Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana was thrilled. At her age, forty-four, this was a great gift. The child would be fate’s compensation for her abandoned Russian children, and it would finally cement her relationship with Wes. When she told him, he was certainly shocked but he seemed happy. However, when he reported the news to Olgivanna, she was furious—there was no place for children at Taliesin—they diverted “energy from the work.” In Wright’s last years, women with babies had been exiled to a tent at the farthest edge of the compound in Arizona, and applicants with children were rejected. Svetlana must get rid of the child. “Women of Svetlana’s age don’t give birth in America,” Olgivanna told Wes. How had he been so careless?4

  George and Annelise Kennan had visited Svetlana at Taliesin East that August. They had so impressed Olgivanna that she’d claimed them as her own guests. Now she turned to them. In a rampaging phone call to Princeton, she demanded that they talk Svetlana out of this folly.5

  It took Wes some time to summon the courage to confront Svetlana, but he finally asked, “You are not going to do anything about it?” She sensed Olgivanna behind Wes’s question and answered angrily. “Why does that dictator always interfere with human lives? Well, of course, because that is the nature of all dictators.”6 Her words eventually got back to Olgivanna.

  When they finally undertook the fall trek back to Arizona, Svetlana was reminded why she loved Wes. Away from the Fellowship, he was still warm and chatty. He drove less recklessly. She thought he was thinking of their child. She now believed the problem was that Wes was in thrall to Olgivanna, and many agreed. Edgar Tafel, who had worked at Taliesin, remarked, “Wes Peters approaches the age of 60, and he cannot have any feelings of his own without consulting his superiors.”7 It shocked her to think that her large, imposing husband was “afraid of that little old lady with the wrinkled parchment face.”8

  She and Wes decided they must renovate his small apartment to make space for the baby. She was hoping for a kitchenette and bath, but he concluded that these were not necessary; they would ruin the design. As they fought continuously over the renovations and he dismissed her suggestions, she was taken aback by how stubborn he could be. At the end of the three months of work by the unpaid assistants, she was presented with a bill for $30,000, the exact amount the foundation had requested from her charitable trust.9

  Svetlana endured the winter as things deteriorated. Having turned down the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s request for an annual bequest, she now found that architects in the halls shunned her. She sought solace among a few people she met outside Taliesin who detested the Fellowship as much as she did. Olgivanna concluded that Svetlana was spreading gossip about her and doing harm to her reputation. One of their quarrels turned into a great battle, which ended with Olgivanna screaming at Svetlana that she “behaved just like Stalin.”10

  Svetlana could not imagine having her baby at Taliesin and gratefully accepted an invitation from Wes’s sister, Marge Hayakawa, and her husband, Sam, to come to California for the delivery. Wes took her to Mill Valley and then left for Iran. To remind her that he was with her in thought, he arranged for the local florist to send flowers every day, with cards that he’d left behind: “I am missing you.”11 Those fifty little handcrafted cards were among the things she always saved. To an outsider, they are uncannily reminiscent of the notes her father sent her when she was a child, declaring his love in absentia. She’d been trained to feed her longings on so little, and even when contrary evidence was staring her in the face, she always tried to will her version of reality into being. But her domestic fantasy held little meaning for Wes.

  Svetlana gave birth to a beautiful healthy child, Olga Margedant Peters, on May 21, 1971. She’d chosen to name her child after her grandmother Olga, though Wes was probably delighted to be able to ingratiate himself with Olgivanna. When her contractions started, her new brother-in-law, Sam Hayakawa, drove her to the hospital. Wes showed up a few days later, bringing with him a local TV crew to film mother and child. He loved publicity. Svetlana thought the public interest in the birth of Stalin’s granddaughter was brutally invasive. He was not the one receiving the letters that said, “How awful at your age!” and “America does not need Stalin’s heirs,” though in truth most of the letters were warm and congratulatory.12

  Svetlana and Olga, photographed in 1971 in Arizona.

  (Courtesy of Ann Zane Shanks)

  From her long conversations with Marge Hayakawa, Svetlana had come to understand that Wes’s devotion to Taliesin was absolute. “He has invested too much of himself there,” Marge told her. Svetlana concluded sadly, “It was for me to comply, to adjust to his ways, to alter my whole nature if necessary, in order to follow after him.”13 She flew back to Wisconsin with her new baby.

