Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  It was impossible to penetrate. Anguished, she agreed with Kennan. She could not respond. Kennan went to his colleague Mark Garrison, director of the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the State Department, who had passed him the letter, and asked him to send a message to the journalist that “Joseph’s mother still loved him deeply,” but that “if he wanted to come to America, he should send a letter by ordinary mail.”29

  The anonymous journalist soon sent a second letter to Kennan. This time he identified himself as George Krimsky. He worked for the Associated Press and often dealt with the dissident community. He explained what had happened. A young man named Alexander Kurpel had approached him in Moscow that spring asking for a lift. As they chatted in the car, Kurpel told Krimsky that he was a close friend of Joseph Alliluyev, to whom he would like to introduce him. Krimsky went to Joseph’s apartment, where Joseph invited him for a walk in the local park so that they could talk more freely. Joseph asked Krimsky to pass a message to his mother “about a possible visit.”30 It had obviously been Krimsky’s idea to send the letter to George Kennan.

  This second letter clarified little, and Svetlana was distraught. Perhaps this Alexander Kurpel, who had first approached Krimsky, was working as an agent provocateur for the KGB when he’d offered to get Krimsky in touch with Joseph in the first place. Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, was certainly ingenious at the tactics of Cold War intrigue. Was Kennan right? Kennan was sure the KGB was out to embarrass the Carter administration by demonstrating that the CIA was still plotting against the USSR through Svetlana. It was an easy conclusion for him, but, tragically, she was still the pawn in the middle, her motherly heart wrung by the politics of the Cold War.

  Next George Krimsky made a brief trip back to the United States and phoned the Kennan household. He spoke with Annelise, who told him her husband refused to be involved. Krimsky then phoned Svetlana, and despite her longing to see her son, she mostly followed Kennan’s advice and spoke with him only briefly.

  Still, Svetlana thought of another possible plan. George and Annelise Kennan were set to visit the USSR in November. Kennan might try to contact her son to know his real intentions. Unfortunately, things had suddenly deteriorated in the USSR. The Nobel Peace Prize had just been awarded to the nuclear scientist and dissident Andrei Sakharov, and the Soviets were furious. It was still not clear whether Sakharov would be allowed out of Russia to receive his prize. (He wasn’t.)

  Svetlana wrote to Kennan on October 15. As if thinking out loud about the implications of trying to contact her son, she parsed the possibilities. With the Soviets so angry about Sakharov’s Peace Prize, the timing was very bad. Any mention of her son’s name would be traced back to her. “After your departure from Moscow, God knows what they might incriminate him in, and we will not be able even to learn about it.” That would be “the WORST possibility, to gain nothing, but to ruin my son’s rather peaceful existence.” But there might be a second possibility. George could meet with Joseph openly and ask him if he wanted to visit his mother. If he said yes, George could convey his request to officials. Surely the Soviets would not dare to refuse George.

  The worst mistake would be to go halfway. She added that if things went wrong, “This would be the REAL tragedy. . . . I would certainly prefer to stay in the same position of ‘no communication’ with them both, THAN to see them in trouble due to my own blunders. . . . Complete separation from me . . . is the most secure way in the crazy society of the USSR.”

  She concluded her letter thus:

  I love my children dearly, George; they deserve it. You would love them, too. But . . . one cannot do anything to fight FATE; we HAVE to wait for better times, when GOOD THINGS will be possible. Even the Decembrists [Russian military officers who revolted in 1825] were returned from their exile, and were allowed to die peacefully in Europe! Such is Russia’s history—was and still is.31

  In the end, Kennan decided it was better not to attempt to contact Joseph, and Svetlana concurred, though the silence from Russia was unnerving.

  George Krimsky later reported that after he returned to the USSR, he went to see Joseph again. Indicating that his apartment was bugged, Joseph led him outside and said, “This all has to stop.” The KGB had hauled him in. “They knew everything about his contacts with the West. If he continued, he would soon be exiled from Moscow. If he was lucky, he would find himself practicing medicine somewhere deep in Siberia.”32 This conversation would seem to confirm that, in fact, Joseph himself had initiated the request for a visa, but of course that doesn’t mean the KGB wasn’t playing him at the same time. Penetrating such cloak-and-dagger intrigues required the mind of an espionage specialist. It would be another year and a half before Svetlana would discover the truth about the Krimsky/Kurpel affair.

