Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Levanter showed [his friend Romarkin] a few photographs of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Picking up the snapshots reverently, as if he were handling fragile and irreplaceable heirlooms, Romarkin carefully spread them out on the café table and studied each one. “It can’t be,” he whispered. “The daughter of Stalin an American. It can’t be.” He shook his head. “If within a quarter of a century you and I can go through life under Stalin and then go halfway around the world and meet his daughter as an ordinary next-door neighbor, well, I guess that means anything can happen.”7

  Knowing the complex responses she evoked, Svetlana mostly avoided the Russian community. Evgeniya Tucker, the wife of the eminent historian Robert Tucker, recalled one friend saying about Svetlana, “Not in my house!” And when Evgeniya replied, “Well, she didn’t do it. It was her father,” the friend simply said, “Why should I shake her hand?”8

  Svetlana had only her faith in God left and sought out a church for solace. Her idea of God was, as she called it, “informal.” She detested all claims of the superiority of one faith over another. Because all religions were the same, the church didn’t matter, though she avoided the Russian Orthodox community.

  A new assistant minister had arrived in Princeton at the Episcopalian Church of All Saints. He and his wife, Rosa, had just returned from nine years of missionary work in Uganda. Rosa Shand remembered her first impression of Svetlana, kneeling one row ahead of her across the aisle in church on Sunday. “She was curled so low I saw her as a ball of untamed orange hair.”9 Her eyes lowered, her pose was penitential. What was she repenting? Her abandonment of her children? All her failures? She was so private that no one dared disturb her.

  Rosa Shand had read her book Twenty Letters to a Friend. Svetlana, seated there in a suburban Princeton church, was the closest she had come “to the dark wellsprings of history.” After the service, Svetlana invited the Shands to visit her at her home. She’d found something in the young couple she responded to intuitively; perhaps they, too, seemed shell-shocked by their reentry into affluent Princeton. And soon Svetlana visited them, though she requested that no one else be present when she came, saying it was hard to encounter unexpected strangers. In a very short time, Rosa underwent back surgery.

  It happened quickly, as all things happened quickly when Svetlana made up her mind, and she made up her mind that she would be our friend. It was scarcely three weeks later, after I’d gone through a back operation, that Svetlana took me into her home. It was the first—though far from the grandest—of those Russian gestures that struck me with awe, made me feel our own inhibiting caution. . . . I don’t mean this spontaneous act of hospitality was particularly odd. Not then, but one already could feel the germ in her: that refusal to calculate. . . . At this point Svetlana’s gesture was a reaching out . . . a simple impulse toward companionship and kindness. In any case, it was a gesture I scarcely imagined a member of my own family offering.10

  Svetlana argued that Rosa needed time to recuperate. Her husband, Philip, could take care of the children. “You must have peace and breakfast in bed,” she said. Rosa was apprehensive. Svetlana’s “thunderous history pressed the air from my lungs.” What might they talk about? But she was in such pain that she gratefully accepted Svetlana’s offer.

  It turned out that they talked mostly about children and played with Olushka (Svetlana’s endearing nickname for Olga). Svetlana said that she was not too worried about her daughter Katya. Katya had discovered her passion for science at the age of eleven and was very close to her father, Yuri Zhdanov. It was Joseph who worried her. By now he was a doctor, but what scars did he carry? Not only from her abandonment of him, but did he feel guilty about the way he had been forced by the KGB to vilify her? It was nothing! What choice did he have? She spoke so longingly of sitting with her son at the kitchen table, laughing, crying, discussing everything in their old apartment in the House on the Embankment, that Rosa imagined she almost knew him.

  Rosa was shocked by the total absence of any signs of Russianness in Svetlana’s home and by the collection of modern gadgetry in her kitchen. How had she found such an item as an electric garlic press? “Television,” Svetlana told her. She seemed to be eternally mopping the already spotless kitchen floor. “She didn’t mean to be different, she meant to get things right, master the American ways.”

  One morning, when Svetlana was unaware she was already awake, Rosa glimpsed her in the kitchen through her open bedroom door.

