Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

Behind the scenes, international shuttlecock diplomacy moved at a frenzied pace. In New Delhi, Ambassador Chester Bowles received a letter dated March 9 from Mr. Chandra Shekhar Jha, Indian foreign secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Its contents and the ambassador’s response were precisely recorded:

  MARCH 9, 1967

  The Ministry of External Affairs presents its compliments to the Embassy of the United States of America and has the honour to inform the Embassy that it has come to the knowledge of the Government of India that Madame Svetlana Aluleva [sic], a Soviet citizen, who had been on a visit to India and was about to return to the Soviet Union, was given a United States visa and a plane ticket and was escorted to the United States by an officer of the US Embassy . . . in full knowledge that she was an important personality.

  The Ministry of External Affairs wishes to point out that the above action taken by the US Embassy in such haste without giving any inkling to the Ministry of such impending action, is a source of serious embarrassment to the government of India. . . . The Government of the Soviet Union have strongly protested to us about what they have characterized as kidnapping of Madame Svetlana Aluleva, a Soviet citizen, by the US Authorities here. . . .

  Having regard to all the circumstances of this case . . . the Government of India strongly urge that Madame Svetlana Aluleva be immediately sent back to Delhi. On her return to India, the Government of India will deal with her in an appropriate manner consistent with international law and practice.2

  Luckily for Svetlana, Ambassador Bowles was mostly on her side. The next day, March 10, he wrote to Jha in a “frank and informal way” responding to what he characterized as Jha’s “secret protest note,” the contents of which were “in no way justified by the facts.”3 Bowles replied that “Mme. Aluleva [sic] had entered the embassy on her own initiative.” No one at the embassy even knew of her existence. She had a valid passport, and her departure had been entirely legal. Numerous employees at the airport could attest to the fact that there had been no coercion. Any attempt by the USSR to suggest otherwise would be “demonstrably false and malicious.”

  Bowles assured Jha that, in making his decision, he’d had India’s best interests in mind. If Svetlana had gone to the press as she threatened, India would have been in the middle of a diplomatic nightmare. He’d helped her on her way in accordance “with American tradition stretching back to our earliest years as a nation.”

  This was all in the style of diplomatic damage control. However, at the end of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) file containing Bowles’s letter to Jha is attached a disconcerting note, written several days later, containing gossip that the American ambassador in Moscow had collected from a UPI reporter’s poker game.

  FROM MOSCOW, 13 MARCH 1967

  Ambassador reports following possibly useful background. Pls pass to appropriate persons in Department. Shapiro comment made in course casual conversation at weekly poker game evening 12 March. Shapiro said he had interviewed children and sent story.

  From Ambassador: Shapiro of UPI says Svetlana Stalin reputed to be a nymphomaniac. He says her children convinced mother will return and think possible she mentally upset by death of husband. Shapiro says she was comfortably well off by Soviet standards and that children attractive and appear fond of her.

  END OF MESSAGE4

  The gossip that Svetlana was a nymphomaniac was the kind of helpful information that could be filed away for future use if the game got dirty. The initial reaction of the USSR to Svetlana’s flight was controlled silence, but soon it had to respond publicly. News of her defection was reaching the Soviet people through Radio Free Europe and on the grapevine, and the regime was worried.5 Svetlana was reportedly carrying a book she’d written. What did she know? It was not likely that her father would have let his daughter in on state secrets, but what gossip might she offer about the current leaders? She knew all their stories. Soviet state television reported coolly:

  In reply to the enquiries of journalists, it is confirmed that Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, is out of the country. In 1966 she was given an exit visa for New Delhi in order to accompany the remains of her deceased husband, an Indian citizen who died in the Soviet Union. How long Svetlana Alliluyeva will remain outside our country is her concern only.6

  The same brief notice appeared in Pravda. Any Soviet citizens reading this would have seen through the lie. None of them were free to travel as they wished. Had she read it, Svetlana would have responded bitterly. Now the government called Brajesh her husband.

