Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  For the Soviets, Svetlana’s return was a propaganda coup. Preparations were under way for a huge celebration the next year of the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The Politburo was busy rehabilitating Stalin as a military genius and brilliant diplomat. Television documentaries showed Stalin addressing the army in Red Square in 1941, with Hitler’s troops only twenty miles from Moscow; in his marshal’s uniform posing with Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran and Yalta; and charming Truman and Clement Attlee at the Potsdam Conference, as he outnegotiated his allies. A feature film based on John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World was rejuvenating the Bolshevik revolution as directed by men of passion and principle. But all this propaganda masked a fragile government. Svetlana had returned to the USSR at a very shaky moment. Konstantin Chernenko, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who had succeeded Andropov as the country’s leader, was old, ailing,15 and rarely seen in public; he would be dead within the year. Behind the scenes, as the economy disintegrated, reformists in the Communist Party were battling the old guard.

  The Soviet population was still divided about Stalin. Photos of Stalin could be seen dangling from strings on the windshields of cabs in Moscow and trucks on the Trans-Siberian highway, but some people remembered the purges and the price paid in human lives. The younger generation seemed ignorant of that past and ready to accept Stalin as the great commander in chief who guided the Red Army to victory and saved the Allies; the prewar purges of the Soviet command and the postwar treatment of returning soldiers had been edited out. In this context, Stalin’s errant daughter’s return and public contrition were invaluable to the Party. Of course, there were those who seemed to have no idea who this Alliluyeva woman was.16 The Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post, Dusko Doder, reported being asked by a young taxi driver, “Who is Alliluyeva?” When he responded that she was Stalin’s daughter, the taxi driver replied, “I didn’t know Stalin’s real name was Alliluyev.”

  The reaction in the US press to Svetlana’s return was predictable outrage. Who did she think she was? Defecting from the free world back to the Communists! The headlines blared: STALIN’S DAUGHTER BACK IN THE SOVIET UNION AFTER 17 YEARS17 and SVETLANA’S FLIGHT: BACK WHERE HER TROUBLES BEGAN.18 Two articles in particular were utterly damning, both by Sovietologists who had known her personally.

  Professor Robert Tucker titled his article “Svetlana Inherited Her Tragic Flaw.” Acknowledging that he knew her, Tucker described Svetlana as driven by her inner demons, voicing “angry recriminations” against everyone, including her American ex-husband, Wesley Peters. She refused to speak of Stalin because she couldn’t admit to herself that “she was—in some sense—like her father”: her “low speaking voice,” her eyes with their “yellow glint,” her “inner imperiousness,” her refusal to accept criticism. She had rejected Tucker’s editorial suggestions for her book, the principal one of which was his suggestion to change the title to Leavetaking. Unlike her father, “who would destroy those with whom he broke,” all she could do was flee. “She is her father’s daughter in a way that has finally brought her back to unfreedom . . . the last misfortune bequeathed to her by the terrible man who was her father.”19

  The other article was a lengthy piece in Time magazine by the journalist and translator Patricia Blake, a member of the Princeton inner circle and a close friend of Max Hayward, with whom Svetlana had fallen in love all those years ago in Princeton. In her article, “The Saga of Stalin’s ‘Little Sparrow,’” she didn’t disclose that she knew Svetlana.

  Blake had a complicated reputation and was considered by many as at least a fellow traveler in American intelligence circles. Vsevolod Kochetov, editor of the Soviet journal Oktyabr, wrote a vicious lampoon of Blake in which she was “portrayed as a beautiful spy from the CIA’s Encounter team who slept around in the Soviet literary world.”20 This was slanderous, but she was clearly a presence as a glamorous journalist interested in Soviet intrigues.

  For her Time article, Blake interviewed Wesley Peters and the Hayakawas, as well as Svetlana’s neighbors on Chaucer Road—Jane Renfrew remembered Blake as being particularly hostile.21 “The story of Svetlana’s life is the chronicle of her losing battle with the specter of her father . . . whom she fatefully resembled,” Blake wrote. She offered a full chronology of Svetlana’s life from her twenty-six years in the Kremlin, where she learned her “lordly” ways, to the dark decade after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes, when she had lived bereft of status and privileges, to her disastrous relations in the United States.

