Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Then, in her book, Svetlana did the unthinkable. She not only criticized the current Soviet government as neo-Stalinist, warning that reinstating Stalin’s “merits” would be disastrous not just for the USSR but for the world. She also traced the Soviet system back through Stalin to its roots in Leninism. This was sacred territory.

  Lenin laid the foundation for a one-party system, for terror and the inhuman suppression of all dissenters. He was the true father of everything that Stalin later developed to its furthest limits. All efforts to whiten Lenin and make a saint of him are useless. . . . Stalin became the embodiment of [Lenin’s ideal], the most complete personification of power without democracy, built on the suppression of millions of human lives.23

  Edmund Wilson received an advance copy of Only One Year for review and wrote to his friend Helen Muchnic that he thought Svetlana’s new book was “terrific—quite different from the first—and I am afraid it may get her into trouble.”24 When he saw Svetlana in early September, he suggested that her book was such a bombshell that the Soviets might just ignore it. She said they weren’t bright enough for that. “They would say, as they had done with her first book, that it had been written by the CIA and circulate scandals about her personal life.”25 A reporter for Look magazine interviewed her and asked how the Russians would receive her book. She replied, “It is an anti-Communist book. They will receive it as they receive anti-Communist books.”26

  She was exactly right. Only One Year infuriated the KGB. She had maligned Lenin! The surviving minutes of a Government Safety Committee meeting directed by Yuri Andropov outlined the plot of deliberate obfuscation the Soviet government was hatching in order to sabotage her book. The Soviets would spread the word that Svetlana had not written the book at all. The enemy had written it as part of an anti-Soviet campaign. The enemy was bent on defaming the name of Lenin on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.

  Top Secret:

  USSR

  Committee

  Government Safety, on the advice of the Ministers of the USSR

  NOVEMBER 5, 1969

  No. 2792-A

  Reference: Moscow

  On the information of the Safety Committee, the analyst is examining the publication of a new book by S. Alliluyeva, “Only One Year” as one measure of an expanding anti-soviet campaign underway in time for the 100-year anniversary of the birthday of Vladimir Lenin.

  Recently in the newspaper “The New York Times” and other American publications, a number of pieces have appeared highlighting the publication of “Only One Year” which propose the idea that STALIN was unjustly blamed for “dictatorship and the police state.” In truth, he inherited everything from LENIN and “it is precisely LENIN who is responsible for everything that is happening in the USSR.” “STALIN was not a perversion of LENIN. He was the sole possible outcome after LENIN.”

  Keeping in mind the aforementioned, in the goal of distracting the global public from the slanderous campaign carried out by the enemy using S. Alliluyeva’s book “Only One Year,” the following action is recommended:

  Through letters between Joseph Alliluyev and Ektarine Alliluyeva and the Politburo “TsK KPSS” in which indignation at the quisling behavior of their mother is discussed, to prepare and publish abroad letters of S. ALLILUYEVA’s children addressed to a famous political correspondent H. Salisbury [Harrison Salisbury], an editor at the New York Times who interviewed S. ALLILUYEVA and who had a personal acquaintanceship with her.

  This action will be ensured by the publication of the aforementioned letters and interview with the children of S. ALLILUYEVA in one of the leading European journals/magazines.

  To publish in Western print, the thesis that the new book by S. ALLILUYEVA is the result of the collective efforts of individuals who may include: D. [sic] KENNAN, L. SCHIFER, M. DJILAS, G. FLOROVSKY, A. BELINKOV, and others who recommend themselves as enemies of the USSR, specializing in falsifying the history of the Soviet Government. At the same time to include in those materials currently at the disposal of the KGB, information to personally compromise these individuals.