  At first the Soviet authorities had been unable to believe that Svetlana had fled and actually searched to see if somehow she had slipped back into Moscow. According to her cousin Leonid Alliluyev, the KGB came to his and his wife’s apartment in the House on the Embankment and, in their absence, questioned his mother-in-law. But for most of the family, there were no immediate repercussions. As Leonid Alliluyev put it, “When Svetlana left, the only person in our government who made a comment was Kosygin . . . a few words and that was all. This is why they were the authorities. They did not speak of anything that was not supposed to be spoken about.”7

  Of course, that was publicly. Behind the scenes, the Politburo and the KGB were already planning their revenge against Svetlana and the Americans. They were certain that this defection was a US conspiracy initiated to embarrass the Soviet government on the soon-to-be-celebrated fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The regime was determined to get back at Svetlana in whatever way it could. Secret telegrams to Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, flew from American embassies as far-flung as Tehran and Hong Kong, reporting rumors that Soviet plans were being set in motion for defamation of her personally, and of her book.8

  When Svetlana and Robert Rayle descended onto the tarmac at Geneva airport—the only two passengers to exit the plane—they were spirited away from reporters shouting questions. Reunited with her little red suitcase containing her manuscript, Svetlana was reminded of the conditions of her stay: no political statements. But her arrival was world news, and every journalist wanted the story. The CBS reporter Marvin Kalb stayed in Switzerland for three weeks, longer than any of the others, but he never got close to Svetlana. “There was lots of intentional lying in Switzerland,” he reflected in retrospect.9

  Svetlana was driven to an inn at Beatenberg near the Jungfrau, in the Bernese Alps, and given papers under the name Fräulein Carlen, with the story that she was an Irishwoman recently arrived from India.10 It was an absurd ruse. Even if she could talk about India and supposedly had been away from her native Ireland too long to remember it, it is hard to imagine her Russian-accented English being taken for an Irish accent. Alone in the dining room of the inn, she listened to the radio announcing, in crisp German, the defection of Stalin’s daughter. She missed Robert Rayle. At the Geneva airport, he’d immediately jumped into a waiting car, which was chased to the French border by eager reporters. By now he was already on his way back to India. When he arrived home, he would find a dinner invitation from Ambassador Chester Bowles waiting for him and his wife. The ambassador was making it clear, particularly to the Indian authorities, that he stood behind Rayle 100 percent.11

  The US State Department handed responsibility for Svetlana over to the Swiss, who insisted that the Americans stay in the background, at arm’s length. Antonino Janner, the fifty-year-old chief of the East European section of the Swiss Foreign Ministry, took charge. As it became clear that international journalists were zeroing in on Beatenberg, Svetlana was whisked off to a hospice run by Catholic nuns as a rest home for priests at Saint Antoni, then to the Visitacion de Saint Marie, a convent near Fribourg, where her identity remained mysterious. The nuns were instructed not to ask. She had just seen The Sound of Music in Delhi and must have felt that she was in a trailer for the movie.12 Fribourg Canton plainclothes policemen assigned to her as bodyguards took her on sightseeing ventures and allowed her to drive their Volkswagen
Beetle. Her first response was euphoria. “I had a feeling of wonder that I had escaped the Soviets! This I will recall even when I am dead,” she later told a friend.13

  Hundreds of letters from strangers, some addressed simply Switzerland, began to arrive, many with propositions of marriage. A former Soviet circus performer, now an Australian citizen, offered to marry her, as did an English naval officer. The owner of a motorboat in Florida, indignant she had not been granted immediate entry into the United States, invited her to stay with his family.14

  On Friday, March 10, ex-ambassador George Kennan received a phone call. Donald (Jamie) Jameson, an expert on Russia at the CIA and Kennan’s friend, was on the line. Jamie said, “We have a tremendous defection here.”15 He wanted Kennan to read a manuscript and tell him what he thought of it. It was, of course, Svetlana’s Twenty Letters to a Friend. The CIA had made multiple copies of it in Rome. Jameson asked if, having read it, Kennan would be willing to fly to Geneva to meet Svetlana. The CIA needed a civilian because the Swiss wouldn’t permit any American officials to visit her.

