Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana was now on her own and discovering that she didn’t have the skills to survive in a capitalist system. In her first forty years, she had never managed money; when she had been desperate, she could ask her nanny Alexandra Andreevna, who actually received a salary, for a loan. In her circle of intellectual friends, those with a little shared what they had. Everything in America seemed to be about money and success, and she had neither. She had worked at the prestigious Gorky Institute and could have attached herself to an American university, as many former dissidents did, but she knew that as Stalin’s daughter she would always be a freak, a curiosity. She must earn money by writing, but she couldn’t reissue her first two books and couldn’t get a contract for a third.

  Svetlana didn’t need much money for herself—she lived very simply—but she was driven by a fixed idea that came from her mother. Her daughter must have the best education, and that meant private school. She watched her income decline—she now had about $18,000 a year from investment, not a meager sum in the late 1970s, but she needed several thousand just for the Stuart School. Her solution was to keep moving. She moved four times in the next several years. When it came to a choice between paying Olga’s private school fees or paying the mortgage, she downsized her house. That first year, she took in a teacher from the Stuart School as a boarder.

  When her lease on Mercer Street was up in January 1979, she bought a house at 40 Morgan Place and then, in the spring of 1980, sold it. She told friends it was a lousy property, too expensive to maintain, and she was glad to be rid of the worries of ownership. She found a rental at 53 Aiken Avenue. She wrote to her old friend Rosa Shand, who had stayed with her in those early days in Princeton when Rosa was recovering from back surgery, to say that the new house was within walking distance of downtown Princeton. Though it was not large, she assured Rosa that if she wanted to send her daughters to school in Princeton, they could be squeezed in. She was planning to stay put, unless the rent went up beyond her limits.

  The truth is, there was a part of Svetlana that loved to move. Olga remembered Mother’s Day on Aiken Avenue when she was nine. She’d prepared and brought her mother breakfast in bed. She watched her mother lying there, gazing pensively out the window as if looking in the far distance. Svetlana said, “It’s Mother’s Day, I feel like doing something special for myself.” Olga responded, “OK,” assuming her mother wanted to go for one of their long drives in the country. But Svetlana asked, “How do you feel about moving again?”

  In the spring of 1981, when the rent on her Aiken Avenue house was raised from $550 to $600 a month, Svetlana started searching for another place to buy in Princeton, but she could find nothing she could afford. Olga was now tall, long-legged like her father, very pretty, and more remarkably stubborn than her stubborn mother. Svetlana drove her to her private lessons in piano and guitar, French, and horseback riding. But it seemed Olga was unhappy at Stuart School.

  The principal had changed, and in her memory decades later, Olga recalled that she had come to hate the school. The children didn’t know that Olga was Stalin’s granddaughter—Stalin meant nothing to them—but they knew she was part Russian, and they had absorbed their parents’ suspicion of Russkies. Olga was sure she was not a Russky; she was American. She insisted on changing her name to Chrese. Hereafter her mother must call her by the American nickname she’d chosen for herself.

  Ironically, there was an added prejudice. Not only was her mother divorced and Russian, but she was also a non-Catholic. When Olga reached the fourth grade in 1980, she encountered the teacher from hell. “It was horrible what they put non-Catholic girls through.”23 She and two other girls—Rebecca and Jasmine, one Jewish, the other Polish—were the only three unbaptized girls in the school, and found themselves ostracized. “There was prayer assembly, but not for everyone. You weren’t allowed to take communion. You went home early on Ash Wednesday, because you couldn’t participate in the ceremony.” Olga remembered going home to her mother and asking, “So, can I be a Catholic?” But that wasn’t going to happen. When Svetlana had asked earlier to be baptized as a Catholic, she was told she had already been baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church and couldn’t be baptized twice.

  Olga recalled: “I didn’t know that there was a Russian hype going on. I didn’t know who my grandfather was. I didn’t know there was a problem with a woman being divorced, with no father around. I didn’t know any of these things. I just felt the wrath. . . . I would be pointed out in class, taken aside, embarrassed, humiliated, caned on the hand. . . . I was actually a really sharp child who liked to learn, but I was very, very shy and terrified of my environment. Those were the days I hated to go to school. I hated it.”