  It seemed to me I looked on all she had thoughtfully hidden. I looked on desperation. She wasn’t moving, but you could not call her resting. She was perched on a stool in the middle of the kitchen, her mop tossed down, her back erect, stilted, gripping her automated eggplant peeler as if she had to fit like a robot in the tin-bright sheen of this kitchen. She stared out the window hopelessly, anxiously, so weary with faking she belonged with gadgets it was clear she wouldn’t survive them. Abruptly I felt my helplessness in the face of the losses gnawing her. . . . What in the name of the twisting corridors of history was Svetlana doing here, clinging to an eggplant peeler in the rarefied elegance of Princeton?11

  But Rosa could talk books, and to Svetlana this was a salvation of sorts. Over vodka, they discussed the ideas of the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard, whose existential theories of faith as passion so moved Svetlana. They talked of Simone Weil, the French theologian and mystic, and of her tragic history. And there was always Pasternak. But Svetlana’s writer was Dostoyevsky. Ah! That story The Gambler. Rosa said she preferred Chekhov. When Rosa mentioned that she delighted in the sassy poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva, Svetlana erupted as only she could: “Tsvetayeva’s nothing. Leave her—she was weak—she committed suicide.”12 Rosa must read Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem. That poetry had moral grandeur.

  Requiem was Akhmatova’s cycle of poems about the horrifying years in Russia under Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s, when she had lined up each day for seventeen months at the prison in Leningrad to deliver a package to her son Lev, arrested for counterrevolutionary activities. It began with the famous moment when an old woman in the line had whispered, “Can you describe this?” and Akhmatova said, “Yes, I can.” The poetic sequence was her requiem to Moscow, its streets bloodied by the wheels of Black Marias, the Kremlin towers like the “wailing wall,” and “hieroglyphics cut by suffering on people’s cheeks.”13

  As Svetlana talked, Rosa was examining the photographs in the book Pasternak par lui-même. When she looked up, she saw that Svetlana was crying. “She had her elbows on the table, her hands in front of her mouth, her knuckles white. Tears rained down her freckles. She said, ‘Akhmatova lost her son. Did you know she lost her son?’”14 Akhmatova eventually recovered her son. Lev was released from the Gulag in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, but he was bitter when he returned from the camps, believing that his mother, who had fought so hard for his release, had not done enough to save him.

  Svetlana had a vague notion that maybe she could buy a bigger house and Rosa, Philip, and their daughters could share it, but the family soon moved to Texas, where Philip had been offered a teaching post, though the friendship continued in letters for years.

  As soon as Olga was old enough for preschool, Svetlana set about searching for a private institution. She had a Russian émigré’s suspicion of state-controlled public schools—she thought parents who recommended them were deluded by some notion of “benevolent” socialism. She wanted “no State schools; no State anything.”15

  Millie Harford was the founding director of the Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart. Harford recalled how she first met Svetlana. She’d recently accompanied her academician husband on a visit to the USSR, during which she’d visited Russian schools. Interviewed in the Princeton Packet, the local daily, on her return, she’d said it was a fascinating experience; schools in the USSR had interesting curricula, hardly different from those in the United States.

  Out of the blue, Svetlana called Millie Harf
ord and chewed her out for her newspaper diplomacy—“diplomatic” was a word Svetlana detested. Millie had never met Svetlana, but she agreed that she had not been truthful. She’d actually found the Soviet schools restrictive; the children seemed to be discouraged from self-expression and taught to conform. Svetlana said, “I want to meet you.”

  “We met. She was disarming. I liked her immediately.”16

  Three-year-old Olga was soon enrolled in a class for preschoolers at the Stuart School. Fees were high—$1,500 a year. Though Princeton was divided between new and old money, many of the students at Stuart were culled from the international set. The husband of one of the teachers had grown up in Communist Poland and remembered all the books with propaganda photographs of Svetlana, the “Little Sparrow,” seated on her father’s knee, as an example for Polish children, of the beloved youngster. He found it ironic that his child should be playing with Stalin’s granddaughter.17

  Svetlana and Millie Harford became close friends. Harford often invited her to dinner with discreet guests, but one dinner in particular was seared in her mind. The gathering that night was intimate.

