Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana needed witnesses to stand up for her during the examination under oath required of all immigrants. Probably with Donald Jameson’s help, she managed to locate Corporal Danny Wall, the marine guard who, on that long-ago evening in New Delhi, had admitted her into the American Embassy. She was indeed closing the circle. With a smiling Wall on one side and Millie on the other, she passed her examination without a hitch.

  On November 20, Svetlana returned to Newark to take the Oath of Allegiance. When Mrs. Lana Peters was called to the front of the room to sign her documents, she noted the intense gaze on the faces of the ninety fellow applicants watching her. She was thrilled. They scrutinized her with the same intensity they trained on every other new citizen, and saw only someone named Mrs. Peters. Not Stalin’s daughter.

  When the ceremony was over, Svetlana gave Millie her citizenship manual—it was marked up and underlined on every page, so carefully had she studied it. Millie remembered Svetlana beaming after the ceremony, though she did complain that when she had taken the Oath of Allegiance, she was bothered by her solemn promise to “bear arms to protect the Republic.” She said, “I could never shoot anyone, in any circumstance.”4 Millie gave a little party for Svetlana in Princeton that afternoon, with George and Annelise Kennan among the guests. There were no announcements in the US press, and the Soviets made no public statements.

  If Svetlana thought that in returning, she might find the Princeton she’d known even a few years back, she was wrong. She was no longer the draw she had once been at Princeton dinner parties. She was now a single mother in straitened circumstances and in need of a babysitter.

  She was unwelcome in the Russian exile community. When she and Millie Harford drove to Rockland County to visit Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, Millie remembered Alexandra’s tart rebuke: “She said Svetlana hadn’t done enough with her life.”5 The American director of Radio Liberty, George Bailey, who knew Svetlana, remembered those words as harsher. When Svetlana declined to join her “in her struggle against communism,” Tolstoya had called her a svoloch, a scoundrel. It didn’t matter to Tolstoya that Svetlana felt activism on her part might harm her children in Moscow.6

  Svetlana began to feel there was a growing anti-Soviet sentiment pervading Princeton, the legacy of Cold War propaganda. At school she noticed that Olga was seldom invited to her friends’ homes. She told Joan Kennan she was worried for Olga. Would Olga, too, be forced to live in “the constant shadow of her grandfather’s name”? Svetlana was indignant that people never identified Olga with her American grandfather. “I just don’t know how she’ll live her life,” she said.7

  For now, Olga lived in a world of adults—of the “uncles,” like Jamie, who came to visit, or the remaining good friends who sat at the dinner table. “My best buddies in those days were people in their forties and fifties and sixties,” Olga recalled. “The only Russian words I knew were the swear words Mom still used when she was angry at something. When she had her Russian friends over, and all the conversation was in Russian, I would be sitting there going insane, trying to intervene with these awful swear words.”8

  Svetlana began to brood over public perceptions of her. Looking back, she now thought that her arrival in the United States had been “vulgar.” She felt she had been presented not as a principled defector who rejected the repressive Soviet government, but rather as a woman selling a book. She believed everyone thought she was still a millionaire. She had promised to give three quarters of her money to charity, and she hadn’t done that.

  During her first summer back in Princeton, Bob Rayle and his wife, Ramona, invited her to join them on their vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. As soon as they met, she and Bob reminisced, as they always did, about that long-ago March day in 1967 when Rayle had been called to the embassy in New Delhi with news of a defector. They replayed the whole thing: his first meeting with the “Russian lady,” her explanation that she was Stalin’s daughter, and George Huey’s response: “You mean the Stalin?” They especially loved to redo the Keystone Kops episode when she was never “legally” in Italy. She told Bob she hadn’t really understood why she couldn’t go to the United States. There were simply “various reasons.” Expecting the Soviets to be furious and knowing they would be maligning her, she had focused all her effort on being as pleasant as possible.9