  One morning, Olga, who had just turned ten, ran away from home. Having prepared her breakfast and gone to her room to wake her, Svetlana found her daughter’s bed empty. Olga had left a note: “Mommy I have left home. Meet me at the bus station on Wednesday. I am sorry but I must go.”

  Svetlana was petrified. Still in her housecoat, she ran into the lane and across the street, banging on neighbors’ doors. No, her daughter wasn’t there. The bus stop for New York was around the corner on the main street. Where was Olga heading? One kindly neighbor simply walked to his Oldsmobile and, waving reassuringly, set out to find her. Svetlana reported her disappearance to an indifferent police officer. She was panicked. Should she search for her daughter? Should she sit and wait? Had she been “too severe on this independent spirit, too demanding”? Recounting the incident later, she said, “I was truly scared out of my wits.”24

  Soon there was a knock at the door. Her neighbor, grinning broadly, was standing with Olga at his side. She was holding out a bouquet of daffodils and offering them tentatively to her mother. She had been in a shop buying a pencil and a notebook when he’d found her. Olga leaped into her mother’s arms and said she would never run away again.

  Svetlana began to think how costly her solitary life was to Olga, an exuberant and extroverted child who was suddenly receiving terrible report cards at Stuart School. She told friends her bright daughter needed “more freedom and less ‘uniformed’ surroundings.”25 They would move; they would find another house.

  Svetlana understood that friends often believed that some kind of psychological instability was the root cause of her constant migrations, and she had once thought so herself. But now, in her mind, Olga’s education was always the motive for her moving. However, in Olga’s own childhood memories, she and her mother moved every November, the month when Svetlana’s mother, Nadya, had committed suicide—that greatest of all losses that still consumed her; the month that, according to her daughter, Svetlana associated with “death, dying, the dying of everything.”26 In fact, they often moved in the spring, but to the child, it was her mother’s sorrow that sat in her memory as the reason they moved. Olga was intuitively shrewd, of course, as children often are. Svetlana was funneling all her multiple anxieties into the fate of her child. It was the one fate she could somewhat control.

  Chapter 29

  The Modern Jungle of Freedom

  Sir Isaiah Berlin, whom Svetlana first met in 1970.

  (Courtesy of the Trustees of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust and reproduced with their permission)

  Luckily for Svetlana, her friend Rosa Shand had moved back to New York with her family in the winter of 1981. Svetlana soon visited, eager to reintroduce Olga to Rosa. She told Rosa she wanted to take her daughter to the museums and galleries in a cosmopolitan city, as she had once done in Moscow with her older children.

  The General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church had assigned Rosa, her husband Philip, and their two daughters an apartment in an eighteenth century neo-Gothic gray-stone on Ninth Street. The twelve-foot ceilings gave an old-world appearance to the cavernous space, the center of which was the kitchen, where Rosa had pasted postcards on all the cabinets. As soon as she visited, Svetlana gravitated to the kitchen, where they drank tea, or vodka “sparingly,�
��1 and resumed their conversations about faith, literature, and children. Svetlana’s eyes played across the glass-doored cabinets. “Glass cabinets, she said—it was the kitchen she grew up in. It was the kitchen she’d not supposed America possessed.”2

  It had been almost ten years since Rosa had sat across a table from Svetlana. Though she’d put on weight, Svetlana was still pretty when she smiled, with her striking pale blue eyes, her hands slicing the air for emphasis. Rosa was amused by the way Olga ordered her mother around. She thought that, with her daughter, Svetlana was both “ultra-solicitous and steely.” She would say, “Do not interrupt me,” but the next moment, the two would be giggling in each other’s arms.3

  Svetlana took to visiting Rosa as often as she could. They would have dinner in the dining room by candlelight. One memorable night, opening a bottle of champagne, Philip fumbled with the cork, and Svetlana took over. Much to the family’s delight, she quickly had the cork flying and the champagne deftly poured into an adjacent glass, explaining, “[My] father took his time to teach the important things quite well.”4

  Suddenly Svetlana was evoking her beloved Moscow—“its onion domes in snow, the dripping evergreen beauty of its quiet little hidden graveyards, the glittering icicle world,” and the tiny ornate church that consoled her as she looked out from the window of her apartment in the House on the Embankment. Rosa’s daughter Kristin slipped over to the piano to play the theme from Doctor Zhivago as a backdrop to Svetlana’s stories. Svetlana was not the only one weeping under cover of darkness in the candlelit room.

