Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Biagi spoke to Svetlana’s old lover, Aleksei Kapler, who said he was shocked at her defection. “When I heard of her departure I couldn’t believe it. I have my own ideas about Russian women; I have known many. . . . I believe something terrible, something abnormal must have happened to Svetlana, perhaps an illness of some kind.” Her act was unforgivable. Kapler paraphrased Turgenev: “Russia can do without us, but no one can live without Russia.”18

  When Biagi asked the writer Ilya Ehrenburg about Joseph’s comments on his mother, Ehrenburg replied cryptically: “He would do better to venerate his father [Morozov] who is Jewish, and has his own troubles.”19 He was implicitly supporting Svetlana’s repudiation of the current government by himself critiquing its policies of anti-Semitism, though only those used to reading Soviet citizens’ coded language would understand this. For Ehrenburg to say more would have been dangerous.

  By July, Biagi had turned his research into a short book, Svetlana: The Inside Story. It was immediately released in Italian and hurriedly translated into English. For Svetlana, the effect of reading it, as well as the slanderous clippings from European newspapers sent to her anonymously, was shattering. While she knew that her friends and her son were under the scrutiny of the KGB and had to denounce her defection, it was excruciating to have her private life smeared. “Why did they have to go after my children?” she asked. But of course she knew why.20

  One day at the end of the summer when there was no one else at the Kennan farm but the children and their babysitter, Svetlana called them all out to the veranda. She asked Joan’s son Christopher, who was seventeen, to bring her the lighter fluid for the barbecue. She told the children they were witnesses to a solemn ceremony: “I am burning my Soviet passport in answer to lies and calumny.” They all watched wide-eyed as the passport flared brightly. When it was over, Svetlana “carried out the handful of ashes and blew on them. The wind carried them off.”21

  There was one consolation, however, that restored a modicum of her dignity. That June the Atlantic had published her article “To Boris Leonidovich Pasternak.” She’d worked with Pasternak’s British translator, Max Hayward, to whom Priscilla McMillan had introduced her before their falling-out. In his brief preface to the article, Hayward had offered lavish praise: “Svetlana Alliluyeva’s reflections illuminate the sense of Pasternak’s work as no other comment has ever done.”22 She had drawn parallels between Zhivago’s terrible fate and the devastation in her own lost family and country. As Hayward was the translator of Doctor Zhivago into English, his words carried weight. He was invited to visit the Kennan family at Cherry Orchard farm at the beginning of the summer.

  Joan Kennan had been surprised when Svetlana chose to settle herself on the third floor of the farmhouse, which got unbearably hot in the summer months. There were other, more comfortable rooms below, but Svetlana had picked this space because it was where Kennan had his study. One wall was covered with bookshelves painted white, as her bookshelves had been in Moscow, and the shelves were full of Russian books, newspapers, and journals. The huge plain wooden table flooded by sunshine, which served Kennan as a desk, now served as hers. But the third floor also had the convenience of a door that closed off the upper reaches of the house. Joan Kennan remarked that Svetlana and Max would go up to the third floor and close the door. “There was a romantic interest, certainly on Svetlana’s part, and I think she was pretty starry eyed for a while because I think she thought they would be going off into the sunset together.”23

  Max Hayward was an interesting figure. Two years older than Svetlana, he’d begun his career in the world of diplomacy, working in the late 1940s at the British Embassy in Moscow, once serving as the British ambassador’s translator on a visit to Stalin in the Kremlin. He was currently a professor of Soviet literary politics at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford.

  Saint Antony’s was the “spy college,”24 rumored to have connections with the London branch of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, one of the CIA’s most effective Cold War covert operations, which supported journals and set up international congresses to reach intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. That very May 1967, it was finally confirmed that the CIA, through the CCF, had been secretly funding the prestigious British magazine Encounter for more than ten years.