  That Christmas of 1975, while she and Olga were in California visiting the Hayakawas, she gave in to an irresistible impulse and phoned her son. “Bunny, is that you?” she asked, as she had always called him affectionately as a child. He replied curtly: “Do you think you sound like yourself after nine years?” and then the line went dead.33

  Chapter 27

  A KGB Stool Pigeon

  Svetlana and Olga, age six, pose together in 1977 for this Christmas photo sent to Rosa Shand from “the Peterses.”

  (Courtesy of Rosa Shand)

  Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, Svetlana pulled up stakes in March 1976, sold her Wilson Road house in Princeton, and moved with Olga to California. While staying with the Hayakawas that Christmas, she’d accepted an invitation from the journalist Isaac Don Levine to visit him in Carlsbad, near San Diego. As she sat in Levine’s living room, she stared at the blue Pacific and suddenly felt at home. The smells of eucalyptus, of orange and lemon trees, of the pine forests, stirred old memories. Emotionally she was leaning back to the Black Sea of her childhood. Life in Princeton was expensive and her income from stocks and bonds inadequate. Levine suggested California was cheaper.

  It was not surprising that Don Levine had sought her out. A journalist of Belarusian background, he was a staunch, even virulent anti-Communist. He was known to help Soviet dissidents but also occasionally to use them for his own propaganda purposes. He must have thought that Stalin’s daughter could prove a powerful propaganda weapon in his arsenal. When they met, Levine had given her an earful about East Coast liberals like George Kennan who served the State Department and catered to the Soviets. Almost immediately she became suspicious that Levine was manipulating her—he was inveigling her to sign protest telegrams—and she cut off any potential friendship. Unfortunately this meant that she and Olga were very much on their own in California. She had hoped that the Hayakawas would be her family, but Sam Hayakawa, though still very fond of her, was running for the US Senate and had little time for his relatives.

  It was not Levine or his politics that drew Svetlana to California. The truth was, she’d left Princeton in part because of a personal entanglement. It had been over four years since her separation from Wesley Peters, and perhaps she was ready to try again. She met Douglas Bushnell, a wealthy businessman, at a Princeton party, and his tragic history had drawn her in. A few years earlier, his wife had committed suicide, leaving behind her teenage daughter and two sons. Bushnell still seemed broken by the tragedy. “Things like these were well known in our family. MAY BE IT IS TRUE that a difficult life produces a better human being,” she later told George Kennan.1 Svetlana, it seems, was always drawn to the broken. For a brief moment, they’d almost seemed a family. Little Olga was crazy about this amusing white-haired joker and loved his visits, when he’d swing her through the air and give her shoulder rides. Svetlana thought Bushnell might become a kind of father to Olga since Wesley Peters had virtually disappeared from their lives. After four brief visits to Princeton, Wesley had stopped visiting and rarely called. He didn’t show up again for five years, at which point his daughter didn’t recognize him.2

  However, Bushnell soon made it very clear to Svetlana that he
wanted only casual relationships with women. “It ended,” Svetlana explained, “with a bad outburst from both sides—as it should be expected.”3 Any man drawing close to Svetlana might have been frightened. Who could cope with her life? She lived on such a large stage, with the drama of Cold War politics and with the KGB as a subtext, and there was her own emotional insecurity to contend with. Her past held private drawers filled with too much pain. She and Bushnell parted but remained friends. He sent warm letters to her in California with news of his children and queries about Olga, and she replied in kind. Svetlana’s solution to disappointment was to move on, but it must have been in her mind that she should now expect to remain alone.

  When she arrived on the West Coast, Svetlana rented an apartment in Oceanside, but soon found a small, inexpensive pseudo-Japanese house to buy in Carlsbad; it had a lovely inner courtyard and a small rock garden. She registered five-year-old Olga in a Montessori school, and then set about resuming her creative life. She wanted to write another book, but she found herself unable to work. Her days grew empty. She would drive Olga to school, to her music lessons, to her dancing and swimming classes. Waiting to pick her up, she would sit in the parked car at the edge of the beach and watch the breakers for hours. Under the multiple pressures she’d endured, Svetlana was slowly falling apart.

