Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Yet Svetlana could not stop brooding. On November 22, she asked Fischer to return her love letters. She said it disturbed her to think his archive was under the administration of Miss Randall. She wanted to destroy her letters herself; she couldn’t trust him to do it: “I no longer BELIEVE A SINGLE word you say, so I won’t calm down until these documents have been returned to me.”38 Fischer replied officiously:

  NOVEMBER 24, 1968

  Dear Svetlana,

  Letters belong to the recipient.

  Your letters to me are therefore mine and you have no right to them and no right to ask for their return either politely, much less “categorically.” However, since you are eager to have them, I shall send them back to you when I find time to search my files.

  Fischer obviously kept a carbon copy of this letter since it remained in his archive and he certainly never found the time to return Svetlana’s letters.39

  The note was a cruel rebuff. By this gesture he had washed his hands of all responsibility. This is probably when Svetlana marched over once again to his house, this time to demand the return of her letters and other things. What happened next is sad.

  Like all stories attached to Svetlana, it would eventually become available for public consumption. Years later the journalist Patricia Blake, who had worked as Fischer’s co-translator, would write in a Time magazine article:

  One autumn evening in 1968 [Svetlana] arrived in fury at Fischer’s house. He was inside with his editorial assistant, Deirdre Randall, but ignored Svetlana’s knocks and shouts. As Randall remembers the scene, Svetlana raged outside the house for over an hour, weeping and demanding the return of her presents to Fischer: a travel clock and two decorative candles. When Svetlana shattered the glass panels on the sides of the door in an attempt to break in, Fischer called the police. Two officers arrived and found Svetlana hysterical, blood dripping from her cut hands.40

  The gossip buzzed around Princeton, a town unused to such emotional extravagance: Svetlana was unstable, but what could you expect? After all, she was Stalin’s daughter. Blake did not identify Randall as Fischer’s lover.

  One might have hoped at least for some discretion, if not sympathy, from Deirdre Randall, because she knew who Louis Fischer was. In one of her letters she chastised him: “What manner of a man sees three women in as many hours? Who would allow such a thing? Well, I just want to be the last.”41 She told his son George that “Lou” had a “horrible hard, tough, thick-skulled frightening ego,” but she adored the man, and she did manage to be the last of his girlfriends.42 Fischer died a little over a year later, on January 15, 1970. Randall worked for the next two years on the final preparation of his book.

  The gossip soon swelled. In a rage, Svetlana drove her car into Fischer’s house. Princeton hostesses invited Svetlana to important dinner parties where she disappointed the guests who had wanted to meet her. She sat in stony silence and once broke into tears and abruptly left. No one thought to ask why.

  Seven years later, Svetlana was still a good subject for conversation at dinner parties. Priscilla McMillan remembered one party where the episode of her breaking the glass on Louis Fischer’s front door came up. In her memory, George Kennan described how he’d been summoned from a party to the police station. He appeared in his dignified suit, white handkerchief in his pocket, every inch the diplomat, and the police had said, “Oh, you again.”43 Joan Kennan asserted that, in her memory, Svetlana had been taken to the police station only once.44

  One thinks of Svetlana at that door, banging for an hour until she broke the glass and her hands bled, and imagines that she was beating in fury against all the ghosts of her past who had failed her: her mother, her father, her brother, her lovers. And now, this new life.

  Chapter 23

  Only One Year

  As much as she was committed to her new life, Svetlana could not forget her past—here she’s photographed in 1969 while looking at family photographs.

  (Copyright © Marilyn Silverstone/Magnum Photos)

  Svetlana took possession of her new house at 50 Wilson Road on December 20, 1968. The move was hardly the joyful event she’d anticipated. She phoned her old friends Albert and George Paloesik of the Fidelity Detective Bureau and asked them to help her move. She had bought useful, cheerful furniture for the living and dining room and a writing desk for the study; on the desk she placed the pen set Al and George had given her the previous summer. Dried flowers from the vacuum cleaner salesman sat on her kitchen table. She hated dried flowers, but these had been the salesman’s gift—he said he usually charged for them—and so she kept them.