  Svetlana told that story, which is so well known, of how in the evening when her father and his companions were drinking and she was already asleep or reading, he would drag her down by her pigtails and say: sing and dance for us. And that was very painful, very painful. I think what made her speak was that my husband asked our son, who was a Beatles fan and had just learned to play guitar, to play for us. And Chris refused. And Jim said, “Come on, Chris.” And he said, “No, I don’t want to do it.” And that’s when Svetlana got up and said, “Let him be. Let him go. Because when I was his age, my father would pull me out when I was very quiet and by myself and have me come out to his parties. Male parties, men parties. And put me on the table, and said, ‘Dance.’” And she showed us how she danced. She went into the coat closet and got a hat and a cane and she did the dance. She actually went to the floor and kicked.18

  As she danced, the guests looked on, appalled at the heartbreak of it.

  Svetlana was aiming for a normal “American” life. She invited guests to her home: the Hayakawas came, and her old friend Ruth Biggs. She had the neighbors to dinner. People she met through Olga’s school dropped by. That summer of 1974, she put a small in-ground swimming pool in her backyard, paid for on a monthly installment plan. She wrote to Rosa Shand that they’d had a lovely relaxed summer at their own “little private beach.” “We’ve had guests all the time—couples, singles, families—with children, and whatnot. All this quite unexpected and unusual for us—but very pleasant anyway.”19 But the next July, terrible rains hit Princeton and the pool collapsed under the weight of the floods, leaving a trench of mud in the yard as if after a bombing. It was “sad” but “OK,” Svetlana reported. “Some people had much worse damages and losses on the same very day.”20 She had a Russian’s stoicism. One never counted on anything’s lasting.

  Moreover, she was never entirely free from fear. The letters from strangers had decreased. Now there were perhaps only ten a day. Some saddened her. One man had wanted to know why her father treated his people the way he did, but even she, his daughter, didn’t know. However, other letters caused deep anxiety. She wrote to tell Jamie (her CIA minder) that right after their regular telephone call, on November 6, she’d received a “terrible hate letter” from a woman who presented herself as a professor at the University of Rome. “I do not mind to be cursed, but she cursed Olga too. This is—I think—something beyond politics; an animal feeling.”21 The thought that Olga might be harmed was unnerving. She told Jamie she’d felt safer in Arizona; it was so isolated. Why had she ever moved back to Princeton?

  Wesley Peters holds his daughter, Olga, in 1974, by which time he and Svetlana were divorced.

  (Svetlana Alliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

  She had other worries about little Olushka. Everyone at the school found Olga a darling child, lively, independent, with large black eyes that drew one in, but Olga did not speak. Svetlana was referred to a speech therapist, who asked her to fill out a questionnaire. When the doctor read it, his face blanched. Svetlana summarized: “Olga’s parents were old. My mother had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. My brother died an alcoholic.” She seems not to have mentioned who Olga’s grandfather was. Perhaps she didn’t need to. She was told by the nervous doctor to bring the child back. They would check her ears; maybe she couldn’t hear. Svetlana felt sick. “I returned home in tears, fearing that no doubt now they would try to find all sorts of inherited defects in my daughter.”22 But by the time Olga turned four, Svetlana was thrilled to be able to tell Annelise Kennan that Olga “keeps talking all the time! I never saw such a talkative child! The last thing she’s brought from her summer school was: ‘Mummy I think I have a baby in my tummy. When one eats a lot you know, one gets a baby in one’s tummy.’ She was so sure about it, I did not know what to say!”23

  Svetlana didn’t believe that the KGB had given up on her. In June 1974, she received a letter from her son, Joseph. She never spoke of its contents but clearly did not trust that it came from him. She told Annelise Kennan she’d sent the letter to a graphologist, along with a sample of Joseph’s authentic handwriting. The graphologist reported that the letter and the sample were not written by the same person.24 In Svetlana’s mind, who else but the KGB would forge a letter from her son? But why?