  It was Chester Bowles’s suggestion that Kennan be selected to take charge of Svetlana. Bowles had written to Dean Rusk that they should see “[Svetlana] as an opportunity to enable us to promote our policy objectives.” But someone like Kennan was needed to keep her in line and encourage her to “see herself in a special position to help improve relationships between the USSR and USA.” Kennan should also give her advice about a publisher. “Since she needs money badly, she is likely to settle with the wrong people on the wrong basis,” Bowles said.16

  George Kennan was indeed the right man. He had a long, romantic attachment to Russia and served briefly as ambassador to the Soviet Union before Stalin expelled him in 1952. He was the author of the American postwar policy of containment of the Soviet empire. The Soviets should be left free to operate within their own sphere of influence, essentially the Eastern bloc, as long as they didn’t challenge American supremacy. He was certain that Communism would eventually self-destruct from its own paranoia and inefficiency. Shortly after the formation of the CIA in 1947, he’d advised the agency to work specifically with Soviet defectors and expatriates to counter the USSR’s dirty tricks in international espionage.17 Having retired from the diplomatic service, he was currently a faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and therefore technically a civilian, but he still had close ties to the US government.

  Now Kennan was about to read a book by the most unexpected defector of all. When Svetlana’s manuscript finally arrived in the United States and was delivered to him on March 16, though he was ill in bed, he read it through the night. He was deeply moved. He thought it was a brilliant book that would be of interest to hundreds of thousands. He went down to Washington the next day to meet Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

  Though Kennan had lived in the Soviet Union for nine years, Svetlana had been so well hidden within the Kremlin that he’d never encountered her. Clearly the idea of meeting her excited him, but he also saw her as a problem. He told Katzenbach that if the government brought her to the United States poverty stricken, it would have to put her up in a safe house. However, if her book was sold in advance, she would arrive with money in her pocket and not as a ward of the government.18

  Chester Bowles was now suggesting to the president’s assistant, Walt Rostow, that Svetlana should be viewed not as a potential time bomb, but rather as an asset. She just needed to be persuaded to rewrite her book. “If, after dealing with the Stalin years, her emphasis were on the new more liberal Soviet generation and hopes that it can develop a more cooperative relationship with America, the favorable impact could be very great.”19 He thought Kennan was exactly the man to persuade her. But Svetlana had just witnessed this “new liberal regime” condemn Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel to hard labor in prison camps for publishing books. She would have asked the Americans what universe they were living in.

  Kennan believed that if the book was sold, Svetlana would need a good lawyer who understood the delicacy of the situation she and her book posed. He immediately thought of his old friend and Princeton neighbor Edward Greenbaum, whom everyone affectionately called the General. (He’d served as a brigadier general in World War II.) Greenbaum, now seventy-seven, was a partner in the prestigious New York firm Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, which counted among its clients Tennessee Williams, Carl Sandburg, and the firm of Harper & Row.20 Kennan felt he would be putting Svetlana in good hands.21

  The day before Kennan left for Geneva, his wife, Annelise, phoned Greenbaum at six p.m. to say Kennan needed to see him urgently. Greenbaum crossed the Princeton lawns. He didn’t need to read Svetlana’s book to understand the value of the enterprise. Kennan asked him to stand by for a flight to Geneva. If Svetlana agreed to have Greenbaum represent her, he would send a curt telegram: ARRANGEMENTS COMPLETED.22

  Kennan flew to Switzerland on March 22. His arrival was top secret. To avoid press inquiries, he had a cover. He was supposedly visiting his daughter at her Swiss school and was giving lectures at the University of Geneva. Janner told Svetlana, ”It’s a big honor and very lucky for you, this meeting. He’s one of the greatest experts on Russia. I’ll bring you his books.”23

  Svetlana had been taken aback when she was told in Italy that the US government didn’t want her in the United States. Now she had no idea what to expect from Kennan. She was so confused that she didn’t even know what she wanted herself. Perhaps she should try to stay in Switzerland, but then the Swiss had forbidden her to make any political statements. What about her book? “What sense was there in leaving my country in order to remain silent here?” she asked herself.24 In truth, the only place she really wanted to be was India, but that was impossible.