  In July, she wrote to Joan Kennan that since her separation from Wes, she’d been breaking down, both physically and mentally, and she was truly frightened. “I’ve had something really like a nervous ‘fit’ (or ‘break-down’). . . . My increasing habit of drinking alone (at the cocktail hours—so to say), brought me to the verge of absolutely uncontrolled—and totally unbalanced—emotions, which started to rule me instead. Joanie, I know only too well, how this sort of thing could develop. It killed my own brother at age 41.”4 She explained that her sudden escape from Princeton had been an effort to change her environment completely.

  It seemed that the only thing she could manage to do was to keep moving. In the next sixteen months in California, she moved from Oceanside to Carlsbad to La Jolla, buying and selling two houses. Her explanation to herself and others was that she was searching for a good school for Olga, but truly, she was lost.

  In November, she wrote a long, devastating note to Jamie (Donald Jameson). She began with her usual optimism, telling him she was trying to write a book. It would be about the United States and the USSR, a dialogue that could illuminate both countries for ordinary people. But she could find no one she could trust to work with, and she’d lost her courage.

  And then her letter took a deeply unnerving tone.

  Since I came to Taliesin—and left it, to my own great unhappiness—I have had a strange feeling of being hypnotized, influenced, directed, or whatever you wish to call that. Very often—since then—I have NOT BEEN MYSELF. . . . I have had moments of utmost despair, such that I did not know what to do with myself. . . . When such a depression comes upon me, I cannot think about anything, Jamie, [but] that some Soviet secret experimentators [sic] are, probably, testing on ME their secret, newest, psychological weapons. Para-psychological weapons, if that makes any sense . . .

  Somebody has been trying—desperately—to reach MY CONSCIOUSNESS. . . . The result—on this end—was my extreme nervousness / without any visible reason/ and above all, the constant desire TO MOVE, TO CHANGE PLACE, to go somewhere else, where those WAVES could not reach me. . . .

  Sometimes—at night—I have terrible fear about Olga, that she might be kidnapped, and I would NOT be able to pay the ransom. This IS my worst nightmare of all. Myself, I do not care about what might happen to ME. . . . But—most of all—I DREAD THE SITUATION when I could be OK, but SHE could get into the hands of some political speculators. . . .

  It is easy to notice, if my behaviour becomes disordered. . . . IT IS disordered, Jamie—you could see it even from this very letter. I have lost some controls, and I am not able to pull it all back into my hands. Jamie, I need help sometimes—because I am afraid to be alone, with this dear child.

  In the envelope, she enclosed a clipping from the Christian Science Monitor, dated November 22, 1976, and titled “DIA Cites Soviet Microwave Research.”

  A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report says extensive Soviet research into microwaves might lead to methods of causing disoriented human behavior, nerve disorders, or heart attacks.

  “Soviet scientists are fully aware of the biological effects of low-level microwave radiation, which might have offensive weapons applications,” says the report, based on an analysis of experiments on animals conducted in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.5

  The clipping was meant as proof that such experiments were under way in the Soviet Union. She continued:

  I have deadackes [sic], heartaches, sudden high blood pressure, sudden depressions, bad eyesight, and what not—and all I can do is JUST try to pull myself together again—like Humpty-Dumpty. Sometimes it works; the presence of any NICE person is a help. . . .

  I feel at the present time desperately opened, unprotected and half-destroyed. . . . We have just moved into that apartment. But I already am going to move back to the house I bought—WHY? I DO NOT KNOW. That URGE CAME—and I will go. Everyone will be once again surprised. I have to say something to explain. But I do not know. I am already in some sort of dead end. . . .

  Please let me know what do you think about all this.

  Yours,

  Svetlana6

  Deeply disturbed by her letter, Jamie rushed to California to see how he could help. His visit was welcome, but other than urging her to return to the East Coast, there was little he could do.