  She wanted real news from Moscow. In the closed universe of the Soviet Union, where mail was censored and official eyes kept watch, the safest route to her children was brutally labyrinthine. Her neighbor on Wilson Road, Roman Smoluchowski, attended a conference of astrophysicists in Moscow that July. He came back with news that Katya, twenty-four, had graduated in geophysics from Moscow University and was now teaching. She was still unmarried and was living with her grandmother, Yuri Zhdanov’s mother, whom Svetlana had so hated that she’d told her father all those years back that she was leaving her marriage because of her domineering mother-in-law. But Svetlana consoled herself that at least her totally impractical Katya was not living alone. Joseph had a very good job at one of the best clinics in Moscow. She was not surprised to learn he was divorced. She had tried to warn him that he’d been too young to marry.25 She discovered for the first time that she was a grandmother. Joseph had a four-year-old son.

  That month, November 1974, was particularly hard for Svetlana. She wrote to Rosa Shand that she’d fallen into a desperate gloom, believing God had abandoned her. “Everything abandoned me—even the words of prayer.” For her, November was the black month of death, the month of her mother’s suicide. Reading the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, she’d found the words for what she’d been through. She told Rosa it was a “crisis of faith,” “a temptation of the Spirit. If you’ve never been through that, I wish you never have it.”26 When the desolation of her terrible aloneness confronted her, Svetlana could only try to hold on.

  Believing it would endanger them, Svetlana had always been very careful not to try to contact her children in Moscow directly. But then on August 5, 1975, George Kennan received an astonishing letter from an unidentified American journalist in Moscow, delivered by diplomatic pouch through the State Department. It read: “Dear Mr. Kennan: I am writing on behalf of Joseph G. Alliluyev who has asked that I get in touch with his mother regarding his desire to visit the US.” The journalist said that Joseph was asking his mother to obtain a three-month tourist visa for him. This was a very strange request. In the mid-1970s, virtually no citizens of the Soviet Union were permitted to travel, unsupervised, outside the Eastern bloc, and any and all contacts with foreigners inside the USSR were still considered treasonous.

  Signing his letter only “A Friend,” the writer explained that, through an acquaintance, he’d met Joseph, who was now a teaching physician at the First Moscow Institute, divorced, with a five-year-old son. Apparently Joseph told the writer that he’d denounced his mother in 1967 because he was b
itter and felt betrayed, but also because “considerable pressure was brought to bear on him to denounce her.” Now, however, Joseph recanted, saying, “I absolutely understand her. It took nine years.” Joseph wanted his intentions kept secret. No one, not even his father or his half sister, Katya Zhdanov, knew of his desire to visit his mother. Joseph never spoke openly of defection, though there were hints that he might not want to return to his country.27 Inside the envelope were several photographs, including one of Joseph holding his passport. The anonymous journalist said he was jeopardizing his own job by acting as an intermediary, but wanted the exclusive scoop if Joseph did indeed follow through with his plans.28

  Kennan immediately took the letter and photographs over to Svetlana’s house. It looked suspicious. Who was this journalist? Why the diplomatic pouch? Why was the letter addressed to Kennan and not to her? Kennan advised Svetlana that it might be a trap meant to damage relations between the United States and the USSR.

  It is not hard to imagine Svetlana’s state of mind at this news. If the journalist was credible, her beloved son Joseph was asking to join her in America; he’d forgiven her for abandoning him. She also understood that his contacting her in such a clandestine manner through the American Embassy was exceedingly dangerous for him. What would happen if his plans were discovered? And if he really wanted to join her in the United States and didn’t receive an invitation from her, would he ever forgive her?

  But there was a second possibility. The whole thing might be a new KGB plot, as Kennan certainly suspected, which meant that her son was being used against her once again—the photographs were clearly authentic. But what was the point? So that the KGB could say that the vile daughter of Stalin, a tool of the American imperialists, was luring her son to become a traitor to his country, but he’d valiantly exposed her?