  Blake erroneously claimed, “No open arms awaited Svetlana in the USSR,” and, “Dissatisfied by the cool official reception she received, she displayed her temper to the Soviet authorities.” To insulate her from diplomats and other foreigners, they moved her out of Moscow and refused her a “car, dacha, or any other of the perquisites that families of the Soviet elite enjoy.”22 This was a fabrication made up out of whole cloth.

  Blake focused in particular on Svetlana’s failings as a mother. She suggested that Svetlana “thwarted” Wesley Peters’s efforts to visit his daughter and implied that Olga had lived in Washington with Senator Hayakawa’s family from 1977 to 1981. Some English acquaintances seemed eager to rush to condemn Svetlana. Her fellow tenants, the Mansfields, reported that she constantly “hectored” her daughter. “We could hear her even when we turned up the television and closed the windows.” At Olga’s school a part-time teacher, Fay Black, remarked that Svetlana forbade her daughter “to wear tight jeans and bright tops like the other girls” and to “wander around town after classes.” She said, “Her mother clung to her like a warden to a prisoner. The child’s only hope was to go back to school.”23

  When Wesley Peters was contacted, he didn’t help. “My reaction is surprise and concern, of course, about our daughter going back to Russia, . . . but there isn’t anything I know I can do about it.”24 The pronoun “our” must have been awkward for him. After he and Svetlana separated, he’d seen his daughter only four or five times.

  When Svetlana eventually read Blake’s article, it was a deep blow. The one thing she felt she had succeeded in was bringing up her daughter. And now she was denied even that success. Olga was quick to defend her mother. “Yes,” she admitted, she and her mother fought, but that didn’t change the love between them:

  For my mother, the primary importance was education. Friends’ School obviously wasn’t going to put me into Oxford or Cambridge. My mother’s way of parenting was not accommodating. If I was being a brat or if I was sulking about something, I would get it. She wasn’t going to tolerate any kind of whining or crying. Yes, she might hit me—it was a Russian thing—but she taught me to be a rebel, so she took it on herself. It was just her way of instilling strength in me, really. I never felt abused, or anything like that. I’m saying this with absolute love. She kept me from the edge of the cliff pretty much.25

  Olga’s former babysitter in Wisconsin, Pamela Stefansson, phoned George Kennan on November 2, saying she was very upset about Olga. She wanted to know if Svetlana had the legal right to take her daughter with her. Kennan had no idea. His secretary suggested she contact the State Department’s legal office or the Soviet Desk.26

  Kennan had a long conversation with Fritz Ermarth, national intelligence officer for the USSR and East Europe. The State Department and the CIA were concerned about Svetlana’s return, convinced she would be exploited for propaganda purposes and unsure of what she might say. What came out of this conversation remains classified, but certainly reports from CIA operatives would have come back from Moscow.27 So far Svetlana didn’t seem a threat. After her press conference, she made no more public statements.

  Meanwhile in Moscow, Svetlana was getting the VIP treatment. Within days, a government-approved teacher was coming to the hotel each morning to teach Olga Russian while Svetlana hunted for a good school. It soon became clear that Olga’s “free” education was not
going to proceed as she had imagined. At the first school, the principal suggested that it would be difficult to have Olga in the classroom, and Svetlana understood that it was Stalin’s ghost who was unwelcome. In another, from the attitude and style of the deputy head, Svetlana saw that Olga would be treated as a celebrity trophy. Of course, Svetlana should have anticipated this, but she expressed shock that “thirty years after my father’s death, the political passions around his name were still so strong and hot.”28 The Russian teacher continued to come to their hotel suite.

