Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  But there were also negative reviews. In the Times of London, Arthur Koestler dismissed the book. “One was certainly not prepared for the voice of this nice, homely woman, treating us to nice homely reflections.”10 The journalist Alexander Werth’s review in the Nation was titled “Svetlana: Who Needs Her?” Werth insisted, absurdly, that Alliluyeva misdated her affair with Kapler. He had been in Moscow when the affair was the subject of gossip.11 Elizabeth Hardwick complained that Svetlana had been so overexposed by the press that her book had the staleness of old news.12

  On October 18—Svetlana remembered the date because the encounter mattered so much to her—she met Alexandra Lvovna Tolstoya, the eighty-three-year old daughter of the famous author of War and Peace. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1920 but released, Tolstoya had chosen exile in the United States. Svetlana traveled to visit her at Valley Cottage in Rockland County, a colony she’d established dedicated to her father’s principles of nonviolence—surely an epic meeting of daughters. Svetlana worshipped Tolstoy and had visited his home in Yasnaya Polyana in Russia several times. Over a Russian dinner of borscht, buckwheat kasha, rye bread, herring, and vodka, she told Tolstoya she would like to help her Tolstoy Foundation.

  By the end of October, as she had said she would, Svetlana began to distribute money from her charitable trust. The New York Times reported in a blazing headline, MRS. ALLILUYEVA DONATES $340,000.13 The donations included $90,000 to organizations helping needy Russians abroad, $50,000 to the Tolstoy Foundation, $10,000 to the New York–based Russian Children’s Welfare Society, $5,000 to the Fund for Relief for Russian Writers and Scientists in Exile, $5,000 to Novy zhurnal, a dissident Russian literary journal in New York noted for its opposition to the Daniel/Sinyavsky trial, $10,000 to the Russian Children’s Home in Paris, and $10,000 to the Pestalozzi Children’s Village in Switzerland. It was her lawyer, Edward Greenbaum, who phoned the New York Times to report the donations.

  Alexandra Tolstoya had assumed Svetlana’s offer was casual. Interviewed by the Times, she said she found Mrs. Alliluyeva “a fine woman, very sincere. I think she suffers. The Russians ought to be kinder to her.” The editor of Novoye Russkoye slovo, the oldest Russian-language newspaper in the United States, remarked cryptically, “If children were to be punished because fathers were guilty, we would do the same thing the Communists did in Russia.”14

  When the jubilee celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Russian Revolution took place on November 7 and the Soviet Union was greeted with endless praise for its socialist progress on American radio stations of the radical left, Svetlana turned off the radio. To her, this was a day of mourning; she spent the day brooding over her mother’s death.

  Like many exiles from the Soviet bloc, Svetlana did not approve of the radical left. She watched the hippie movement and anti–Vietnam War protests of 1967 with dismay. “There is no ideal society,” she said curtly, but at least “here a person can leave.”15

  By the end of October, she’d found a home of sorts. Colonel Ruth Biggs, whom she’d met through George Kennan, invited her to stay at her home in Bristol, in Newport County, Rhode Island. Biggs was actually a lieutenant colonel, now retired, who had served with the Women’s Army Corps in World War II. She had good connections in Washington and tried, unsuccessfully, to help Svetlana search for information about her half brother, Yakov, whose death in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp in 1943 remained unclear: had he committed suicide or been executed? Svetlana spent the next month and a half with Biggs. They passed their days weeding the garden overlooking Narragansett Bay and taking long walks by the ocean, while the colonel kept the newsmen at bay. Svetlana desperately needed this respite. She wrote to Joan Kennan:

  I had such a difficult time—and finally, now, when [I am staying with] Colonel Biggs (with black cats) and when I can relax and try to forget all the worries—now I feel completely exhausted. It seems to me that all my strength has gone—the last summer, autumn, the book, the reviews, TV interview and all that propaganda of slander which continues to go from Moscow—all that finally has ruined me. I feel no more strength to resist all that.16

  In the December 9 issue of the New Yorker, the literary critic and expert on Russia Edmund Wilson, who had not yet met Svetlana, wrote a long article that completely vindicated her complaints about being misunderstood. Few critics carried Wilson’s authority. He castigated the press—in its eagerness to exploit the sensational aspects of her story, it had vulgarized her. The magazine Stern had cast doubts on her veracity. The TV journalists who had interviewed her were hostile, as if they wished to degrade their subject. Esquire magazine reached the lowest point with a cover photograph of Svetlana painted with Stalin’s mustache, implying that she was trading on her father’s infamy.