  Svetlana and Rosa tramped through the winter streets of New York with Olga, visiting bookstores and museums, and lumbering up the stairs inside the Statue of Liberty. When Svetlana was in town on a Sunday, they attended services at an Episcopalian church in Greenwich Village. They also went to concerts throughout the city, and these made Svetlana nostalgic for the days when she had taken her son, Joseph, to concerts at the Moscow Conservatory—she could almost see him sitting beside her. How strange the twists of fate, how strange that she now had Olushka at her side in America. On one occasion, Vladimir Ashkenazi sent Svetlana box seats for his concert at Carnegie Hall, and Rosa learned that he was a friend whom Svetlana had not seen in six years. He’d been living in Iceland and then Switzerland since his defection in 1963, when the continual pressure from the KGB to turn stukach (informer) had proved too much. She also met her friend the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who had defected in 1974 and like her had had his Soviet citizenship revoked in 1978 for speaking out against the lack of freedom in his homeland.

  That May, Rosa saw a wonderful new film called Oblomov, released in Russia in 1979, that seemed made for Svetlana. She phoned to tell her she must come to New York to see it. Svetlana said that in her student days, she’d known the star, Oleg Tabakov, as well as the director, Nikita Mikhalkov. Mikhalkov had survived the Soviet censors by making lyrical films about the seasons in Moscow, films without people.5

  Leaving Olga to walk in the Village with Philip, Rosa and Svetlana went to the cinema for the matinee. As the film opened with the image of a child waking, running through a warm kitchen, and dashing gleefully out over a green steppe filled with summer flowers filtering dazzling sunlight, Svetlana was immediately transported back to the kitchen at Zubalovo, where her nanny, Alexandra Andreevna, had bathed her in the iron tub with the hot water pouring in from the tank, the logs burning, the fire cracking, and the room filling with steam. She still remembered her nanny’s fat warm hands. Her mother was always off doing something more important. When the film ended and the credits played as the curtains closed, Svetlana sat in stunned silence. They remained in the dark abandoned cinema for an hour as Svetlana cried. To Rosa, the moment was somehow transformative. “I knew: this was another order of experience. This was beyond my grasp of being moved by art. This was Russian, or Svetlana, or a disparate color of soul.”6

  Oblomov totally overwhelmed Svetlana. She wrote to Rosa that she’d slipped back to New York on her own to see the film again and that night she had spent many hours “in the same position as Oblomov, who sat overnight under the rain, thinking—I was stunned and could not move.” She was shocked that the Soviet censors had approved a film about nineteenth-century tsarist Russia. Could this mean that the USSR was changing?

  She told Rosa the film had taken her back to Moscow in 1962 and to her spiritual mentor, Father Nikolai, whom she revered and whose words she always remembered. “He did not say that Christ cannot love me, Stalin’s daughter.”7 He had baptized her.

  She had had a reassuring dream about Father Nikolai just before moving to Princeton in 1967. In September 1970, she saw him again in a joyful dream, predicting wonderful news, and then discovered she and Wes were going to have a child. Many years of silence had followed. These were her worst years, but she had dreamed about him again this very March and was certain something important was coming. She had never imagined it might be this film. She begged Rosa to understand.

  Please do not think I am exaggerating the importance of some movie production. You know: in Soviet Russia, in that silent society, e v e r y sign is important, every little symbolic move, word or even ballet dance is a communication. One has to learn to read those silent signs. I have learned to do so. . . .