  After the first two weeks, Svetlana was shown a large luxury apartment in a sixteen-story complex on Spiridonyevka Street (now Aleksei Tolstoy Street) with a panoramic view of Moscow and the Kremlin towers in the distance. An armed guard stood at the entrance. The apartment had belonged to a Politburo member who had recently died. Svetlana and Olga would be able to shop in the luxury government stores reserved for the elite; they would have a car with a driver; Olga would go to the showcase school next door; and Svetlana would receive the state pension that had been assigned to her when her father died. The well-known House of Receptions, where Moscow correspondents met, was down the street. Svetlana had been forgiven her traitorous defection, but she would be expected to perform. She suggested that she and Olga would prefer a more modest flat.

  Olga recalled: “They tried to bring us the best of everything—the white stallions—but my mother would point at the donkey and say, we’re taking that; it started to get weird pretty quickly.” After the relative austerity of their life in England, Olga didn’t understand why they were getting such exaggerated treatment. Her mother’s refusal of such largesse “made the landing softer, but it was all a shock.”29

  One of the first people Svetlana went to visit was her friend Fyodor Volkenstein, to whom she had addressed her Twenty Letters. The intervening eighteen years had not been kind to him. He was old and ill and his wife had died. He was angry with Svetlana. “Why have you returned? Why? We are all used to the fact that you are living abroad. Your children were all right, you knew that. What will you do here now? You can see already that your return is being used for propaganda. You do not need that!”30 Volkenstein would be dead within a few months.

  Olga and Svetlana visited Joseph and his wife in their Moscow apartment and also at their dacha in Zhukovka near Svetlana’s old country house. It seemed to Olga that Joseph had a very comfortable life, with everything he needed, including a driver at his disposal, yet they all looked at her as if she were the one wearing the designer labels. Even as a thirteen-year-old, Olga was shocked by how much they drank. Looking back, she would reflect, “Joseph had a drinking problem, a bad liver. When we visited, we understood why: the rich greasy food, the endless vodka, just pouring shots of vodka. He had yellow eyeballs and looked a lot older than he should have for a man his age.”

  Svetlana was hardly placating. She confronted Joseph about his drinking, and he responded angrily. Her suggestion to Lyuda that she call her “Mama” was met frostily. When Svetlana asked Joseph to drop by the hotel—she needed to talk with him on his own—he found excuses. When he asked her for money, she gave him what she had but asked him why he needed it and he yelled at her. “Well, I have not come to hear this,” she said. She was not yet willing to imagine that her son might still carry deep resentments as a consequence of her abandonment of him and his sister. She concluded only that he had been Sovietized in the intervening years.

  Svetlana phoned Joseph’s first wife, Elena, now remarried, and asked if her grandson Ilya could visit them. Elena replied that her son was applying to the School of Architecture and had to study. She may have felt it was still too risky for him to visit Svetlana, and after all, what did she owe her ex-mother-in-law, who had left behind her own children?

  Svetlana had been hoping Katya might visit from Kamchatka. Although it was a long distance to travel, they hadn’t seen each other in seventeen years. Svetlana understood that Katya was now widowed. Her husband had shot himself with a rifle, reportedly by accident. When Katya finally wrote back, her letter was cold and abusive. She called Svetlana a traitor to the motherland and refused to see her or to allow her to see her granddaughter.

  All the family relations were dissolving. It was November, and Svetlana felt she was doomed and drowning.

  Svetlana visited Stepan Mikoyan and his wife, Ella, who had always been kind to her, and Olga spent time with her four uncles. Svetlana still called them the Alliluyev boys—Anna’s and Pavel’s sons, with whom she had once played in the yurts in Zubalovo and driven through the darkened streets of Moscow behind her father’s back. These were enjoyable reunions, but Olga was finding that “Moscow was the craziest, darkest place and the coldest place I’d ever been. It was really terrifying.” Shopping was a shock for a young American teenager. “In some stores, the people were killing each other just to get an egg. And then in the government stores they fought over some kind of designer perfume. I saw racism and sexism.”