  Wes seemed happy with his new family. He said he had always wanted a daughter. She would cherish his lovely words spoken when they were visiting friends in Wisconsin with the infant Olga: “You have returned me to life. I was dead all these years.” She was astonished. “It was more than I had expected to hear from anyone.”14

  Svetlana still had hopes for the cattle farm at Aldebaran. Brandoch was delighting in his new role as cattle breeder. Though the herd of Holstein cattle she’d bought him had died over the winter, she’d sent money for another herd—the second one cost $92,000.15 He’d built a new silo, improved the old barn, and purchased a stud bull from Colorado. As she sat with her baby on the porch while her men inspected the farm, she had a moment of bliss. She would write about that moment over fifteen years later:

  I couldn’t forget the one happy hour years ago in the summer of 1971 when Wesley and I had a small farm near here. Olga had just been born three months ago and I was tending the baby-buggy while sitting on the wooden porch of a small farm we had. A big Irish wolfhound was peacefully lying at my feet as I rocked in an old, comfortable rocker. It was the evening hour, the golden rays from the low sun were filling everything in sight. A herd of cows was returning home down the road, with cow-bells tinkling. I could see, down the road near the gate, Wesley and his grown son, hands in their pockets slowly walking home while discussing farm affairs. The rocker was rocking, Olga was sleeping, and I thought then, here it is, the greatest, the happiest moment of my life. Stop! Hold this moment forever. I have a family, a home in my new country and from here on, my life will be like this: harmonious, secure, and filled with evening light. I thought then that nothing, no force in the world, could undermine this seemingly well-established life in which everything was harmonious and secure. Never before had I such a complete moment of satisfaction and peace. . . . I had everything: a good husband, a healthy child, good friends, beauty, and plenty.16

  What’s astonishing is that this is all she got of domestic life on her farm: one hour.

  As Wes and his father returned to the porch, Brandoch made it very clear that if she had any ideas of moving in, she wasn’t welcome. He said that he needed privacy for himself and his girlfriend, who often visited. Wes concurred, telling her that he didn’t want her “meddling” in the business and that he needed her at the apartment at Taliesin. Svetlana was shocked and hurt. She suddenly understood that Brandoch had never considered himself her son; she was only his banker. There was no warmth; they had never been a family. But she was not ready yet to give up on Wes. Launched on her “path of domesticity,” she had to keep fighting.

  She confessed to Annelise Kennan.

  I feel I am egotistic, self-centered and absolutely have no experience of married life. I spent almost all my life alone, divorced, and with my children. I do not know how to be a good wife in the most usual normal way. And this is what Wes badly needs. . . . I know (and you know too) that life in Taliesin as such has its enormous difficulties for an individualist like me. But apart from that, there is something within myself that deprives me of a possibility to be a real good wife. . . . I have to find ways to overcome that and to learn to be a good wife. Pretty late—isn’t it? Please, do not laugh at me. Please, do help me
. You know, you are so perfect in this difficult field of knowledge. . . . Annelise, I just cannot break this family. I have to save it, and even more, to make it a pleasant thing to live. Some trick within myself has to be found and has to work—up to now I never knew how to do this. A divorce always seemed to me the best way; but I do not feel that way anymore. . . . It still seems to me that not for nothing the Fate has joined us together and blessed us with that sweetest child. . . . But I do not know how to build my home, how to create, please tell me—how?17

  To see into the heart of a relationship, to understand the impinging of one personality on another, is virtually impossible. Certainly Wesley Peters must have sometimes felt he had invited a tornado into his safe bachelor’s existence, but he had willingly turned Svetlana into one of Taliesin’s collectibles. As his apprentice Aris Georges, who deeply admired both Wesley Peters and Svetlana, admitted ruefully, Wes and Olgivanna together played Svetlana, though he claimed Wes was not without feelings of guilt.18

  It’s hard to exonerate Wesley Peters, however. His freewheeling use of Svetlana’s money was immoral. In retrospect, at her bitterest and most insightful, Svetlana could see that she had been used. “He married me because of my name; if I were Nina or Mary he would never have looked at me. But the main attraction was money.”19 Stalin’s mythical Swiss gold, his long shadow, had enveloped her. It was all very sad. Even sadder was that Svetlana was perfectly tailored to their needs. She carried an idealized template in her head of the man who would offer permanent security and serenity and who would need her. For now, she was still not ready to give up, but Wesley Peters was never the man for the domestic life she imagined.