  When Svetlana’s article on Pasternak came out that June and the KGB realized that Max Hayward was working with her, he was called a CIA spy in the Soviet press. There was no evidence for this, but Max Hayward was certainly one of the foreign academics who were personae non gratae in the Soviet Union. In the frenzied 1960s world of intelligence intrigue, it made sense that Hayward was thought to be safe to manage Svetlana. He was well known to George Kennan and Arthur Sulzberger from summers spent together on the Greek island of Spetses. But Hayward was more of a gadfly than anything else. Looking back, he liked to boast of the wealthy Americans whom he’d “managed to con” into generously supporting his lifestyle.25

  Svetlana was delighted by Max. They spent their time in her third-floor room speaking in Russian about Russia, about “everything under the sun.” No one understood her problems and worries better than Max Hayward. He was at the farm so often that Joan Kennan ended up doing his laundry.26

  Before long, Svetlana was in love with Max. He was flattering and he clearly admired her, but he soon discovered he was in over his head. As Priscilla McMillan, who knew him well, explained:

  Max was a person whose idea of heaven was to come to New York and stay at the Chelsea, where [Bob] Dylan, [Judy] Collins, Leonard Cohen had stayed, and drink a lot. There was one time he left to go to supervise the Maltese translation of Doctor Zhivago. We were all laughing. Or when it came to translating [Solzhenitsyn’s] One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, I and my friends locked him up in a room in the Russian Center here and took him his meals so he couldn’t get out and drink all night and could translate it in time for the deadline.

  In Priscilla’s opinion, whoever had an affair with Max had to be smart enough “to know he wasn’t marriageable material. But Svetlana had a tropism towards men and wouldn’t have applied that kind of sophistication.”27

  Joan Kennan remembered picking up Max at the train station in Harrisburg on one of his visits. He was clearly distraught at having entangled himself with Svetlana. He said that she seemed to expect to marry him. Joan wasn’t sure whether they had an actual physical affair or who seduced whom, but in any case, Svetlana was expecting to be with Max. By the middle of August, he beat a hasty retreat to England. However, Svetlana was not so easily discouraged.

  When George Kennan returned from Africa at the end of the summer, though Max had asked her not to, Svetlana discussed her plans with him. Max, she assured Kennan, had said he was coming back to the United States for a month at Christmas, and had invited her to join him in Oxford. He was going to help her write a second book. Kennan knew Hayward. He advised Svetlana, gently, that it would be hard for her to get to England now that she had burned her Soviet passport.

  That October, she finally received a letter from Max saying it was impossible for him to leave Oxford. She wrote to Joan Kennan that she didn’t know what happened. It had to be the slander from Moscow. She ranted, “Why have I escaped from USSR, indeed, to meet here, in this free country, something which again makes me feel the ‘Government property’ but not the free human being?”28

  She lamented to Joan that she was terrified of being alone. “I cannot imagine my own life just alone—it is not my nature to live just by my own. My life can only wind itself around somebody—and you know how much I have lost. . . . To remain alone just in the beginning of some kind of the new life seems for me absolutely unbearable.”29 Svetlana may have been gullible, but she was also extremely willful. She was looking to Max to save her.

  Poignantly, she refused to see through Max’s evasions. She believed in Max’s feeling, his compassion. There was a future with him, but the world condemned her to solitude. Love was a melodrama, a longing for the person
who never came; and fidelity to that person. Who but her father had taught her the dynamics of love? But this was not something that Svetlana could examine, for it would have meant confronting the psychological scars, traumas, and losses of her terrible childhood. The affair with Max fizzled out.

  Svetlana decided there had to be an enemy, and the enemy became George Kennan, who was worried about “what people would say.” In Moscow they said she was a “very bad woman.” She complained to Joan: “And so for the sake of my own good name, and also the honor of this country . . . I must keep away from Max Hayward and he should stay away from me.” She said, “I still have great faith in Max, in his feeling, in his compassion, in everything he has given me—and can give more. But I can see that his own life becomes only full of pain because of me—and nothing else.”30 Max was probably feeling more embarrassment than pain.

  The relentless KGB-staged attacks—from her son, her friends, her countrymen—appearing in Soviet and international newspapers were lacerating, and she must have felt totally exposed. Who could possibly understand what she was going through? She had turned to Max Hayward, the erudite and impeccable Russian translator, for protection. Given her outward strength, Hayward probably had no idea of her vulnerability. Uncharacteristically, Svetlana rarely spoke publicly of Max Hayward again or wrote about him in her books.