  On December 24, she received a card from her children. The date, so close to the New Year’s celebration, was suspiciously precise. She doubted they sent it. She was sure it came through the Soviet Embassy and was a sadistic taunt. Why was she alone? If she returned home, she could be with her children.

  At some point, Louis Fischer phoned to thank her for her Christmas card and gift. She wrote to him the day after Christmas to say that she’d sent neither a gift nor a card but was simply returning his things. He sounded as if he expected to joke and chat again. If he thought their friendship could resume, she told him, “Forget it.”1

  At the end of January, Edmund Wilson and his wife, Elena, invited her to visit them at their home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Wilson was passionate about all things Russian and spoke the language well. He’d visited the Soviet Union in 1935 and come back an advocate of a Soviet-style socialism, but after the show trials of 1937–38 and Stalin’s 1939 pact with the Nazis, he’d completely repudiated Soviet Communism. Svetlana and her courageous act of defection fascinated him. His wife, Elena, whose roots were partly Russian, was very nervous about meeting her; she told her husband she had a prejudice against Stalin’s daughter. But Svetlana turned out not to be what they’d expected. Wilson wrote in his journal:

  Svetlana made a hit with everybody. She is over 40 but does not look her age. She is very pretty and with her character and brains must have had men after her all her life. Her appearances on TV and in photographs give a misleading impression of her because they make her look much bigger and more substantial than she is. She is small, with nice soft brown hair, rather large round eyes of a peculiar pale color of green, a somewhat elongated and pointed bird-like nose and a small mouth. She has small hands and feet. Elena says that the way she uses her hands shows that she has been frightened all her life: she flicks her thin little fingers as if she were accustomed to warding something off. She is simple and well bred—rather shy but with very firm opinions.2

  Soon Wilson discovered how fierce Svetlana could be. When they discussed the Soviet Union, he found her very pessimistic. He asked her if there wasn’t some political opposition in Russia now, and she replied with disdain that five or six people protesting over a literary trial (the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky) in a country of two hundred million, a handful of ignored poets in Red Square while tanks invaded Prague—what did that amount to? She thought Brezhnev and Kosygin were complete mediocrities, quite incapable of governing Russia, and would soon be pushed out, and things would get worse. When Wilson mentioned that the writers Leonid Leonov and Valentin Kataev seemed “good fellows,” she replied, “We have a different opinion of them,” and told him that both had voted against Pasternak at the Union of Writers.3

  Wilson’s purpose in inviting Svetlana to Wellfleet was for her to meet his friend Paul Chavchavadze, who he thought would be an excellent translator for her new book. Chavchavadze, a Georgian prince in the Caucasus, had fled to Romania and then America, where he’d worked in a shipping office. Recently he’d turned to writing novels and doing translation work.

  The maiden name of his wife, Nina, was Romanov. Her father, the tsar’s uncle, had been shot by the Bolsheviks as he was attempting to leave Russia. Her mother had been queen of Greece, and Nina herself was a grand duchess. Apparently both Nina and Paul were charming and could be great fun and never complained of the catastroph
ic change in their fortunes.

  At dinner that first night, Svetlana remained restrained and silent. When Nina Chavchavadze mentioned that she’d visited the Kremlin, Svetlana replied, “Your Kremlin and my Kremlin are different.”4 She was not amused by Paul’s joke that reports would soon be surfacing that the two great families of Georgia and Russia—the Chavchavadzes and the Stalins—had met. And yet when Svetlana and Nina had a chance to talk privately, Svetlana’s warmth surfaced. They talked of their children, and it was clear to Svetlana that Nina did not judge her.

  Svetlana was soon regularly taking the bus to Wellfleet to visit the Chavchavadzes. Nina always delighted in telling friends about Svetlana’s first visit to her house with George Kennan. There’d been an accident in the kitchen. The sink had blocked and two inches of water covered the kitchen floor. Svetlana said, “I can do this. Leave it to me,” and rolled up her sleeves and mopped the floor. Nina remarked, “If somebody had told me that one day Stalin’s daughter would be scrubbing my kitchen floor, I’d have thought them mad.”5 For Svetlana, the Chavchavadzes seemed a relief after the conventionality of Princeton, where she complained that the ladies “put on stockings” to walk a block or two on the streets.