  To direct a letter to the address of S. ALLILUYEVA from the known Soviet intelligentsia, who are personally acquainted with S. ALLILUYEVA (the writer Soloukhin; the cinema director Kapler, editor in chief of the journal “The Soviet Screen,” Pisarevsky; professor Myasnikov who was academic advisor to S. ALLILUYEVA when she defended her thesis, and others), which would contain a motivational protest against the falsification of the facts surrounding the Soviet government, slandering V. I. LENIN. Such a letter may be sent to S. ALLILUYEVA via the KGB, with the calculation of it being worthy of publication abroad.

  In preparing for the publication, in the soviet press, of these letters/articles in order to expose the construction of these lies, it is imperative to include the thesis that these pieces dirty the “facts” of the material available to the people, in that they are inadequate in a personal and public sense. With that comes the need to show the attempts of the enemy to undermine the greatness and authority of V. I. LENIN, while instilling distrust in our system with the help of such figures as S. ALLILUYEVA, discrediting the memory/eulogy of (Aleksander) KERENSKY and relying in her book on the demagoguery of TROTSKY.

  Allow the Propaganda division of the TsK KPSS to analyse the book “Only One Year” in order to determine the new position and direction/strategy of the enemy, which may be present in the text, and on the basis of which the ideological campaign will be set in play to undermine the 100th anniversary of the birthday of V. I. LENIN.

  Please consider.

  Representative for the Committee on Government Safety,

  Andropov27

  This top-secret document was among Svetlana’s personal papers. How or when she obtained it remains a mystery, though it is probable, if not verifiable, that it came to her through the CIA. How she reacted can be guessed. She would probably have thought, Yes, this is how the secret police work in my country, and found their scheme to distort reality and steal her book both repulsive and predictable. The clear evidence of their blatant manipulation of her children would have been exceedingly painful, if also predictable. Of course, she would not have blamed Joseph and Katya; she knew that, like all those who came under KGB scrutiny, her children had little choice.

  However, the terrible thing was that the suspicion of treachery and espionage was so ingrained that the accusation stuck; many Russians believed the KGB propaganda. Even members of Svetlana’s own extended family suspected that she didn’t write Only One Year.28 It was too different from her first book.

  In the acknowledgments, Svetlana had made the generous mistake of thanking all those who had read her manuscript in Russian. Among others, she thanked George Kennan, Louis Fischer, Robert Tucker, Georges Florovsky, Milovan Djilas, and Arkady Belinkov and his wife. This was where the KGB got its list for the “collective” authorship.

  Arkady and Natalia Belinkov had indeed read the manuscript. In their memoir published in 1982, Natalia Belinkov explained:

  Like many writers, who have been cut off from their familiar milieux and have not yet adapted to the new one, she needed readers. While we visited [Svetlana] we took on that role. Arkadii thought highly of this manuscript. He only had doubts about the chapter that was most important to Svetlana—“The Shore of the Ganges.” Perhaps it slowed down the development of the main plot. . . .

  We did not know, and neither did Svetlana, that at the same time as we were reading the book, it was being read in all the right places. It was read more than carefully. As a result, the head of State Security, Andropov, in December of 1969, ordered the Department of Propaganda “to spread ideas into the Western press that the new book is the result of a collective work of people like Kennan, Fischer, Djilas, Florovsky, and A. Belinkov” and ordered “to include materials in the possession of the KGB that individually compromise every person on the list.” No, he [Andropov] was not concerned about “The Shore of the Ganges” slowing down the main plot of
the book. He was saving Lenin’s reputation.29

  Kennan had read part one of Only One Year and told Svetlana it was very good. She didn’t offer him the rest to read. He made a few editorial comments, but nothing substantial.30 Georges Florovsky was a professor at Princeton; mentioning him was a courtesy, as was mentioning Djilas, whom Svetlana had met only once.