  She would always be grateful to the people at the embassy in India, particularly to Ambassador Chester Bowles, who had courageously taken a risk in saving her, and to Bob Rayle, whose career she felt she’d ruined when he was outed as a CIA officer. He always assured her that he’d simply been reposted. But now she began to see that her entry into the United States had been orchestrated by the State Department so as not to offend the Soviets. Why? If they had asked her, she could easily have told the officials that the Soviets would not be appeased. They would be humiliated. They would have to hold to their propaganda lie that her defection was a CIA plot. There was no point in the Americans’ trying to placate them. Why hadn’t they just asked her? There had been many publishers looking to publish her book. Why hadn’t she been allowed to meet them? George Kennan would have said the officials had protected her from the thousands of reporters and publishers desperate to get at her. He would also have admitted she was a diplomatic liability, and naturally he had to protect the State Department’s interests too.

  Reading the past with a now cynical eye, she concluded that she had always been under the CIA’s control. In comparison with those of the KGB, its strings had been silk, but nevertheless, there had been strings. She began to feel she had been controlled and supervised since her arrival. The Americans had tried to make “this strange defector,” as she described herself, the least dangerous of them all.10

  She was bitter, and in the book she was writing, she got it off her chest.

  The public, through the world Press, were misinformed by the State Department. They were making the whole picture increasingly confused and controversial. Decisions were attributed to me that I had never made. The public imagined for years that “She went to Switzerland to collect money her father left for her in Swiss banks.” This fantasy of my father behaving like some Western millionaire caught hold in some quarters and took root. . . . This idea was so easily believed.11

  If she hadn’t stopped in Switzerland, would this calumny have persisted? The State Department said she had chosen to “retreat to Switzerland for rest and recuperation.” But it had never been her decision. She now felt she had been set up for a fall.

  The rumor of all that gold and the wealth from her book had made her vulnerable to Olgivanna Wright, whose plan, as Svetlana explained to Joan Kennan, had been “to sell out her best man for big money.”12 Svetlana had been catastrophically naive. It hadn’t occurred to her then that a man would marry for money. That was a plot she’d seen in films. Her father had been so mistrustful that he had the air in his rooms chemically tested, never ate food that wasn’t first tasted in front of him, and eliminated anyone who roused his slightest suspicion. But she, his daughter, had trusted too much. She thought she’d been loved.

  Her encounter with Taliesin had been the “turning point” in her “whole American experience.” She later wrote to Joan, “As to Wes, he continues today to behave the same way—he pretends to live ‘as a wealthy man,’ but doesn’t pay his bills and never remembers how much I’ve done for him—paid 0.5 million for his old debts as a gift for our wedding.”13

  She was angry with Wes and with herself. Perhaps she was thinking of Alexandra Tolstoya’s remark that Svetlana “hadn’t done enough with her life.” She wrote to George Kennan with remorseful regret. She assured him that she never identified him with her “New York lawyers,” but why hadn’t they done things differently?

  BUT WHEN 10 years ago, George, I suddenly, just out of a blue moon made millions with my very mediocre memoir, IT WAS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT—THEN—that my very next step would be the RIGHT ONE. And the only right step to do then was: to give
away as much of that money as possible. To give it to US charity, to the world charity through the United Nations, to Russian Emigrees scattered all over the world, to OTHERS whoever they might be . . . But to GIVE IT AWAY, as I have promised in my own words, in my press-conferences, in my TV appearances in spring 1967.

  That this has not been done is MY fault, of course. I did not have enough guts to insist on what I considered then to BE RIGHT. I kind of softened under all that murmur of pleasant publicity and fame and nice talk and innumerable friendly letters. I was overwhelmed with all that—and gave up.

  I gave up THEN, dear George, and there is no one to blame ten years later. I should have stood firm like a rock, defending my OWN plans, my own ideas. . . . I did not. And all my dear trustees, of course, were NOT able to think my thoughts at this point, all but you.

