar will give me the greatest satisfaction and consolation. . . .

  My son who is 21 and my daughter who is 17 now have become deeply attached to Brajesh. Everyone who knew him here was charmed with his quiet nature, with his humor, his patience, his good nature—although he was so badly sick for the last six months. . . .

  I was so happy with him—notwithstanding the illness, doctors, hospitals, and all that. He’d taught me so many good things. . . . I’m so grateful to Fate that I could meet Brajesh and for three long years my life was full of him and of his love.

  Svetlana24

  Her passport was issued on November 11. She received a polite letter from Singh’s nephew Dinesh Singh with an invitation to stay at his home, but he was also asking her to delay her visit until December 12, when the Indian parliament would be in recess and he would be free. Clearly Dinesh would be responsible for Svetlana.

  For the month and a half she waited, Svetlana rarely left her apartment. She was guarding Singh’s urn, as if she feared it might be abducted if the government changed its mind. Joseph announced that he and his girlfriend were going to get married. At the end of November, they held a short civil ceremony. Though Svetlana and Grigori Morozov, Joseph’s father, had been divorced twenty years and he had remarried, he and Svetlana stood together at the ceremony, holding hands. The event was joyous. Svetlana believed Singh was present, his “cheerful soul . . . warming us.”25

  On December 19, 1966, Svetlana waited in her apartment with her son, Joseph; his wife, Elena; and her daughter, Katya, to find out if her 1:00 a.m. flight out of Sheremetyevo Airport would actually be leaving for India. The weather was terrible. Snow fell, covering the city. A blizzard was building. The phone was busy all night. She kept calling the dispatcher for updates on the flight, and friends kept calling to ask if it was really true that she had gotten permission to travel outside the USSR. It was an extraordinary privilege—to be traveling to India.

  Finally her handler, a Mrs. Kassirova, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, showed up. There was a kerfuffle before Svetlana’s departure. Joseph’s wife, Elena, had grabbed Svetlana’s overnight bag to hand it to her. She’d shouted, “Don’t touch that!”26 Elena didn’t know that it contained the porcelain urn carrying Brajesh’s ashes. Joseph was angry at his mother’s sharpness, Elena looked offended, and Svetlana was distraught. She hadn’t had time to give more than a peck on the cheek to Katya. She had mismanaged her farewell.

  She left for the airport around ten p.m. with her son, her friend Lily Golden, and Mrs. Kassirova. In the car, all was silence. At the airport, Svetlana was rushed to the segregated section for “passengers leaving for foreign parts.” She barely had time to hug Joseph, who was brooding. She glanced beyond the glass partition to see the sad face of her son. It was the last glimpse she would have of him for eighteen years. For his part, Joseph remarked, “I did not dream what epilogue that journey would have.”27

  And then she was on the plane with Mrs. Kassirova. Singh had always promised that she would see his village, Kalakankar. This was the version that fate assigned her, his urn occupying the seat beside her on the flight to India. The irony was not lost on her that, because she was Stalin’s daughter—“state property,” as she bitterly called herself—she had been refused permission to accompany Singh to India while he was alive but had been granted a visa to carry his ashes back to his country after he was dead.

  Chapter 15

  On the Banks of the Ganges

  On March 6, 1967, Svetlana walked into this building—the United States Embassy in Delhi—and announced her intention to defect.

  (New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection [Library of Congress])

  When Svetlana descended from the plane in Delhi on December 20 in the company of her minder, Mrs. Kassirova, she found Second Secretary Surov and two other officials from the Soviet Embassy waiting to greet her. They whisked her underground so hurriedly that the Indian press never got wind of her visit. Her passport, visa, and plane ticket were confiscated. Though she had expected to stay at the home of Brajesh’s nephew Dinesh Singh, she was driven to a guesthouse on the grounds of the Soviet Embassy in downtown Delhi and told this was where she was meant to stay. The room she was assigned was bare except for a bed and table. It had been sanitized—the telephone had been removed. She would have to make all phone calls at the embassy building next door, where there would be a staff to monitor her conversations.1

