Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  She’d sent Olga to Wisconsin to spend the month of July with her old friends, Herbert and Eloise Fritz, who ran a summer camp near Spring Green, and was hoping her daughter might reconnect with Wesley Peters. Secretly, Svetlana often thought of herself as still married to Wes, perhaps because he and Olga were so much alike in character. In Olga’s memory, the meeting was a bust. Yes, she met her father, but he was “just some reserved stranger.”14 Whenever Svetlana said Wes liked something, Olga would snap back, “So what?” to which her mother would reply timidly, “It ought to matter.”15

  During her trip to England, Svetlana began to conceive of a new plan. Olga needed stability, continuity. England was so pleasant; the people were so kind. She wrote to the Muggeridges that she wanted to find a good boarding school for Olga in England and live nearby. Did Kitty know any good schools? She would need to have an income, of course, but she could work as a companion to an elderly lady or old couple “who would be educated and sophisticated enough . . . to enjoy having a misfit like me as a companion. . . . I can cook, sew, clean, drive, shop, take photographs, type (slowly), handle mail.”16 She loved old people and would do this with pleasure. She was currently helping a ninety-three-year-old woman in Princeton.

  On her return, Svetlana plunged back into the chaos of her life, resuming the ritual of unpacking and scouting out her new neighborhood. She immediately disliked it. There was no place to walk. The streets were filled with cars in the evenings; she missed the lovely trees of Princeton. But she had signed a contract to buy the house and was trapped. She berated herself. She should have known better than to listen to real estate agents. She waited anxiously for Olga to return from Wisconsin. Without her daughter, she roamed the empty house, hoping for things to fall into place.

  Then she discovered, to her horror, that the principal and most of the children at Olga’s new school were Ukrainians. How would the Ukrainians respond when they found out who Olga was? So many of the hate letters she received were from Ukrainians telling her “to drop dead, or go back to red Moscow where you belong.”17

  A key to Svetlana’s psychology was that she would sometimes convince herself of paranoid explanations in order to do what she really wanted to do—in this case, move. If the school administrators had found out that Olga was Stalin’s granddaughter, would they have said anything? Stuart School protected Svetlana’s and Olga’s privacy.

  Of course, paranoia was a reflex response for most Soviet political exiles, let alone for Stalin’s daughter. It was an automatic self-defense. The purges and famine in the Ukraine had been particularly brutal during Stalin’s regime. It would take only one person to begin a hate campaign. Svetlana decided she couldn’t take the risk. They couldn’t live in Lawrenceville. They must move again.

  Whenever she felt cornered, Svetlana acted precipitately, making frenzied decisions. She found another house, this time in nearby Pennington, and bought it, further depleting the principal of her investments. Now she owned this house and the Lawrenceville house and was almost out of money. She wrote to Kitty Muggeridge ruefully, “I feel I am a bad mother.”18

  At least Pennington was an old town with sidewalks. The house at 440 Sked Street was a traditional Cape Cod on the outskirts of town with two bedrooms upstairs, a living room with a wood-burning stove, a dining room that Svetlana turned into her study, and a big kitchen overlooking a sheltered backyard. The large trees in the distance screened her from her neighbors’ view. She set about digging up the back lawn and planting her garden. She enrolled Olga in the Toll Gate School in Pennington.

  But she was already restless. She wrote to Kitty Muggeridge:

  Oh I wish there were no fence, and fields and hills would go endlessly—or the sea, the lake, the river—something that is not limited, not bordered. Frankly I do not need that vegetable garden because the peasant roots in me are not stronger than those gypsy roots from my Grandpa Alliluyev. I wish I could go on those innumerable trips all over the world, preferably by slow freighter ship, with a small cabin, so that we would stand for a long time in every port, where tourists do not go.19

  Poignantly, Svetlana always claimed her maternal grandparents’ bloodline. Grandma Olga was from German/Georgian peasant stock and Grandpa Sergei was part Russian, part Gypsy. It was an ancestry she could celebrate. If she hadn’t lost her money, she would have traveled—back to India, to Japan, China, South America, Spain, Greece. But as she told Kitty, 99 percent of people live very far from their dreams. At least she had her sweet daughter. “So I go back to my laundry . . . and my house repairs.”20