  It was as if all the self-control that it took to be Svetlana was failing. As the fears and terrors broke through, she felt invaded and occupied. She had always censored her feelings of betrayal. Now she would have to confront them. She faced a dark winter trying to hang on. In the spring, still desolate, she wrote to George Kennan:

  Dear George,

  I am definitely not a stone wall, neither a block of concrete. Nor do I possess those nerves of steel, famous enough, which have made a name for my father. Rather from my mother’s side comes oversensitivity and capacity to react to minor things. . . .7

  I respond TOO EASILY, George, to the ideas, wishes, suggestions, and desires of other people: instead of PRESSING MY OWN instinctive wish, which IS very often the most right one. My father noticed this in me, when I was a teenager, and used to say angrily: “Don’t you repeat to me what others want you to say, like an empty drum! Say what you really want: Yes or No!” I am afraid he noticed that weak point in me. The GOOD things to see was not HIS talent. But he was pretty smart about human weaknesses, and despised those.8

  Her self-contempt is obvious, still filtered through her father’s voice.

  Finally, in March Svetlana consulted her family doctor and, through him, found a psychiatrist. What precipitated this desperate gesture was her sudden realization that her undigested bitterness at Wes was affecting her relationship with Olga. She told Joan Kennan that if Olga was stubborn or bossy, she saw her child as “a copy of Wes.” That was “unhealthy (I knew that!) and wrong.” She was panicked. “Olga is my dearest child (no matter who is the father).”9

  She began to visit the psychiatrist once a week. She never identified him, calling him simply Peter, but it was important to her that Peter had once been a Jesuit. He did not judge her or rush to conclusions. One can imagine the shock to the West Coast psychiatrist of finding Stalin’s daughter on his couch, but she told Joan Kennan she was able to speak to this kind, gentle man about her “whole life.” He gave her the simple acceptance she craved.

  It may have been her psychiatrist who helped her to see that the bedrock of her current despair was located in her broken marriage. It was not Soviet experiments in mind control that were paralyzing her. It was grief. After her defection, the disaster of Taliesin had been the second total break in her life, and it had been a brutal betrayal. She had to f
ind a way to exorcise the rage that resulted from the death of what she’d thought had been love from Wes, from the litany of betrayals during her father’s murderous attacks on her family, and from that terrifying moment in 1932 when her mother had abandoned her and she was psychologically orphaned.

  Because of Wes, she had lost money, of course, and money is freedom, especially in the West, and is the only route to physical security. But more important than this, she had lost herself. Wes had totally shattered her self-confidence. It had taken her a long time to see and admit this. Now she had to reconstruct herself from scratch. It was a brutal fate, but she assured Joan Kennan that she was recovering the courage and pride she had felt in her act of defection in 1967 and was beginning to imagine again that maturity and tranquillity would be hers.10 She started attending meetings of Christian Scientists. Though she wasn’t convinced by their ideology, their methods of self-discipline allowed her to control her drinking.

  In February 1977, a scandal erupted in the international press. The Soviets expelled the journalist George Krimsky (the man who had attempted to help Joseph to defect in the spring of 1975) on charges of spying for the CIA. Time magazine’s Moscow bureau chief Mark Clark claimed, “The real reason for Krimsky’s expulsion was his coverage of dissidents.”11 The Carter administration retaliated by expelling a Soviet reporter. However, mysteriously and to Svetlana’s relief, her son’s effort to defect was not mentioned.

  Then, in March, just around the time she began to see her psychiatrist, she received a letter from Alexander Kurpel, the Russian who had taken George Krimsky to meet Joseph in Moscow. Kurpel had somehow discovered her California address.

  In his fourteen-page handwritten letter, Kurpel ranted in incoherent English in a scrambled, frightening way. He began, “I’m belling the cat not to consider you to be an indifferent person in my destiny. Since the end of January, 1977 everything has gone upside-down and that very comforting so-called ‘steel curtain’ has flown away in nowhere.” He stated that after George Krimsky was expelled as a CIA agent, he, Kurpel, had been hauled in for a seven-hour grilling by a KGB officer named Sevastianov,