Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  The Swiss were pressuring the Americans to take Svetlana off their hands. Although they found her to be undemanding and were fond of her, her security was a burden to their small Foreign Office. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised President Lyndon Johnson that he now believed Svetlana should be permitted to enter, but strictly as a private visitor.29 The State Department informed the media that she was traveling to the United States on a six-month tourist visa at the invitation of her American legal firm, Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, in order to consult her publishers about her book. Even the Soviet journalists at the Foreign Correspondence Center in Moscow said this was a “diplomatic master stroke.”30 The State Department had kept its hands clean.

  Very early on the morning of April 21, Alan Schwartz was picked up at his hotel. Svetlana was already in the car. They were scheduled to take a Swissair flight to New York under assumed names. Schwartz recalled: “The airport was surrounded by security guards in uniforms with guns. Svetlana was determined to make sure she got out of there in one piece, and I was too.” On the flight, Schwartz warned her, “They’re going to ask you to say something when you get there. Do you want me to say something for you?” She replied, “‘No, no, I want to speak for myself.”31

  But Greenbaum had already hired a public relations firm to handle Svetlana, and Kennan had drafted the statement she was to make on disembarking:

  I have come to this country because I am faced with the problem of making a new life outside Russia and would like to make some acquaintance with the United States, but also because it is here that I intend to publish material I have written, and I would like to be in close contact with my publishers. I do not know how long I shall remain here. . . . I am tired, now, from the journey, and I would like to have a few days of privacy before I meet with the press again.32

  Kennan’s job was to keep Svetlana from saying anything that might compromise American relations with the Soviet Union. But Kennan did not yet know Svetlana. She didn’t intend to use his carefully crafted diplomatic speech. She wanted to be very clear about why she left the Soviet Union. It was not simply to publish a book, but rather to protest her treatment and the treatment of Russian artists and intellectuals at the hands of the current Soviet government.

  In placating the Soviets, had the American government distorted her poignant rejection of life under Communism?

  The British Foreign Office thought so. Because the BBC was planning to broadcast the Russian text of Svetlana’s “To Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” the Foreign Office scrambled to determine its “policy about the Svetlana story.” Many were puzzled about why the Americans were “taking so restrained a line.” On May 1, nine days after her arrival, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs, sent a secret memo to twenty-three heads of mission at the Foreign Office:

  Miss Stalin’s Defection:

  The defection of Miss Stalin seems to me to be something of quite a different order from the normal world of defection in which one scores plusses and minuses, and tries to exploit the plusses and, by a deep professional yawn, to submerge the minuses.

  If any person said to you in 1950 that in seventeen years Miss Stalin would defect to the West, you would rightly have considered that person certifiable. She has now done it, with impressive smoothness and conviction. She has made it clear . . . that the reason for her defection . . . is because she can no longer accept a society in which you are told that there is only one point of view from which politics, and indeed life itself, must be judged. . . . This may not be a new doctrine, but its relaunching by the daughter of Stalin, in the fiftieth anniversary of the Communist Revolution in Russia, is immensely important, indeed so important that quite a lot of people haven’t noticed it.33

  Svetlana could have told the State Department that its efforts to placate the Kremlin were pointless. Nothing the Americans could say would ever convince the Soviets that the CIA had not “prepared, arranged, and financed” Svetlana’s defection.34 At the deepest level, Soviet officials needed to believe she’d been kidnapped. They could not accept the idea that she had acted freely, and so their first response would be to try to kidnap her back. In an interview held later that August at the home of Harper & Row’s executive vice president, she explained this belief to journalists puzzled by the Kremlin’s fury:

  They cannot believe that an individual, a person, a human being, can make decisions on his own. They still cannot believe that I left Russia just by my own decision, that it wasn’t a plot, it wasn’t organized, there wasn’t help. They cannot believe it. They only believe in actions which are ruled by some organization—the collective, yes—and they are always very angry to see that although they have tried to make people in Russia for fifty years think the same way, have the same opinion . . . the same political point of view, . . . when they see that the whole work done for fifty years was in vain and people still have something of their own, they are very angry.35