  Svetlana had now tasted the intoxicating freedom of escape, but to what? From the total silence of the USSR, she had stepped into the world of the free press and was an object of everyone’s scrutiny. She knew “the lies spread about me would be believed sooner than anything I might say or write. My father’s name is too odious, and I am living under its shadow.”31 She was now an exile: her country, her roots, her children, and all those she loved had been amputated. When her new acquaintances closed their doors and retreated to their families, she was entirely on her own. It is hard to imagine a human being more alone than Stalin’s daughter.

  Chapter 21

  Letters to a Friend

  By 1969, Svetlana was hard at work on her second book, Only One Year.

  (Copyright © Marilyn Silverstone/Magnum Photos)

  Svetlana left the Kennan farm in the middle of August and headed to New York to prepare for the publication of Twenty Letters to a Friend. The autumn would be frenetic as she moved from household to household, often the guest of people she’d met casually who offered to take her in. It might have been fun if not for the campaign of vilification against her book and the constant intrusive attention of journalists looking for Stalin’s daughter.

  On August 15, while staying at the home of Evan Thomas, she met with fifteen editors of the various magazines that were serializing her book, including ones from England, Finland, Japan, Israel, Greece, and Brazil. Publicity about Twenty Letters, particularly the slanders from Victor Louis, had raised some concerns. Svetlana was almost amused by their initial response to her.

  How they eyed me at first! I don’t know what they had expected to find—a proverbial Russian baba in bast shoes, or a dark-haired Georgian with a moustache and a pipe in her mouth, like my father? Whatever it was, after two hours they warmed up to me. The conversation was unconstrained and interesting. They could not guess, of course, how much I would have liked to continue talking to them for a few more hours, ask them questions, go to a restaurant with them, have a long heart-to-heart talk with every single one. If only they could have understood what a yearning for the outside world is experienced by all of us, the cloistered and incarcerated Soviets!1

  Her demeanor impressed the editors; she was not the unstable woman Victor Louis and others portrayed. But she was frustrated that they didn’t seem to understand her main point. Russia was a paradox; her whole life consisted of paradoxes, and until Westerners fully recognized this, nothing would ever be clear. She wanted them to understand that while so-called revolutionary Russia had become a reactionary, repressive state, many Russians still miraculously maintained a climate of psychological freedom and a longing for internationalism that made it an exciting country. Russia was not only the Gulag prison system and the police state that the West focused on in its portrayal of dissidents. Among the tiny community of intellectuals, it was a vibrant, creative milieu, at least in private kitchens, and she missed it deeply. There was so much paranoid propaganda that she despaired of the West’s ever understanding the conundrum that was Russia.

  Svetlana spent the next two weeks in Nantucket with Alan Schwartz and his family. The place plunged her into a meditative and restorative nostalgia. She felt she was back in Koktebel in the Crimea, a seaside village where artists and friends gathered.

  Nantucket was all subdued colors: gray, overcast skies, yellow dunes, purple heather in the marshes, and, of course, the ocean, changing every day, every hour. Inconstant, capricious, at times gray, at others blue, and then again black with the white foam of rage. One never grew tired of contemplating that difficult, changeable temperament. Perhaps that was why all Russians loved the sea so. . . . To reach the blue sea, to feel in one’s heart its expanse, its freedom, see its glitter in the sun, enjoy it to the full and dissolve in it. . . . Pushkin talked to the sea. Pasternak listened to it. Gorky said: “The sea laughed.”2

  In Nantucket she’d met Eleanor Friede, the widow of an Estonian immigrant from Russia, who invited her to stay at her summer home in Bridgehampton on Long Island for a couple of weeks. Friede had a small one-story cottage on the ocean. She kept a portrait of Emperor Nicholas II on her living room wall. Svetlana was amused when Eleanor offered to remove it, thinking it might offend her Communist sensibilities. The portrait stayed on the wall. They walked on the beaches collecting stones and driftwood, and Svetlana talked of her rambles along the Black Sea Coast. Though Truman Capote had a house nearby, she declined an introduction. She longed for privacy.