  Not unexpectedly, Svetlana’s relationship with Louis Fischer could not be so easily abandoned. In early February, they accidentally ran into each other on High Street in Princeton. She wrote to him on February 3:

  Dear Louis,

  I can’t seem to forget your face, which I only saw for a moment when you accidentally looked into the car. It looked thin, to me, tanned, but not very healthy.

  This state of malice and pain that we’re both now in, is counter-intuitive and unfair. . . . But the worst part is knowing that I did it all myself. . . . To forget you and everything else, all that was, isn’t in my hands—there’s no use trying. The foolishness is forgotten and all the good things remain. . . . But a dead end is a dead end; and I know I know how to get out of it.

  Svetlana6

  Fischer agreed to meet her in March at their old haunt, the Princeton Inn. On March 5, she wrote to him that she’d been frightened she would open old wounds, but as she put it, “It turned out you were so emotional and I was so happy.” He wasn’t to worry; she wasn’t going to call him. She would wait for him to call. This woman who had had the strength to defy the Kremlin was again twisting herself into emotional knots. She resumed translating his biography of Mahatma Gandhi into Russian, a task she’d begun, unpaid, as a gesture of love. She told Louis she could feel him between the lines, though she complained—“You USED to be better, I’ll have you notice.”7

  By the end of March, she could say, “I miss your voice—if only I could hear it for a little everyday.” She knew that for Fischer she had been “Too Much, too hot, and too exhausting. What to do? . . . I hope you remember that I’m not asking for anything. Don’t worry and panic when I call. . . . Please try to understand me.”8 By mid-April she could say that all she needed was his smile over the phone. She assured him she was “re-making myself in the spirit of Gandhi. It’s very hard, but possible. Kisses.”9

  At the end of April, she wrote to Annelise Kennan, who had been on the sidelines of the drama, to reassure her that she and Louis had succeeded in making peace. “Do not worry, Annelise my dear—there will be no more broken glasses [sic].”10 She told Annelise she was holding birthday parties for her children. Katya turned nineteen on May 4; Joseph, twenty-four on May 22.

  When she visited Harper & Row in June, she casually asked her publishers how much they were paying Paul Chavchavadze for his translation, because she knew he needed money badly. The amount was satisfactory, but then she was told Louis Fischer was paid $4,000 for editing. Shocked, she wrote to Fischer:

  I do not understand it at all. Should friendship be paid for by the publishers? Do you really believe that you have done such amount of work with my manuscript, which could be estimated in such high figures? What about warmth and encouragement—which was the most important part of your participation in my work? Did you refuse to receive this payment from Harper & Row, or did you feel that it’s OK? . . . I still have hope that it is a mistake. But I would like to hear from you about that.11

  She could not believe that Fischer had taken money. He had only encouraged her. The book was hers.

  Fischer did not respond, but in early August he sent her the manuscript of her translation of his Gandhi biography, obviously hoping she might resume her work on it. She sent it back, addressing him as “Mr. Fischer,” saying he could easily find a better translator. She wished him “good health and a peaceful life.”12 She rarely mentioned Fischer again.

  Svetlana now undertook the ordeal of seeing her new book through publication. Like her first book, Only One Year was autobiographical. It was an account of the extraordinary journey she’d made from the Soviet Union to India to Switzerland to the United States, all in a single year. She’d wrestled with the first section because it mattered to her a great deal, offering as it did a loving portrait of Brajesh Singh and recounting their long battle to marry, ending in his death and her journey to India. In a second section, called “Interlude,” she told her version of her dramatic escape from India and her brief sojourn in Switzerland. In a section called “We Shall Meet Again,” she offered portraits of the many friends she’d left behind in Russia. The last section of her book was about her new life on another continent—“another planet,” as she put it. But Only One Year had a political dimension her first book lacked. In subsections she made uncompromising criticisms of Stalin and his regime.