  Chapter 19

  The Arrival

  On April 21, 1967, Svetlana stepped onto American soil for the first time at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

  (AP Photo)

  The FBI was watching a Soviet operative named Vasily Fyodorovich Sanko. On April 13, 1967, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent the FBI a memo advising that a G-2 visa had been issued to Vasily Sanko to attend the Fifth Special Session of the UN General Assembly. J. Edgar Hoover personally acknowledged the memo, indicating that the subject, Vasily Sanko, had participated in the attempted abduction in Australia of a Soviet citizen in 1954. Svetlana Alliloueva (sic) was mentioned in the FBI document.1

  Enzo Biagi, an Italian freelance journalist, and Martin Ebon, a German American author, both of whom were working on stories about Svetlana and had sources inside the Soviet Union, reported that a KGB operative named Vasily F. Sanko arrived in New York on April 20 (one day before Svetlana) on a diplomatic passport.2 He was identified as a chauffeur with the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. In 1954 Sanko, along with three other agents, had kidnapped Yevdokia Petrova, wife of Vladimir Petrov, a KGB officer who had defected in Australia seventeen days earlier. The Soviet agents forced Mrs. Petrova aboard an Australian airliner in Sydney bound for Moscow, but the pilot received instructions to land at Darwin airport. Mrs. Petrova was freed and, along with her husband, granted political asylum.

  Obviously alerted to a possible abduction plot, on April 19, Greenbaum called into his office Albert and George Paloesik, two brothers who ran the Fidelity Detective Bureau. They claimed to have expertise in guarding celebrities; they had once guarded Errol Flynn.

  On Friday, April 21, Svetlana and Schwartz, using their assumed names, managed to slip unnoticed onto the Swissair DC-8 jet bound for New York. Svetlana’s presence on board was not announced to the media until one hour after takeoff. Even the flight crew didn’t know she had boarded. When the plane arrived at Kennedy Airport, six representatives of the Fidelity Detective Bureau were on the tarmac to greet her.

  Svetlana was the last of the forty passengers to disembark after the flight touched down at 2:45 p.m. Dozens of plainclothes policemen were stationed around the arrivals gate, and a tight security web surrounded the airfield. Members of the New York City Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services peered from the observation deck of the International Arrivals Building, which had been closed to the public at 2:30. Svetlana’s arrival was a sensation. There were more people to greet her at the airport than had been there for the Beatles in 1964. Reporters remarked how she “bounded down the stairs” onto American soil and seemed unable to stop smiling. She climbed onto a small box to elevate herself into camera range and, facing scores of journalists cordoned off behind police barricades, said, “Hello there, everybody. I’m very happy to be here.”

  The firm of Hill & Knowlton, which Greenbaum had hired to handle Svetlana’s public relations, had decided that she would make only a brief statement at the airport and give a press conference later. The Hill &
Knowlton executive in charge, John Mapes, later remarked, “I talked with Foy Kohler of the State Department on the way to handle the thing.”3

  Apologizing for her clumsy English, Svetlana assured the public that leaving the USSR had been her own decision, based on the anguish she had felt over the death of her husband, Brajesh Singh, and her subsequent treatment by her government. She had come to the United States to seek the self-expression so long denied her in her own country. She was part of a new generation, as were her children, who didn’t want to be fooled by the old ideas. “I do believe in the power of intellect in the world, no matter in which country you live. Instead of struggling and causing unnecessary bloodshed, people should work more together for the progress of humanity. I believe that one’s home can be anywhere that one can feel free.” She added, perhaps as a conciliatory gesture to George Kennan, that publishing her book would “symbolize for me the main purpose of my journey here.”4