  Svetlana gave the Russian typescript to the Princeton historian Robert Tucker. He and his wife were neighbors whom she’d met shortly after she arrived in the United States when he’d tried to persuade her to lecture at Princeton University. Tucker posed questions, offered suggestions, and advised her to change the title. Svetlana told Louis Fischer in March that Tucker had “made ‘comments’ on almost every page, but I didn’t bother listening to him.”31

  In a portrait of Svetlana written for the Washington Post in 1984, titled “Svetlana Inherited Her Tragic Flaw,” Robert Tucker complained that she had taken almost none of his advice and that her unnecessary thank-you to him in her afterword caused him an “unpleasant moment” when he visited Moscow State University in 1970. His Soviet escort had pounced on him in an unguarded moment and told him in an intimidating way that he had read Only One Year, remarking nastily that it was American anti-Soviet propaganda.

  We knew her as a student here and she couldn’t even write a course paper on her own. . . . Then he leaned very close to me and said in an intense voice: “You wrote that book.” If he believed that, I answered, he didn’t understand Svetlana. She was not one to accept easily a person’s critical suggestions, much less to allow somebody else to write her book. It would offend her pride of authorship. At that, the exchange ended with a frosty smile on our escort’s face.32

  Louis Fischer’s role was initially important. He was her lover. She had read the first part of her manuscript to him during those days in Princeton when their affair flourished, but he had already left for Paris and Tunis in mid-August while she was still in the midst of writing the book. And by the time he got back, their relationship was so acrimonious that he could hardly have offered his services as a reader. However, his presence in the initial stages of the writing probably influenced her tone. Only One Year was a more political book than Twenty Letters to a Friend, but, as she told her friend Lily Golden in her telephone conversation from Switzerland, she now knew so much more about the crimes of the Soviet government, and she was outraged.

  Twenty-five years later, Meryle Secrest, who’d written a biography of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and approached Svetlana with the idea of writing her biography (an idea Secrest eventually abandoned), asked her directly about the “collective authorship” of Only One Year. Svetlana stated, “No one has written anything for me. I wrote it all,”33 but said she did feel that, by posing questions to which she felt obliged to respond, her editors at Harper & Row swayed her to write a more polemical book than she’d initially intended. Fischer encouraged her to remove references to her belief in God in the first part, but she rebuffed his suggestion, retaining the chapter “Destiny,” about her baptism in the Russian Orthodox faith in 1962. She decided to keep it in the book after the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas visited her in Princeton, and said that, if she believed in faith (he didn’t), she should write about it, because he would like to understand the impulse toward the spiritual. This was why she’d included him in her acknowledgments.34

  In fact, rather than influencing her, Louis Fischer had stolen from her. It was she who reported in Only One Year that she had heard her father on the telephone responding to the murder of the actor-director of the Yiddish State Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, in 1948 with the comment, “Well, then, a car accident.” In his 1969 book, Russia’s Road from Peace to War, Fischer reported the story: “Stalin received the news by telephone and apparently . . . said . . .”35 Fischer offered no source for the anecdote. He edited Svetlana out of the story.

  It mattered. The international Jewish community was desperate to know what had happened to Mikhoels. Svetlana’s book came out after Fischer’s, and thus it was as if she were copying his anecdote and claiming it as her own. When she confronted Fischer and asked why he hadn’t acknowledged her as his source, he said he’d forgotten, but when she asked his editors at Harper & Row (she and Fischer shared the same publisher), they told her they’d advised him to include her name, but he’d refused. It was a deep betrayal. When Fischer died in 1970, this scandal of “literary theft” fizzled out.36

  Ironically, the one area where Svetlana would later admit she’d not been candid in Only One Year was in her description of her experiences in Italy and Switzerland. The US State Department had made it clear that she was never to reveal the role the Italians played in her “stopover” in Rome, because it had been illegal, and the Swiss had asked her not to discuss their political role in her defection.