  Ambassador I. A. Benediktov was currently out of town, but she was taken to meet the chargé d’affaires, Nikolai Smirnov. Breakfast was set in the embassy dining room; on the table sat a large bottle of cognac. A round of toasts was drunk to the much-loved Mr. Brajesh Singh. Svetlana was then told that plans had been altered. The situation in Delhi was unstable. The elections were looming in February, and the opposition, particularly the pro-American Swatantra Party, was mounting attacks on Mrs. Gandhi’s Socialist government. It would be unwise for Svetlana to go to Kalakankar. A solemn and dignified ceremony would be held at the embassy, and Mr. Singh’s ashes would be taken back to his village by his nephew.

  Smirnov said that Mrs. Kassirova would take Svetlana shopping and sightseeing; she knew all the stores in Delhi. Certainly Svetlana could visit the Taj Mahal. She would stay in the Soviet compound. Smirnov mentioned that Dinesh and T. M. Kaul were friendly to the Soviet government, of course, but it would be quieter and more peaceful at the guesthouse. They didn’t trust Kaul. He had outraged Moscow by violating the rules for foreign diplomats that restricted their travel to a twenty-five-mile perimeter outside Moscow, and had even taken foreign visitors to Pasternak’s grave in Peredelkino.2 There was a return flight to Moscow on January 4. This would give her a comfortable two weeks.

  After the overnight flight, Svetlana was exhausted, but she gathered her wits for the bargaining. She agreed to stay at the guesthouse while she was in Delhi, but only she could take her husband’s ashes to Kalakankar. She was a guest of Dinesh Singh and Suresh Singh, longtime friends of the Nehru and Gandhi families. After a long s
ession with Chargé d’Affaires Smirnov the next day, it was agreed that she could go to Kalakankar as long as she kept her visit a secret, avoided all contact with the press, and traveled in the company of Mrs. Kassirova. She would return to Moscow January 4.

  Soon Svetlana extended her liberties. She walked in the streets around the Soviet Embassy alone, encountering locals with an insouciance she had never thought herself capable of. On one walk she noted the US Embassy, with its wide, imposing steps and Christmas trees, only a few hundred yards from the Soviet Embassy. She imagined the festivities inside and kept walking.

  Expressly avoiding Mrs. Kassirova, Svetlana spent three days touring Delhi with Ambassador Kaul’s daughter Preeti. The chaos of rickshaws and cyclists careening through the boulevards, street vendors selling garlands of flowers, brilliantly colored saris in cluttered shopwindows, and endless beggars importuning as they passed was like nothing she had seen before. She discovered that she was a good traveler with a keen eye and soon had a sense of the social strata in Delhi. The layering of eras and cultures, of classes—the colony of beggars outside the first-class Hotel Oberoy, the luxury vehicles, the billboards blaring the names of English films, like Doctor Zhivago, left her marveling. For someone who had been locked inside a single culture for forty years, this sample of another culture was intoxicating.

  She visited the Kaul household and the ambassador mentioned to her that he had her manuscript. His daughter had read him the first few pages. She thanked him but did not retrieve it. Perhaps she had no plans for it, but more likely she knew her room at the Soviet compound would be searched.

  On December 25, she took the flight to Lucknow, but not without some frustrations. When Dinesh, who was to accompany her, didn’t show up, she insisted that Surov drive her to Dinesh’s house. They were intercepted by Smirnov’s limousine on the highway. He wanted her to return to the guesthouse, but she resisted. The Soviet officials were in a difficult position. They had to follow Moscow’s orders but also not offend the Indians. When she reached the Singh household, Dinesh said he couldn’t travel to Lucknow, but she could go with his daughter Reva. Dinesh seemed very friendly, so Svetlana took a risk. Only a few days into her visit, she asked him to tell Mrs. Gandhi that she wanted to extend her stay in India. It was an impulse. He offered to take her to Mrs. Gandhi that day, but she said she was not prepared for an interview and asked if he could put in a good word. He assured her he would and then added that Mrs. Gandhi would be traveling to Kalakankar soon to give a speech as part of her campaign for reelection.