  Svetlana had renewed contact with an old Georgian friend, Utya Djaparidze, now a professor at Hartford College, in Connecticut. Utya was horrified to learn she was living in suburban Pennington. Pennington would ruin Olga! They would both end up as “Archie Bunkers.” Olga needed New York City to know the world. Utya suggested a number of private schools. Svetlana wrote to Rosa: “I was SO HAPPY that someone was telling me all this. And she was already taking in her hand our lives.”21

  One of the worst legacies of Svetlana’s childhood was her terror of acting independently and getting things wrong. And almost invariably, it was a man she turned to. She told Rosa, “I know I failed to make my own way in this modern jungle of freedom to which I have run fourteen years ago,” and reported Utya’s words. “‘Ludka [Utya’s son] is a man and he CAN take your life in his hands and help you and Olenka’—she was shouting at me—and I was melting like ice-cream under sun, and swelling with tears, hot tears of love and gratitude, happy to accept all this and obey and to agree—because I know she understands—I know she knows.” Even as she thought of her own submissiveness as a failing, Svetlana seemed unable to resist. She told Rosa, “I have lost my own will completely. Unless something or somebody takes my hand and pulls it strongly in the right direction, I would not be able to do things myself.”22

  Some would diagnose Svetlana as manic-depressive, or bipolar, but such a diagnosis would not take into account the pressures she still lived under as Stalin’s daughter. It was as if Svetlana had two modes: abject submission and total rebellion. She had married a Jewish man against her father’s wishes long before she had defected from his country, for which act she believed, accurately, that he would have killed her. Her father’s censure lurked in her mind long after his death. She was always fighting to find her own authority, her own way. She would abjectly accept others’ advice and then rebel. Each new step was inevitably fraught with misgivings. Was she doing the right thing? Yet it could also be said that part of this dynamic was a trait of Soviet psychology. To survive in the Soviet Union, it was customary, indeed necessary, to identify a patron or protector under whose wing one could shelter.23

  Svetlana was thinking not of New York, but rather of Europe. Like many European émigrés, she believed American children were undisciplined. Olga was already a little rebel. Svetlana told Rosa: “We act exactly as it is described in all those dreadful Mother-Daughter books I have seen. . . . My American daughter gives me all that constant disagreement about everything.”24 Olga was a very bright child doing badly at school. If she could adapt, an English or Swiss boarding school with high educational standards would put her back on track.

  Svetlana sent out requests to British and English-speaking Swiss boarding schools for brochures, warning friends, if they made inquiries on her behalf, never to mention who she was. The last thing she needed was reports in American newspapers that she was abandoning the United States. She preferred to remain invisible. When she’d recently been invited to attend a presidential luncheon at the White House to commemorate Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s hundredth birthday, she’d written to Nancy Reagan to say she was sick.25 The prospect of serving as her father’s stand-in appalled her.

  In February 1982, when Svetlana was visiting Rosa and she and the Shands were all sitting down to a candlelit dinner with the music of Handel playing in the background, the phone rang. It was the British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin asking
for Svetlana. Rosa was intimidated by the voice of the great man, the very man who had traveled to Russia to meet Anna Akhmatova. Svetlana explained that Berlin was a friend whom she’d first met in 1970. He was in New York and she was going to talk with him about moving to England. He was one of those who could tell her what was best for her. Being told what to do was what she needed now.26

  Svetlana told Berlin she wanted to return to an intellectual life. How strange it was that even under the severe pressures of cultural life in the USSR, it was easier to have an intense intellectual life there than in the United States, where she had been sleepwalking for fifteen years.27 Berlin said she had to resume her writing. Forget writing about America. She should go back to the beginning and attempt to see her life whole. She should write about family life with her father. But Svetlana replied that the problem was, she’d “missed a family life.” Her father had never been “interested in what she was doing, though she had wanted him to be. But then, to be fair, she was not interested in what he was doing either.” She and her father had spent their time together in silence, he mostly fuming in anger.28

  When she suggested to Berlin that she might serve as a companion to a British retiree, he said this was a little far-fetched, as was her notion of living in a London attic. “I cannot see you in the décor of the first and last acts of La Bohème.” On the other hand, he was sure she was right in assuming that she would be less visible in England.29 The British valued privacy. Berlin offered to send a letter of recommendation to Hugo Brunner, his editor at Chatto & Windus, warning her that regarding publishers, it was, of course, always better to be skeptical and then to be agreeably surprised.