  Ten years ago I could have destroyed a bad reputation of “Stalin’s daughter” by giving away 80% of my royalties from my first book, I sensed this; I knew this was the ONLY and the RIGHT step to do; and I missed it. I just missed it as in tennis one falls down instead of doing the right backhand.

  I was a loser in my game of high stakes. . . .

  Today I am not able to forgive myself; and I cannot find an excuse for all others involved.14

  Was Svetlana revising the past? Had she really intended to give most of her money away? Quite possibly. To the end of her life and to the astonishment of friends, she was always giving things away. But she did not fully admit that it had been her own impulsiveness that had sent her in Wesley Peters’s direction, and this certainly must have been in Kennan’s mind as he read her letter.

  Now, ironically, money was a constant concern for Svetlana. A Princeton friend suggested she should reprint her first two books in a single volume. It probably wouldn’t mean much money, but why not? She’d been a best-selling author twelve years ago. Surely there must be a new readership for those books. But she soon found that she could not yet reprint Only One Year. It was still in print and supposedly selling, though she could find no copies in bookstores. Also, to her shock, she now discovered that she was not the owner of the copyright to her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend.

  In Switzerland in 1967, the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst had created Copex Establishment in Lichtenstein to handle her visa and her book rights. This had been a convenience and also a tax dodge, but certainly legal because she was not an American citizen. But unwittingly, she had signed away all her rights to Copex.

  In 1967, the Greenbaum firm had set up two trusts for Svetlana. When she had demanded that her money be sent to her and Wes’s bank account in Wisconsin in 1970, the personal trust, the Alliluyeva Trust, had been dissolved. But the second trust, the Alliluyeva Charitable Trust, continued. For tax reasons, it had been converted in 1968 to an irrevocable trust, run by a board of trustees, of which she was a member. According to the Princeton copyright lawyer she hired, E. Parker Hayden Jr., when Copex was dissolved, in 1972, the copyright and royalties to her book had been assigned, not back to her, but to her irrevocable Alliluyeva Charitable Trust. Even though she was a board member, she said she was never informed of any of this. Why hadn’t the lawyers simply given her back her copyright? Edward Greenbaum had died in 1970, and there may have been some confusion, but no effort was made to correct the error, if it was one. For Svetlana it was as if the lawyers had stolen her book. She was furious. As any author might have, she felt it was a profound personal violation.

  Determined to regain control of her professional life, she wrote to George Kennan’s secretary to request that all mail be sent directly to her, not to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. And she expected a lot of mail. The upcoming hundredth anniversary of her father’s birth, December 21, 1979, would bring endless requests for interviews and she wanted to receive and decline these requests through her own lawyer.

  E. Parker Hayden Jr. wrote to the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst to suggest that Svetlana had not understood what had been done through Copex Establishment in 1967–68. According to Svetlana, the firm replied, “We did inform you about everything, you were aware of all we were doing,” and “we have done our best to help you.”15

  Svetlana now did something she had avoided doing for years. She invited a journalist, Sharon Schlegel of the Trenton Times, into her home to interview her. She wanted the world to know that she wasn’t a millionaire. Schlegel’s long article was reprinted in the Washington Post, titled “I Don’t Want to Be Svetlana Any More.” Schlegel began with a portrait of Svetlana’s modest living conditions and repeated the story of Svetlana’s defection, her divorce from Wesley Peters, and her lost money.16 She quoted Svetlana as declaring, “I am not a greedy person who came here to make money. . . . I came here to live in the free world, as an enemy of communism. I made certain sacrifices [she was referring to her children].” Svetlana also said she now believed that “the legal fees charged by her original American lawyers . . . were exorbitant.”

  Schlegel interviewed representatives of the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst and reported their response: “Lawyers [unnamed] connected to both the sale of her book and its serialization deny that she was never fully informed and stress that she was actually anxious for world-wide serialization. They call her account ‘pathetic and confused—she’s been through a lot of unhappiness.’”17

  Toward the end of her article, Schlegel reported Svetlana’s angry response to a newspaper clipping that stated, “At 53 Mrs. Peters is hiding from the public.”