  Olga’s uncles tried to entertain her with movies, as there was a cinema in her complex. “I saw lots of Russian films that were dubbed in English, and lots of English films with subtitles. My favorites were Gandhi and Faraway Pavilions, which was a series about Englishmen living in India. I just remember thinking how wonderful India was, but then having to deal with the Russian dubbed commentary about Indian ‘savages.’”31

  One day at seven a.m., Svetlana and Olga showed up unannounced at Lily Golden’s door. Lily’s daughter Yelena awoke her mother to say a strange woman named Svetlana was asking to see her. In her half sleep, Lily said, “What Svetlana? There are many Svetlanas.” When Yelena returned to say it was Svetlana Alliluyeva, Lily immediately told Yelena to get dressed and leave for work and never to mention to anybody that Svetlana had visited. Clearly she felt it was still dangerous to be connected to Svetlana in any way. On Yelena’s return late that night, Lily refused to speak to her daughter about the encounter.32

  It seemed that Lily didn’t give vent to her anger at Svetlana’s portrayal of her in Only One Year, but instead chose to be kind for Olga’s sake. Probably she warned Svetlana that Olga would never be accepted in Russia. She would always be either a trophy or a pariah and would never be allowed to be herself. Olga recalled: “When I met Lily, I just remember wanting to cling onto her every word. I just wanted her to stay. I just wanted her to be around all the time.”33

  Svetlana was beginning to understand that she had made a terrible mistake in returning to Moscow, and she found a confidant for her anxious reflections in Alexander Burdonsky, the son of her brother Vasili. When she had last seen him, he was an adolescent. Now he was a well-known theater director in Moscow. Olga, too, recalled him warmly and always delighted in the “great story” of their first meeting:

  Uncle Sacha was surrounded by Gypsies. He was directing a musical in a Gypsy theater and we had gone to see the performance. There were lots of other children—we went back to his apartment and there was a big party and there was lots of drinking. I mean, poor mother. Everybody was passed out, and there was no place for lots of us to sleep, so I went home with the Gypsies. Two hours’ drive clear across Moscow. And Mom woke up the next morning to be told that I’d been taken by the Gypsies! I spent the night in a very, very small apartment in one bed with an entire family of Gypsies.34

  Burdonsky’s childhood had fractured when Vasili divorced his mother and took custody of the children. He and his sister were often simply locked in a room, left hungry and living in filth and squalor, and frequently beaten by their new stepmother, Katya Timoshenko, while she and Vasili pursued the high life of parties with their retinue of Olympic athletes, racing car drivers, and ace fliers. When he was eventually sent to the tough Suvorov military school, it felt to him like liberation. After putting up with whispers behind his back—“Look. Stalin’s grandson!”—he had assumed his mother’s last name.35

  Burdonsky admired Svetlana. “I always liked her household—at the dacha or in Moscow. I learned to
have good taste from her. No excess. I remember her excellent library with photographs of Ulanova,36 Chaliapin, and Akhmatova. It’s strange what stays with you as a child.” He used to watch, with longing, her tender relationship with her nanny.

  I admired her as a woman and as a human being. I cannot say that of all my relatives. I loved her very much. Of course she was difficult. She was a personality, with charisma. . . . I have compassion for her, and it seems, at times, that I understand her very well. Each one of her actions, seemingly unexpected and spontaneous—to me they are understandable. I hold her in my heart. I am always on her side.37

  Burdonsky and Svetlana had long conversations sitting and smoking through the nights in his apartment or walking his dog Lialka through the dark Moscow streets. Perhaps only he, as a Russian, could understand what no American could—that in abandoning Russia in 1967 she had pulled up her “whole root system.” She had had to leave behind not only her children, not just the landscapes and streets, but all the people with whom she was spiritually connected.

  Svetlana was able to talk with Burdonsky about her children. She confessed to feeling enormous guilt at abandoning them, but she could not understand why Joseph, in particular, had so categorically rejected her. To Burdonsky, it was not puzzling. “They had not seen each other for almost twenty years. The boy she had left behind was now a different man and she really did not like what he had become.” Joseph had a comfortable life as a surgeon with all the amenities this entailed. He was inside the system of security that the elite enjoyed. Burdonsky felt that Joseph “was very dependent on his wife—a woman of little charm. He was very much under her pragmatic, mercantile influence.” He understood that Joseph’s wife was offended; Svetlana, a rich woman, hadn’t even brought them decent presents.