  I cannot tell you what a magnificent, and also mysterious effect the last photographs convey. One must be, of course, familiar with that gentle green land . . . the meadows and the skies, those pale clouds, those gently rustling groves, those wild flowers. MOTHER, childhood, love, gentleness . . .

  Here it is not a sentimental image at all. It is not “Mom & Apple-pie” of Protestant virtue, righteousness, and all good things. . . . Here it is Life itself, in its every little sweet moments of existence, fragrant, immensely peaceful, filled with that blessing and grace. . . . Life as Oblomov was able to perceive it. Although he was indeed a lazy, sleepy man, he had a gift of communicating with grasses, flowers and clouds, that gift of contemplation which is in fact, the essence of Russian Orthodoxy.8

  But the film had a more heartwrenching element that Svetlana did not mention to Rosa. The film begins and ends with images of Oblomov as a child running rapturously through green meadows. It is a dream sequence, a memory of waiting for, longing for, his mother, who has returned from a long journey and whom the child is instructed not to waken. The mother never appears in the film; she is only an absence. It is impossible not to imagine Svetlana shaken by the child’s voice crying with such rapturous anticipation for the mother who will never appear.

  Oblomov brought Svetlana back to her Russian roots. She had vehemently insisted that her daughter would be American, giving Olga the best American education and deliberately eliminating all things Russian from the child’s life. She refused to teach Olga the Russian language. Clearly she was insulating her daughter from her history. She knew the cost to Olga of being identified as Stalin’s granddaughter, but she had never examined the toll this sacrifice had taken on her own psyche. She lamented to Rosa that she had cut herself off from the “music and fragrance of my native tongue. I have suppressed all this and made it silent. Stay there, inside, but shut up!” It was a terrible surgery. “My soul was crying, like in prison and I did not know why. Now it is released.”9 This was Oblomov’s message.

  And then, that summer of 1981, there was silence. Rosa did not hear from Svetlana until September, when she wrote to say that her life had again plunged into chaos during the summer and she had lost her peace, remarking with rueful irony that after the film “some kind of fresh breeze came strongly through my whole being—but for a while only.”10

  Needing to find a cheaper residence than 53 Aiken Avenue, in June Svetlana spent a frenzied month hunting for a new home. Finally she signed a contract to buy a small house in nearby suburban Lawrenceville, about twenty minutes from Princeton. She had decided to give the public school system a try and enrolled Olga in the Lawrenceville Intermediate School.

  And then, at the beginn
ing of July, she left on a trip to England. That February the British journalist and media personality Malcolm Muggeridge, notorious for his conservative Christian propagandizing, had written to invite her to do an interview with him on the BBC. He was proposing a discussion about the resurgence of Christianity in the Soviet Union. He said that she, who had been at the very center of the “materialist-atheist apparat,” must have some insights.11 At first she refused, complaining that after every public appearance, her words were always twisted, and she was tired of the hate letters that followed “from the left and from the right and from the very middle.” As a strange non sequitur, she added, “Men are able to easily disregard all this; I cannot.” She just wanted to live in peace and avoid “unnecessary hatred.”12

  But gradually the thought of traveling to England became too seductive. She felt it was cynical on her part to agree to be interviewed, because she had turned down so many American invitations. Nevertheless, she accepted, but on one condition: “Could you please, somehow, try to separate me from my father’s name, life and philosophies? It is very necessary to do so, otherwise you will keep trying to communicate with my father through me.”13 Of course the request was pointless. The reason Muggeridge wanted to interview her was that she was Stalin’s daughter: this made her thoughts on the new Christianity in Russia all the more sensational.

  Svetlana set out for London in early July 1981. With the BBC paying for her stay at the Portobello Hotel near Stanley Gardens, she spent three days in the city walking through the streets and found it thrilling. She felt nostalgic for “old stones.” She spent five days with Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge at Park Cottage, their country house near Robertsbridge in East Sussex. The resultant interview, “A Week with Svetlana,” culled from twenty hours of talk, was eventually broadcast on BBC 2 the following March. The visit proved to be a quiet interlude; the bucolic walks down English country lanes were therapeutic. She may have reflected that her life might have been this comfortable if she hadn’t lost all her money.