  On April 6, Svetlana set out for London to meet Hugo Brunner, who found her charming and compelling. She told him she had two projects in mind: a collection of stories about America, which would be a warm-up exercise for the big book she intended to write; and a long autobiographical work that she was not ready to define explicitly. Brunner provided her with the letter she needed for her visa application:

  APRIL 8, 1982

  Mrs. Lana Peters, who wishes to live and work in the United Kingdom, is a distinguished and successful writer. She will pursue her career in this country. She is at present at work on two books and it is our intention to publish them both.30

  Rosa arranged for Svetlana to stay in London with friends whom she and Philip had known since their days as missionaries in Uganda. Through them, Svetlana met Terry Waite, then serving as assistant to the archbishop of Canterbury, though in a few years he would become well known when, attempting to negotiate a hostage crisis in Lebanon, he was himself kidnapped and held hostage for almost five years.

  By coincidence Rosa was in England visiting friends in Cambridge when Svetlana arrived. The children of Rosa’s hosts were attending a Quaker school called Friends’ School in the nearby town of Saffron Walden, and Rosa thought perhaps Svetlana might be interested in seeing it. Having arranged a meeting with the headmaster, Waite, Rosa, and Svetlana set out on Easter Sunday for Saffron Walden. Svetlana found the two-hundred-year-old property beautiful and the headmaster sympathetic. She wrote to Aline Berlin that, being more liberal, the Quakers seemed not only tolerant of but indifferent to Olga’s background; this was unlike the attitude in America, where suspicion of Russians seemed “a national hysteria of sorts.”31 At Waite’s intercession, Olga was enrolled. In Svetlana’s mind, the future was set. She was working with a publisher. From his generous letters, she assumed Berlin had taken her on as his protégé.32 Olga passed the entrance exams for Friends’ School. All Svetlana needed to do was survive until the fall.

  But then Svetlana’s visa application was proving difficult. Sir Isaiah wrote to his friend Francis Graham-Harrison, describing Svetlana as “a dignified, serious, intellectually inclined, somewhat melancholy (not surprisingly, in her circumstances) lady, of considerable presence and charm.” He did feel she behaved somewhat like a “Princess from a minor German court,” or like “a distinguished exile in an alien land,” but he had read her books and she clearly had literary talent. His letter concluded: “My interest in this is that of someone who found Mrs. Peters’s predicament a difficult one, and herself a rather noble, certainly touching, human being. . . . I can see no objection myself to letting her come and live here for some time, but I shall be guided by what you think.”33 Graham-Harrison sent a note to the Home Office. Svetlana’s visa came through.

  By August 1, Svetlana had managed to sell her house in Lawrenceville and the one in Pennington and recouped much of her capital. Rosa’s friends found her an apartment in Cambridge that she could afford. At the end of August, she and Olga flew to Britain to begin their new life.

  PART FOUR

  Learning to Live in the West

  Chapter 30

  Chaucer Road

  In this photograph from 1984, a thirteen-year-old Olga poses with a bulldog at a British fair.