  Wilson lashed out:

  Thus America has exploited Svetlana and at the same time accused her of exploiting herself. The Soviets denounce her as a traitor and a tool of the United States, and intimate that she is off her head, while the more fantastic White Russian émigrés, who do not want to believe that the daughter of Stalin can have anything good about her, declare variously that her sojourn in Switzerland was for the purpose of collecting money that her father had stashed away there, and that her interest in religion is an impudent pretence, since she is really a Soviet spy. The last idea that any of these critics seem to be able to entertain is that . . . she may have left the Soviet Union with something like a sense of mission—to repudiate her father’s “system” and to try to make amends for his crimes. No one seems to ask himself what it would be like to be Stalin’s daughter, brought up on the gospel of the class struggle and later a witness to the horrors that this gospel was made to produce, and at the same time to find oneself a serious, affectionate, and spiritually minded woman. . . . Why are the only motives imagined for her so often only sordid ones?17

  This review mattered deeply to Svetlana. She had become accustomed to the merciless attacks against her father in the USSR during the Thaw, attacks that had also fallen on her, but in the West she had naively expected a different reception. It’s astonishing that she absorbed the blows and continued. She had an undaunted optimism, honed by years of surviving so many cruel bereavements, so many disappointments and losses. Somehow she continued to believe in the future. Was this merely the product of growing up at the top of the pyramid and learning to wield the power there? Detractors said so, but she said her optimism was founded in a spiritual sense of the profundity of nature and the Good.

  In 1963, still trapped in the USSR, she had ended Twenty Letters to a Friend with an epilogue addressed to future generations who would look back “at their country’s history with a feeling of pain, contrition and bewilderment”:

  I hope they won’t forget that what is Good never dies—that it lived on in the hearts of men even in the darkest times and was hidden where no one thought to look for it, that it never died out or disappeared completely.

  Everything on our tormented earth that is alive and breathes, that blossoms and bears fruit, lives only by virtue of and in the name of Truth and Good.18

  It’s a remarkable statement from Stalin’s daughter. Many wanted to dismiss this as rhetoric, sentimentality, self-delusion, or hypocritical evasion. And yet she would never let go of this belief in the Good. How to explain it? Perhaps when human beings are tested to the depth that Russians were tested, they find other dimensions of the inner self. Andrei Sinyavsky had taught Svetlana much about belief in the Good. It sustained him through his years in the Gulag. It had less to do with Western notions of goodness, the absence of evil, than with the will to affirm good in the face of evil. Svetlana kept going when others would certainly have quit. Something drove her to pick herself up each time. And the tests would continue almost indefinitely.

  Chapter 22

  A Cruel Rebuff

  In a photo taken in 1969, Svetlana stands proudly outside 50 Wilson Road.

  (Copyright © Marilyn Silverstone/Magnum Photos)

 
; In December 1967, George and Annelise Kennan had good news for Svetlana. They’d found her a house to rent in Princeton. She had been a nomad for nine months now, living as a guest in other people’s houses, and it would be a relief to be settled. The house at 85 Elm Road belonged to Dorothy Commins, a professional musician whose husband, a New York publisher, had recently died. Commins was setting out on a world tour to collect children’s songs and musical games, leaving her substantial home to Svetlana to rent for a year.

  The house had a living room large enough for musical recitals, a library filled with musical scores and records, and a grand piano. There were fine engravings and watercolors on the walls, and old silver and bronze decorative objects scattered throughout the rooms. Everywhere, there were also plastic flowers, which Svetlana stuffed away discreetly in drawers. She brought only her boxes of books, sent to her by strangers from around the world, and the clothes she’d collected since her arrival.

  Svetlana claimed that when she went down to the cellar of the house, she found men installing wires. They said these were for a fire alarm, but she was certain the men were from the CIA or FBI. She complained to Kennan, who responded that, well, yes, it was possible, but he couldn’t prevent it. Anyway, he was concerned for her safety. She laughed. Here she was in the free world, still bugged. No matter.1 Was she actually being bugged? Svetlana sometimes gave in to paranoia, but the FBI had certainly been informed as soon as she moved into 85 Elm Road and kept tabs on her, believing, accurately, that the Soviets had not given up on Stalin’s daughter.2 They knew she was working on a second book. If she left Princeton for more than two days, she felt uncomfortable unless she put her papers in a safe-deposit box in the bank.

  On December 19 she sat at a small table at the Princeton Inn with Annelise Kennan and Louis Fischer. It had been exactly a year since she had left her son at the Moscow airport in a raging blizzard and flown to New Delhi. Who could have predicted that the flight would land her at this table? “Let us drink then to this year of freedom!” Louis Fischer said.3 Svetlana had met Fischer a little over a month before at a dinner at the Kennans’ home on November 12, and he had taken it upon himself to show her how to live in America. There was so much she didn’t know. One of the first things he did was to accompany her to a Princeton bank to open a bank account and show her how to balance a checkbook.4

  On December 21, Svetlana was alone and in an antic mood and decided to play a joke. She put out snacks and wine on the table and dialed the emergency number for the police. When the police arrived, she said, “Merry Christmas” and invited them in. It was the same spirit of mischief that had led her to step on the gas when she passed the sentry post in Zhukovka. It amused her to test authority, though only someone used to wielding it would find this amusing. The police replied, “We’re on duty. We don’t drink,”5 though apparently one of them laughed. Gossip soon traveled around Princeton and even reached the newspapers that she had dialed the emergency number to summon the police because she was so desperately lonely.6

  Svetlana was actually excited by her new life of freedom, though she was, not unexpectedly, looking for someone to share it. She was deeply attracted to Louis Fischer. Fischer was seventy-one when he met Svetlana, but he was still as charismatic and vital as he had been in the days when he had out-Hemingwayed Hemingway. It is hard to imagine a more volatile career and a more seductive man.