  Back at the Fellowship, Kamal Amin watched the animosity build between Olgivanna and Svetlana, but he assigned much of the blame to Svetlana. “The residue of resentment [between them was] exaggerated by Svetlana’s brooding nature. . . . Her soft, sweet demeanor camouflaged forty years of bottled-up anger accumulated during her life in the Soviet Union.”20 But one might also ask how she had contained her anger for so long.

  The last straw, just before the trek back to Arizona, was a summons from Olgivanna to her private quarters for a talk. Olgivanna was making it clear that the warfare between them was entirely Svetlana’s fault.

  When Olgivanna asked what she so disliked at Taliesin, Svetlana couldn’t say, “Everything,” so she said she simply wanted peace. She assured Olgivanna that everything would be all right. Suddenly Olgivanna pulled Svetlana to her and looked deeply into her eyes. Svetlana was appalled.

  She began to breathe deeply and slowly, still staring. I lost all volition and stood there riveted; fear entered me like a cold wave, but I could not move. After a few moments of strain I broke down in tears, still holding her hands. And then I did something I would never have done of my own accord: I kissed those hands of hers several times. Only then did she release me. She was pleased. “One never forgets such moments,” she said slowly.

  Svetlana ran to Wes, still trembling and weeping, and said that Mrs. Wright had attempted to hypnotize her. She would never again go to see that woman. As she recalled the scene, Wes, with a cold indifference, called her hysterical and lectured her.

  Mrs. Wright loves you, but you are unable to respond to her in the same way. She is very much upset by that. She loves everybody here like a mother. . . . You have no understanding of this place whatsoever. It is a privilege to live at Taliesin, the best way of life imaginable. I thought I gave you this chance by our marriage. If you do not appreciate this, I do not know what our future will be. You cannot stay at our farm because I want my wife to be where I am. You must find some way to adjust.21

  The smugness of his response, as Svetlana reported it, probably accurately, is shocking, given that he and Olgivanna had set her up.

  Svetlana now saw Taliesin as an uncanny and sinister echo of something she knew all too well. Olgivanna was just like her father. Her brown eyes had “the yellow wildcat sparkle” Stalin’s eyes used to have that said, “Here is the boss.”22 She looked deeply into your eyes, digging for what you were trying to hide; her father “had a way of looking like that, too.”23 At dinner Olgivanna controlled the table, and everyone was careful to anticipate her response, just as at Stalin’s table. Like Stalin, Olgivanna rewrote history to correct anything that diminished her role, claiming that only after Frank Lloyd Wright met her did his genius flower, though he was then sixty and already world famous. How had Svetlana landed herself at a place in America that echoed her father’s oppressive world with its “cult of personality”?

  Svetlana wrote to George Kennan that Taliesin was “ruled, suppressed, dominated, and indoctrinated in the most dictatorial Slavic (Montenegrin) way by the old woman (69) who is a good politician, who has very sharp common sense, and a tremendous desire to RULE.” She had left dictatorship and false ideology in her country and now, in this “most democratic and free country in the world,” she had landed “in a small Montenegrin Kingdom,” with “a court and devoted courtiers, just like in my father’s residence in Kuntsevo.”24

  Svetlana made a decision. She would neither bend to that psychological yoke nor allow her daughter, Olga, to be tethered in this way. She was appalled at the thought that she would have to leave. For solace, she took to driving along the back roads of Spring Green. This was her baby’s motherland, and she wanted Olga to receive its beauty in her blood. She would gather wildflowers and sit on the banks of the Wisconsin River wondering at her life.

  On one of her drives, she stopped to visit the cemetery beside the local Unitarian church and searched for the grave of the first Svetlana. There it was, Svetlana Peters, her own name on the gravestone, and with it the name of the dead child, Daniel. She had seen photos of the child, and he looked like her Olga, who resembled her father. Perhaps truly paranoid now, she began to be afraid of driving with Olga, afraid of a car accident. She knew she was falling under the spell of an idée fixe, but she couldn’t stop herself. Perhaps she was meant to repeat the life of the first Svetlana down to the last detail.