  Coincidentally, the Soviet poet Andrei Voznesensky had arrived at Kennedy Airport just two hours before Svetlana for his American tour. When asked to comment on Svetlana’s defection, he said that he would speak only about “literary topics, not politics.”5 Svetlana was not offended. She knew that Voznesensky was under tight KGB control. Back home he was adored as one of the generation of liberating poets of the 1960s, and his recitals could fill whole stadiums. Moscow sent him on international tours as a “cultural envoy,” but he knew the terms—never to speak out about the truth of repression he and other writers suffered. His fate embodied the reason Svetlana left the Soviet Union. When Voznesensky got back to Moscow after the tour, his travel permit to return to the United States that summer was revoked because he had not publicly condemned her.6

  The KGB agent Vasily Sanko seemed to have kept to his chauffeur duties, although the CIA and the FBI continued to take the possibility of an “extraction plot” seriously. Was the threat credible? In his obituary of Vladimir Semichastny titled “Top KGB Plotter Dead at 77,” the Reuters correspondent Ron Popeski wrote, “Semichastny, head of the KGB in 1967, told reporters he was removed by Brezhnev and replaced by future Communist Party chief Yuri Andropov after a failed attempt to smuggle Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, out of the United States.”7 Whether this is reliable or hearsay is unclear, but Andropov was appointed the new head of the KGB on May 18, 1967, three weeks after Svetlana’s arrival in the United States.

  In any case, Svetlana’s personal security detail stayed on. It is unlikely she was aware that it was she who was paying for their services.8

  In his statement to the New York Times the day after her arrival, George Kennan asked Americans to rise above their “Cold War reflexes.” He said, “Mrs. Alliluyeva loves her country and hopes, with her writing and activity outside Russia, to bring benefit to it and not harm” in the “new era” that was “dawning.”9 He didn’t seem concerned that Svetlana didn’t believe in this “new era.”

  Harper & Row’s executive vice president, Evan Thomas, also spoke to the Times, characterizing Svetlana’s book as a high literary achievement, although he admitted he’d not read it. “What politics there are are by implication. It is largely personal.”10 This insistence that Svetlana was not politically important seemed to mask an anxiety that, in fact, she was.

  After her brief encounter with the press, Svetlana climbed into the backseat of a car with Alan Schwartz. Svetlana’s translator, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, had offered her father’s estate in Locust Valley as a refuge. Svetlana and Schwartz were traveling in a convoy of three cars. Albert Paloesik drove the first car, his brother George drove the second, and one of their men from the Fidelity Detective Bureau followed in a third. As they drove out the Van Wyck Expressway to Sunrise Highway, Albert was sure they were being followed. He went into evasive techniques.

  [Our] third car detained the one that was following us . . . known as the crash car technique. We went north on Meadowbrook Parkway, and by the time we reached East Gate Boulevard, we had determined, talking to each other on the car radios, that we were being followed by another car. This one was a limousine, with a chauffeur and with two men in the back—I thought immediately of the Russian Embassy. When I turned off at Roosevelt Field, I made a left, a right, another left, and stopped. We were in a narrow lane. My brother stopped and the limousine drew up behind him. My brother got out and started toward them. . . . I shot forward.11

  It turned out the men in the limousine were reporters. Paloesik was sure Svetlana didn’t notice any of this—she thought he was just talking on the radio with his other cars. He probably underestimated her. When they arrived at the estate of Priscilla McMillan’s father, Stewart Johnson, the Paloesik brothers, armed with shotguns, set up guard posts.

  Priscilla and her father had been waiting for Svetlana. Now a widower, Johnson was excited by the distraction of sheltering Svetlana, with all the cloak-and-dagger brouhaha this involved. That night in the stately, wood-paneled reception room, they watched news clips of Svetlana’s arrival. It embarrassed McMillan that the news clips were continuously interrupted by commercials. Svetlana didn’t seem to mind.