  Fischer grew up in the Jewish ghetto in Philadelphia, the son of Russian immigrants. After serving with the British army in Palestine in World War I, he married a Russian and began working as special European correspondent for the Nation. “We correspondents were one big, almost permanent poker party,” he recalled.7

  Fischer knew Russia well. Enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution, he’d lived for nine years in Moscow until the Great Terror of 1937, when he quit the country, leaving behind his wife and two sons. Through the intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt, he eventually got his family to the United States, but he abandoned them again, saying he preferred to live in hotels.8

  Fischer was most famous for his coverage of the Spanish Civil War. He’d worked with Hemingway, with the novelist André Malraux, with John Dos Passos; he’d met Gandhi and Churchill. There were few among the famous whom Fischer hadn’t encountered. By the time Svetlana met him, he had published ten books, including a somewhat hurriedly written biography of Stalin completed in 1952, and a biography of Gandhi. Fischer was now a professor at Princeton, affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He radiated confidence. The sheer scale of his life, its encyclopedic breeziness, was thrilling.

  And now Fischer sat across from Stalin’s daughter in a restaurant in Princeton. To him, of course, she was an opportunity. Svetlana would have the inside story. From the beginning, it was clear that Fischer was less interested in Svetlana than in the idea of Svetlana—as Stalin’s daughter, she was at the center of the maelstrom of twentieth-century history.

  Fischer was obsessed with Stalin. In 1927, with a delegation of American labor leaders and intellectuals, he had spent six hours interviewing him. He described Stalin as having “crafty eyes,” a “low forehead,” and “ugly short black and gold teeth when he smiles,” but he was impressed. Stalin was “unsentimental, steel-willed, unscrupulous and irresistible.”9 Irresistible was not quite the word one would expect, but according to accounts of those close to Stalin, the vozhd could be charismatic and even seductive.

  The Yugoslav author Milovan Djilas corroborated Fischer’s assessment. He knew Stalin well and described him shrewdly as a “cold calculator,” a man of “fanatical dogmatism,” but said that “his was a passionate and many-sided nature—though all sides were equal and so convincing that it seemed he never dissembled but was always truly experiencing each of his roles.” Whatever he wanted “he could approach by manipulating and kneading the reality and the living men who comprised it.”10 Stalin had a capacity to focus so intently on whomever he was talking to that the person felt intimately connected, almost, for the moment, as if living in the reality he, Stalin, invented. One could almost say the same of Fischer. This gift of attention made him a brilliant journalist and a consummate seducer.

  Svetlana would claim that Fischer was the first man to capture her imagination with the intensity of her long-ago lover Aleksei Kapler. At forty-one, she must have felt sixteen again. Indeed, she behaved as if she were.

  Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Svetlana found Louis Fischer attractive. He was an outsize figure, larger than life. But in her way, so was she. Her old lover, David Samoilov, had said that there was something of the tyrant in Svetlana’s emotional exuberance. When she was drawn to someone, she dived into the relationship until it consumed everything else. She demanded a drama.

  The affair with Fischer had been building for some time, but for Svetlana the climax came when Fischer invited her to accompany him to the memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King at the University Chapel in Princeton. She’d phoned Fischer when she heard the news of Dr. King’s assassination on April 4. The shock and distress in his voice had been palpable.

  After they’d spent the night together, she wrote to Fischer that at the memorial service, as they had sat under the filtered light from the blue and yellow stained glass windows and the organ played, she’d had a “strange feeling” that she and he were “joined together.” “It was our wedding, the union of two souls to be always together, to do only good to each other. That was something that Martin Luther King left for you and me—because he, certainly, left his heart with us, with everybody, who was present that afternoon at University Chapel.”11

  But Fischer seemed unmoved by Svetlana’s romanticism. He was not looking for a soul mate. The central motive of his life was his own work, and at seventy-one, he cherished his independence. On their next encounter a few days later, he was decidedly cool. “I felt the strongest pain of uselessness,” she complained.

  Well, dear, you have taken my life in your hands, now, DO SO
METHING with it: throw it away, press it to your heart, put it aside gently, put it in the freezer for a while, to keep it there—DO SOMETHING, if you really are concerned about me and my feelings. BUT, please, PLEASE, do not just play the game with it. . . . My only peace is near you, when I embrace you and your hands ARE AROUND ME. Svetlana12

  Having clearly raised her expectations, Fischer seemed to have been in retreat from her all-consuming passion. He warned her that he needed his independence for his work. She countered: “You do not need a mistress—forgive my vulgar words. Neither I ever looked to find a lover. We both need something else—warmth, friendship, understanding. . . . It is love. Everyone needs it.”13 By June she was assuring him she would follow his “way.” “I will not come and will not make telephone calls.”14 She even promised to write shorter letters.