  That fall Svetlana read chapters of her book over the Voice of America. The Soviet Foreign Office immediately protested to the US Embassy in Moscow, which replied that what a writer read over the air was the writer’s private concern. The Soviet government was so infuriated that on December 19, two days before the ninetieth anniversary of Stalin’s birth, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (executive council of the parliament) passed a decree stripping Svetlana Alliluyeva of her Soviet citizenship. She was charged with “misconduct, defaming the title citizen of the USSR,” a crime her father had invented in 1938 during the Great Terror.37 When American media asked her for her reaction to this news, she said she was overjoyed. She commemorated the event by climbing with a friend to the top of the Empire State Building.38

  The reviews of Only One Year were mixed. Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker was effusive in his praise, claiming that Only One Year was “a unique historical document, which will take its place, I believe, among the great Russian autobiographical works: [Alexander] Herzen, [Peter] Kropotkin, Tolstoy’s Confession.”39

  Margaret Parton wrote in the Saturday Review: “Her character remains the same: gentle, nature-loving, profoundly religious. What seems new is the clear-eyed, almost hard objectivity with which she describes Russian society and her father who had terrorized her. She is even capable of occasional irony; explaining why her father left no will, she remarks that ‘He lived above material interests at the expense of the State.’”40

  However, some reviews were nasty. Life published a review titled “Svetlana Faces Life.” “Who needs it, after all? We have had better harder-eyed witnesses to these truths.”41 The political Left hated the book for its “fairytale version” of the United States. In his review titled “The Princess” in Commentary, Philip Rahv wrote that he didn’t believe Svetlana went to India with the sole purpose of scattering her husband’s ashes. “Her eyes were already riveted on distant America, so big and so glamorous.” She knew that her book would be “the ticket to another life.” She built up “a fancy-picture of America staggering in its naiveté. . . . Now that she knows the horrid truth about [her father], she has found another cult-object she can worship, and this time it is nothing less than a whole country. . . . The term ‘democratic socialism’ is not mentioned in her book; nor is the term ‘capitalism.’ . . . Clearly, Svetlana is not a woman capable of communing with history. She is merely its victim.”42

  From her letters to friends, it is clear that Svetlana was growing tired of these attacks. She was feeling buffeted, bruised, pushed around, and often not a little paranoid. And soon she was dealing with problems with the French translation of her book.43 Apparently pages, paragraphs, and phrases of her text had been omitted. Odd jokes and humorous phrases had been inserted. Some criticisms of the Soviet regime had been softened, and friendly attitudes toward the Americans had been omitted. The translator had imposed his own political agenda. Harper & Row and the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff, & Ernst demanded that the translation be withdrawn.

  But there was a much more serious concern—Only One Year was causing dangerous repercussions for her friends in the Soviet Union. In writing the section of her bo
ok titled “We Shall Meet Again,” Svetlana wanted to honor the Russian intelligentsia and to protest their treatment.44 These Soviets were not the gray conformists the West thought them to be, but rather were highly original, uniquely talented individuals. But she should have known that her portraits of friends would put them at risk.

  One of the unwritten laws in the Soviet Union was that you never spoke. She had changed names, but it was not hard for the KGB to identify the people she meant. Certainly her disguise of the black specialist in African song and culture under the name “Bertha” was no protection for Lily Golden. Lily found herself increasingly followed and watched. Party hacks who had long been trying to kick her out of the Institute for African Studies were encouraged to harass her. She discovered that one “friend” was checking the titles of books she borrowed from the library while another was reporting all her meetings with foreigners. She had already been blacklisted from travel to scholarly conferences abroad, and any hope that this ban might be lifted was now gone. Lily fought back and endured the isolation but was shocked that Svetlana had exposed her.

  Lily’s daughter, Yelena Khanga, thought perhaps Svetlana had been caught up in the enthusiasm a writer feels when she creates a book, not measuring the consequences. Perhaps the dizziness of freedom to speak out in the West had dulled her censors, leading her to break the code of loyalty and discretion among friends in the USSR.45 Her cousins Alexander and Leonid Alliluyev later claimed that none of her relatives, indeed not even her children, had suffered.46 However, Lily Golden maintained that all of the friends Svetlana mentioned were put on a list and banned from traveling.47