  “Well, I’m not hiding from the public. I’m bringing up this child. And it takes so much of my strength and I’m tired much of the time. . . . This is the No. 1 interest of my life now and I don’t see such tasks as second-rate.” Svetlana did not understand American misogyny. In Soviet culture, especially after purges and war had so drastically reduced the ratio of men to women, a single mother bringing up a child alone was almost the norm.

  Finally Schlegel asked, “Has it been worth it, after all the misunderstanding and disappointment that have followed in these 12 years?” Svetlana replied: “Oh yes! Oh yes! . . . I turned my life from one road to another with my own effort. . . . It was a unique chance—I had never been out of the country before, you know. Once in your life you can take it or not take it. I took it. I will never be sorry.”

  Svetlana was bitter about the published piece. It was condescending and clarified nothing. She sent it to George Kennan, with the comment “Our dear Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst now dares to say that I ‘was actually anxious for worldwide serialization’ and even ‘knew every detail of their money-making.’ And so on, without end. Their name is not mentioned [Schlegel had not identified the law firm]—neither is yours, but MINE is always opened for any slander.”

  Kennan did not respond. She wrote again, scathingly.

  Hypocrisy, even much honorable and presented as a “good image,” will never take one to a desired destination. All efforts will be fruitless. Better to be “vulgar” and outspoken—not quite so dignified, not so in the best taste. . . . Goodbye George. I feel sorry that you have associated yourself with my name for such a long time—in the public eye that is—I hope I did not smear your IMAGE too badly by my very existence. You will be OK, honored and respected. . . . Please do not bother about me any more.18

  Svetlana remained a Russian. An angry letter from her could feel as if she were ripping your flesh. She knew this. She thought part of her problem was her “clumsy English.” Even when Americans spoke directly, they always offered “polite decorations.” Unfortunately, she’d never been very good at this, even in her native tongue, but “in a foreign language every thought inevitably looks simplified to a certain degree of unpleasant vulgarity. And directness sounds almost rude.”19 She was like Grandmother Olga, who always said, “My tongue is my enemy.” Moving past anger, Svetlana was soon writing Kennan a letter of apology. Though she didn’t expect their close friendship to resume, she wanted Kennan to know she wasn’t, as she put it, “an ungratefu
l swine.”

  But she wrote more candidly to his daughter Joan:

  At 53, I feel tired, disgusted, and very bitter about many things I went through in USA since 1967. I am not the same person you and Larry used to know then, Joanie! . . . So, we’ll stay where we are, not liking it, but tolerating. What else can I do? Nothing. It is important not to make things even worse.20

  Kennan eventually did make an unsuccessful effort to help Svetlana regain her copyright, but he always rejected the idea that she had been in any way manipulated. Kennan explained to Donald Jameson of the CIA, that, yes, he had suggested the Greenbaum firm. Greenbaum was his neighbor, and this meant that “I could handle the matter through him without danger of its leaking prematurely to ten thousand hungry publishers and editors, dying to get at her.” Certainly the attorneys had charged her “a handsome sum for their services; but since they left her a wealthy woman . . . this was no more than was to be expected.” That they deliberately took advantage of her was “wholly out of the question.” She probably didn’t understand all the details of the arrangements, but what client hadn’t been in that position? He advised that, after so much time, the copyright should be returned to her if “legally possible. But this should be without reflection on her attorneys.”21

  By now, Svetlana was exaggerating the conspiracies against her, but she was right about some things. The Greenbaum firm had not been enthusiastic about her creating a charitable foundation. As Alan Schwartz put it, “We were very skeptical about setting up a foundation in India in some hospital in remembrance of her former lover.”22 But most important, Svetlana felt that the firm had not protected her copyright. It had probably been bureaucratically convenient to transfer her copyright to her irrevocable trust, though Svetlana continued to believe that it was revenge. She had gone against the lawyers’ advice when she dissolved her personal trust in 1970 and transferred her money to Wesley Peters’s account.