  (Courtesy of Rosa Shand)

  Svetlana moved into her flat at 12-B Chaucer Road. The house belonged to Dr. Robert Denman, a professor of land economy at Cambridge. It was damp and gloomy with that peculiar claustrophobic atmosphere typical of an English Victorian house, though there was a substantial and beautiful back garden that ran down to a brook. Chaucer Road was on the edge of Cambridge, and the walk into town went past the botanical gardens along a meandering stream. Svetlana’s attic aerie was a hangover from the nineteenth century—small, with no central heating—almost worthy of La Bohème. The hot water trickled into the tub and the cold wind blew through ventilation holes behind the gas range. She joked in letters to Rosa Shand that the construction reminded her of “my old Russia.” “Very Nostalgic and cold.”1 There were two other tenant apartments in the house, occupied by an elderly Irish librarian on a pension who was always inviting Svetlana in for a cup of tea beside her gas fire, and a South African couple with two children.

  Olga boarded at Friends’ School while Svetlana took the trip by bus or train from Cambridge to collect her on weekends. The school, founded in 1702 as a Quaker institution committed to internationalism, dominated the medieval market town of Saffron Walden, with its narrow streets and alleyways into which the houses leaned like friendly neighbors. Initially somewhat intimidated, hiding her insecurities, Olga asserted her Americanness—ultrapatriotic, she complained that everybody hated Americans; it was appalling that the Brits didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. But within a few weeks, she began to delight in her school. To Svetlana’s amusement, she aped a Cockney accent in order to talk like a Brit.2

  Olga recalled: “We had always been moving. It was back and forth between California, Carlsbad, Princeton, round and round New Jersey—it was a new house all the time.” With her newfound stability, she established intimate friendships with the girls in her dorm. Her closest friends came from Brunei, Kuwait, Uganda, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and, of course, England. She soon felt a wonderful sense of belonging.

  The press were buzzing about when we moved to England, but somehow Mom managed to keep me really sheltered. I still didn’t know anything about my grandfather. [Friends’] was an incredible school where I was accepted and flourished. I was actually able to have a personality, for the first time. Ever.”3

  Without Olga around to structure her days, Svetlana tried to pick up the threads of her writing life. After her long silence as a writer, in her attic where the damp English cold penetrated to the bone, she went through a painful autumn of self-doubt. She was reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. His work was so good. Why would she have the temerity to think of writing in English? She would open herself to ridicule. And yet she found she could not write in Russian.

  She’d written to Berlin soon after her arrival. “Hugo Brunner wants me to write in my native language. . . . Of course, having been raised on Russian literature and poetry, it is only natural for me to write in Russian.” But she told Berlin that writing in Russian brought “a feeling of pain, since it’s bordering on guilt.” It evoked the
past: her father, her mother’s suicide, all those disappeared lives, the suffering of friends, her abandonment of her children—all the losses that she had been retreating from “behind the American curtain.” After fifteen years, was it not time to get rid of her “funny and hypocritical camouflages”?4 But she could not get to work. She confessed that she needed constant encouragement. She imagined that Berlin’s circle must be something like that of the Tolstoys in Leningrad or even of her colleagues at the Gorky Institute—Berlin was Russian-born, after all—and she could indulge again that wonderful “useless” habit of Russian intellectuals: arguing for hours for the sheer pleasure of it as if it were a sport.

  But meanwhile she had pressing concerns. Her savings were now reduced—she had an annual income of between £8,000 and £9,000, but that had to last and was quickly being depleted as she paid Olga’s boarding-school fees and the costs of her own frugal maintenance.5 Her visitor’s visa to the United Kingdom dictated that she was in the country as an independent writer at the behest of her publisher. She was expressly prohibited from taking on work, whether as a translator, a tutor, or a lecturer. Her only solution was to publish a new book, which she was determined to do. She was sure that all she required was a clear directive from her publisher, a contract, and Berlin’s moral support.

  When she arrived in England in August, however, Berlin had been in Italy; he was unable to meet her until mid-November, when they finally had lunch in Piccadilly. Their initial encounter was stimulating as she described her plans for work, and she found herself doing something unexpected. After their luncheon, she took a taxicab to Covent Garden to break her long silence with an old friend, Mita, the ballerina Sulamith Mikhailovna Messerer. Mita had defected to Great Britain in 1980 at the age of seventy-two, ending a distinguished career as a dancer and ballet coach with the Bolshoi. Svetlana left a note with her phone number at the stage door. Mita called her in Cambridge the next day.