  She was with Eleanor Friede on September 10 when the first of twelve installments of Twenty Letters appeared in the New York Times. When she eagerly opened the newspaper, she was shocked to find herself staring at a photograph from her own collection. The photograph had been taken in Sochi. She was seven years old, squirming in her father’s arms as he kissed her and tickled her with his mustache. The extract was called “The Death of My Father.” There were other photographs: of her father’s funeral cortege; of Lavrenty Beria, with the caption “monster”; of herself sitting among the birches at Zubalovo. How had the newspaper obtained her photographs?

  Over the subsequent days, for twelve issues, she read the distressing subtitles: “How My Mother Killed Herself,” “My Love Affair with Kapler,” “Two Marriages End in Failure,” “My Brother Dies in Disgrace,” “Beria Takes Over Our Household.” A number of the photographs were mislabeled. In one her governess was misidentified as her mother; in another the child was not her but a stranger. She thought the newspaper must have bought the photographs from Victor Louis, because the captions contained the same inaccuracies as his article in the London Daily Express. There were also errors in the text.

  Why hadn’t the newspaper checked with her? The Greenbaum firm had neglected to ensure that preapproval rights were in her contract.3 She complained to Evan Thomas that extracts taken from here and there in her book and illustrated by stolen photographs made her feel confused and unhappy, but there was nothing to do.4

  In late September she moved to the home of her publisher Cass Canfield in Bedford Village. It was here that she got her first copy of Twenty Letters. The book was a consolation after the serialization. It was pristine; there were no photographs or lurid titles. It seemed suddenly miraculous that she was here, in America, holding in her hands a book that she had written for the drawer four years earlier in Moscow. She had never imagined then that people would be able to read it.

  Soon she moved to New York, living as a guest at the Brooklyn home of her lawyer Maurice Greenbaum (though he was an executive partner of the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, he was not related to Edward Greenbaum). She was grateful not to be in hotels, where sh
e would have been at the mercy of reporters, and spent much of her time with Greenbaum’s twenty-two-year-old niece, who introduced her, incognito, to Manhattan. She found it easy and absorbing to be with the young woman and her friends, and as they talked of their summers in Greece and Canada, she thought how constrained the lives of her own children were. Her son had never been given permission to travel as a tourist, even to Yugoslavia.

  Nevertheless, she still had reason to feel anxious. The KGB had her in its sights. She received an unexpected letter from a woman named Madame Boyko, an employee at the Soviet Embassy whom she had known slightly in Moscow. Madame Boyko wanted to meet and talk with her, even offering her services in delivering a letter or parcel to her children. “I often think of you in the evening. Is there a single person here with whom you could talk? I know Americans, they are indifferent to the lives of others, uninterested.”5 All of a sudden this stranger was concerned about her loneliness. She was certain that KGB officers at the Soviet Embassy had dictated the letter.

  In October, CIA officer Donald Jameson wrote to George Kennan:

  As perhaps you have learned from Svetlana or Alan Schwartz, there have been a series of interesting new approaches to her from the Soviets. The affair of the letter from Madame Boyko [is] . . . only part of the story. Two KGB officers in New York have mentioned her recently to contacts of theirs. In both cases the content of their comments seemed to foreshadow an attempt to urge Svetlana to return to the Soviet Union for family reasons.6

  Reviews of Twenty Letters began to appear in late September, and predictably, they were more about the reviewers’ politics than about the book. Bertram Wolfe, who had written biographies of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, wrote in the Chicago Daily News: “[Alliluyeva’s] memoirs take us into a world whose people and way of life are utterly strange to us, a world of gloomy Kremlin splendors, intrigues and suspicion, espionage, preposterous accusations and blood purges.”7 Arthur Schlesinger ended his review in the Atlantic by commenting that the Russians were upset by the book and asked: “How would Americans have felt at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence if the British, a month before July 4, 1826, had published a book by a daughter of George Washington exposing the glorious experiment as a racket and a fraud?” But he said the Russians were wrong. “This book is not the work of a sensationalist or a traitor. It is wrung from an agonized conscience and a sickened heart.”8 In the New York Times Book Review, Olga Carlisle, a writer of Russian extraction whose family had been forced into exile after the triumph of the Bolsheviks in 1917 and who later helped to smuggle Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago to the West, expressed astonishment. “To be Stalin’s daughter and to remain human is itself admirable—and we have every evidence that Svetlana Alliluyeva remained so.”9