  This time, when the Taliesin caravan headed to Arizona, instead of taking their lovely drive across the country, she, Wes, and Olga flew. When Wes returned to work in Iran, she was on her own. There was now open warfare between her and Olgivanna. Kamal Amin remembered one particularly brutal dinner. He, Olgivanna, her daughter Iovanna, and Svetlana sat at the exclusive table. Svetlana began to complain, slightly hysterically, about Wes’s work schedule. “He works too hard all the time; he’s going to die.” Olgivanna replied through clenched teeth in a tone of steel: “So are you.”25

  Svetlana had had enough. When Wes’s friends Don and Virginia Lovness visited, Virginia claimed that Svetlana asked them to take her and Olga away with them. Apparently she told Virginia, “Someone tried to burn Taliesin before and they didn’t do a good job. But I’m going to burn it down and I’ll do a good job.”26 Believing Svetlana might really set fire to Taliesin, Virginia warned Olgivanna, who hired a private guard to protect the estate. Svetlana withdrew into her room with Olga. When Wes returned, he was delegated to bring their food.

  According to Kamal Amin, “Olgivanna had the unusual ability to design and implement conflict, then cleverly retire into a solitary posture, assuming the role of victim. . . . In the process she gathered around her the small circle of yes people who in turn tried to widen the circle by disseminating the party line.”27 The party line was that Svetlana was the recipient of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s beneficent largesse. Olgivanna had facilitated her marriage to a wonderful man. Taliesin was a place where she could nourish her creative abilities, which she had failed to do. Svetlana was “stubborn and ungrateful.”

  That Christmas, Olgivanna staged a final gesture of reconciliation, clearly to secure her own exoneration. She went to Svetlana in bare feet and presented her with diamond earrings. Svetlana threw them out into the desert, saying, “You cannot buy my friendship!” When Olgivanna’s daughter Iovanna heard this, she scr
eamed, “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her.”28 They had come to the end, and Wes finally agreed that they could move out of Taliesin.

  But now Svetlana began to worry about money. The Aldebaran farm was proving a sinkhole. Since the initial outlay, she had spent an additional $500,000 in repairs and land purchases, a total of about two thirds of her initial $1.5 million advance. The tax accountant complained that he could find no proper bookkeeping. Tax returns had not been filed for the last two years.29

  When Svetlana wrote to George Kennan to ask for his advice, he immediately turned to his daughter Joan. Her husband, Walter Pozen, worked in the Washington office of the prestigious law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. For months, Joan had been receiving strange, unexpected presents in the mail from Svetlana and Wes: Native American turquoise jewelry, expensive perfumes, and, once, four exquisite evening dresses in a single mailing.30 The presents disturbed her, and she worried about Svetlana.

  Pozen began to look into Svetlana’s finances. The lawyer who represented the Valley National Bank indicated that the bank was extremely anxious about Svetlana’s account and the endless loans that were being made against it. Pozen began to feel that “something awful” was going on. He sent one of his partners, an estate lawyer, to Spring Green, first to Taliesin and then to the bank. Both were shocked. “How could she have done this? She just assumed debts, assumed all the debts, assumed all of Wes Peters’ personal debts, and there was much, much more.”

  To Pozen the whole farm fiasco felt like a fraud. When he confronted Svetlana, she said, “Oh, Walter, we’re going to do this with this cow and that with that cow Charlie.” And he thought, My God, she’s completely unaware she has nothing.31 Pozen concluded that her husband and stepson had almost wiped her out.

  Svetlana’s stay at Taliesin had lasted just short of two years. A few days after Christmas 1972, she moved out with infant Olga. She had found a two-bedroom house with a small terrace and fireplace, fully furnished, about fifteen minutes away. She signed the deed in the names of Mr. and Mrs. Peters, hoping Wesley would follow her. A young local resident, Pamela Stefansson, who’d served as Svetlana’s babysitter at Taliesin and was devoted to Olga, moved in, and Svetlana was grateful for this.