  Preparing to meet the man who would possibly determine her fate, Svetlana read Kennan’s book Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin. His attack on Stalin and Communism was relentless. To her mind, it was accurate. She wondered if he would be able to separate her from her father.25 Two policemen drove her to Janner’s house, near Bern, where Janner greeted her enthusiastically: “I have already spoken to Kennan. He has read your manuscript and thinks it should be published.”26

  When the courtly diplomat arrived, they sat on the sofa, and he congratulated her on her memoir. It was soon clear that he had read it thoroughly. Kennan had made a decision. He would protect Svetlana but also guard against her being used in the United States for anti-Soviet propaganda. In his ongoing relationship with her, he had always to balance two things: “his genuine admiration for her and his other responsibilities.”27 He would later tell the New York Times that help for Svetlana in adjusting to her new life would best be given “by private parties, not by governments or by anyone who had a commercial interest in her future.”28 In effect, however, the State Department would be pulling the strings.

  Kennan assured Svetlana that if she wanted to go to the United States, she would certainly find a publisher. There was international interest in her book, and she would be offered substantial sums of money. She’d need lawyers to negotiate with publishers and arrange her visa. He suggested Greenbaum. He had been careful to ensure that Janner, as a Swiss representative, was present at their discussion, and he emphasized that he was only offering suggestions. It was up to her to decide, because “this was the essence of the free society in which she now found herself.” She smiled wryly and agreed, but then added realistically, “What choice, after all, do I have?”29

  Over a candlelit dinner, Kennan talked of his family and American friends eager to meet her. He said he was impressed by her mastery of English. For Svetlana, the pace of things falling into place felt surreal. Soon she was telling Janner and others that Kennan was “like a God to me” and that a “whole new world had opened” when he put his counsel at her disposal.30

  Kennan reported to the State Department that he was very impressed by Svetlana’s “intelligence, stability, sincerity.” He was sure her decision to pre
sent herself at the US Embassy in Delhi had not been an “irrational caprice.” Her book had literary merit. She was implacably opposed to the Soviet regime. Moreover, he wrote, “She has iron in her soul.”31

  She would later say this was the kind of gamble she always took. When she’d left the Soviet Compound in Delhi, she had only the address of the American Embassy.

  What I would need to do after, on the next day, I did not know about it and I did not think about it. Not planning ahead—as always—I only vaguely imagined what my new life would be. . . . Sometimes at night I dreamed of the streets of Moscow, the rooms of my apartment; I woke up in a cold sweat. This was the nightmare to me.32

  The nightmare was both what had happened in that city and the thought that she might be forcibly returned to it.

  Chapter 18

  Attorneys at Work

  When Svetlana defected, she left Joseph and Katya behind, and in October 1967, they appeared on West German television with an open plea to her to return.

  (UPI)

  On March 25, Edward Greenbaum traveled to Switzerland with his legal assistant Alan Schwartz. Schwartz knew only that they were going to help a “lady in distress.” It wasn’t until they were in midair that he was advised their client was Stalin’s daughter. The two men stopped in Milan, where Kennan was waiting to brief them, and were then driven to Bern. Their mission was to ensure a book deal for Svetlana, so that she could enter the United States as a private person, reducing the political liability she represented for the State Department. When they met the Swiss official Antonino Janner, he warned them that not only the press but also the Russians were looking for Svetlana like crazy.1

  That evening Janner drove them to a remote hotel and, as Alan Schwartz remembered it, “There she was. She was a very warm person. She charmed the two of us.” It wasn’t yet certain what the American government was going to do with her. They offered their services as her attorneys.