  Greenbaum had scheduled Svetlana’s first press conference for April 26, four days after her arrival. It was to take place in the Terrace Room of the Plaza Hotel and be broadcast via satellite feed through Telstar. The day before her performance, Greenbaum rehearsed her on likely questions and reported to George Kennan that he was “optimistic about Svetlana’s conduct in a press conference.” He said he had “grilled her ‘brutally’ about some of the more sensitive aspects of her life” to see how she’d stand up, and was astonished by her “composure and skill,” as if she’d been giving press conferences all her life.12

  Greenbaum did not indicate what these “sensitive aspects” were, but US intelligence sources were already confirming that the line the Soviets were taking about Svetlana was that she was promiscuous, abnormal, non compos mentis, and certainly incapable of writing a book. In fact, they were going to try to pin her book on the CIA.13

  The next day, Svetlana was driven to the Plaza Hotel. Reporters had been directed to submit questions in writing an hour and a half before the 2:00 p.m. press conference. From the more than three hundred questions, her public relations firm—Hill & Knowlton—selected about forty. At the hour-long session, Alan Schwartz read the questions to Svetlana, assuring the audience that she had not seen them in advance. The full transcript of her interview was published the next morning in the New York Times.

  One of the first questions came from Bob Schakne of CBS News, who asked if she disapproved of her father’s regime. She responded, “Of course I disapprove of many things but I think many other people who still are in our Central Committee and Politburo should be responsible for the same things for which he alone was accused. . . . Those horrible things, killing people unjustly, I feel that responsibility for this was and is the Party’s, the regime and the ideology as a whole.” When Gabe Pressman of NBC asked what caused her to “re-evaluate conditions in Russia” and to defect, she responded that the government’s opposition to her marriage to Brajesh Singh was “disgustful,” but also added that another factor was the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel. “The way two writers were treated and sentenced made me absolutely disbelieve in justice. I lost the hopes that I had before that we are going to become liberal.” If the State Department people expected that Svetlana would refrain from expressing her political opinions, they were disappointed.

  She spoke of her children. “They are not guilty at all and I believe they cannot be punished for anything.” Of her newfound wealth: “I’m not going to become a very rich woman. It is absolutely impossible for me to become a rich woman here.” She planned to give most of the money away. To the question of whether she minded the media fuss, she replied, “I cannot understand why, if they write something about new person, why it should be mentioned . . . what he is eating for his lunch.” But she added, “More information is better than no information at all.” A
sked if she would become an American citizen, she said that “love must come before marriage” and burst out laughing. “If I will love this country and this country will love me, then the marriage will be settled.”14

  Her performance was described as “stunning, surefooted, breathtaking.” John Mapes, the head of her PR handlers, remarked to reporters, “She is an intellectual exhibitionist. She needs an audience. She’s a female Nabokov, quite strong-willed.”15 At the end of the press conference, the press corps gave her a standing ovation. She was swiftly taken back into seclusion.

  The next day, however, Svetlana received a devastating letter from her son, Joseph, which she showed to Priscilla with shaking hands. Greenbaum had held the letter back until after the press conference, knowing how much it would devastate her. It was a cold, angry letter in response to their phone conversation in Switzerland:

  When we spoke on the telephone and I heard all you had to say, I was so lost I was unable to answer you coherently. It took me several days to think it over, for things are not at all as simple as you seem to think. . . .

  You must admit that after what you have done, your advice from afar to take courage, to stick together, not to lose heart and not let go of Katya, was, to say the least, strange. . . . I consider that by your action you have cut yourself off from us and therefore, please allow us to live as we see fit. . . .

  Since we have endured fairly stoically what you have done, I hope from now on we shall be allowed to arrange our own lives ourselves. . . . Joseph16

  Svetlana could not stop weeping. She wanted to run away, to hide from all the hospitality and curiosity of people who didn’t understand and seemed to believe that everything was fine now that she was free.

  Basketsful of mail for Svetlana began to arrive, friendly notes of welcome to America, marriage proposals, invitations to join religious organizations, as well as the occasional variation of “Go back home, Red dog! Our cat is better than you. She takes care of her children.” That one cut particularly deeply.17