  Her US publisher, Cass Canfield, had warned her British publisher: “We are dealing with a rather complicated lady and what I advise has little effect. She makes up her own mind.”13 He assured her translator, Paul Chavchavadze, that she was very amenable to suggestions about style, “but she’s not receptive to suggestions as to the shape and content of the book. She feels that the book must be wholly her own and must stand as it is.”14

  Many reviewers had concluded that her purpose in Twenty Letters to a Friend was to exonerate Stalin by placing the blame for his crimes on Beria. She felt they did not understand that her first book had been a private family memoir, written almost as a catharsis four years before she defected. She published it without revisions because it was authentic as to how she had felt then. Beria had targeted her relatives because of their Georgian connections—they knew too much about him.15

  But since 1963, she had read much and been exposed to other cultures. She knew who her father was. Her description in Only One Year of her gradual recognition of his crimes is devastating.

  In the family in which I was born and bred nothing was normal, everything was oppressive and my mother’s suicide was most eloquent testimony to the hopelessness of the situation. Kremlin walls all around me, secret police in the house, in the kitchen, at school. And over it all a wasted, obdurate man, fenced in from his former colleagues, his old friends, from all those who had been close to him, in fact from the entire world, who with his accomplices had turned the country into a prison, in which everyone with a breath of spirit and mind was being extinguished; a man who aroused fear and hatred in millions of men—this was my father. . . .

  My generation was trained to think this monument [Stalin] was the embodiment of all that was most beautiful in the ideals of Communism, its living personification. . . .

  But later I began to doubt. . . . Little by little it became more than obvious not only that my father had been a despot and had brought about a bloody terror, destroying millions of innocent people, but that the whole system which had made it possible was profoundly corrupt; that all its participants could not escape responsibility, no matter how hard they tried. And it was then that the whole edifice, whose foundation rested on a lie, crumbled from top to bottom.16

  She wanted to offer a real portrait of Stalin. After all, she knew him intimately.

  [My father] knew what he was doing. He was neither insane nor misled. Wit
h cold calculation he had cemented his own power, afraid of losing it more than of anything else in the world. . . . To explain things in this way—as madness—is the easiest and simplest thing, but it isn’t true, and it isn’t an explanation.17

  He believed not in ideals but only in men’s realistic political struggles. Nor did he romanticize people: there were the strong, who were needed; equals, who were in the way; and the weak, who were of no use to anyone.18

  I don’t believe he ever suffered any pangs of conscience.19

  But Svetlana had a larger point to make. Her father was not alone responsible. A dictator needs accomplices. In 1966, before she defected, she read Milovan Djilas’s Conversations with Stalin and Isaac Deutscher’s Stalin: A Political Biography and was able to understand the history of the political struggle for supreme power that Stalin had waged in the Communist Party against all his former colleagues. Stalin had reedited, altered, and added to A Brief History of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in order to exclude all rivals, in particular Trotsky. This text served as official history and was distributed in millions of copies. “My father needed this ‘textbook’ to throw out of history, once and for all, those who had been in his way,” she wrote.20 But it was not the true history. The true history was that there were many participants in the political roulette game that Stalin had won, and after his death, the Party continued to play it.

  Svetlana agreed that Khrushchev had raised “the banner of liberation” and would be remembered for his effort “to call things by their real names. The timid half-efforts of this vital, jolly, pig-headed man, broke the silence of many years.”21 But Khrushchev was also responsible for the bloody events in Hungary and the killing of university students in Georgia, students whose bodies had lain in the streets because their relatives were forbidden to collect them. His eleven years in power were a pseudoliberation. Nothing had changed. “Sputniks, festivals, jubilees, and consciousness drowned in Vodka on every occasion: ‘We are the greatest!’ ‘We are the best, the fastest, the foremost!’”22 Anti-Semitism was still rife—no Jews on the Central Committee. In the 1960s in the Soviet Union, you could be refused a job because you were Jewish.