Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Burdonsky thought that Svetlana had never been “the type of tender, fussy mother—a hen with her chicks.” In fact, she was like her own mother. “In our family they always said that Nadya, my grandmother, was not a tender, soft person. She was also a dry person: you could talk with Stalin in a casual manner, but not with her.” Svetlana, too, was strict, but she loved her children. “I was on her side and not on the side of her children. I would never behave this way, no matter what my mother did, whom I loved madly.”

  He remembered her children’s reaction when she had abandoned them.

  They were still quite young. And they were people who were not used to public revelation and public attention. And they were literally attacked on a mass scale. They felt confusion. Extreme bewilderment. Svetlana understood well—she was a very intelligent woman—that while all of this was at the center of the world’s attention, nothing would happen to the children. I mean Joseph and Katerina. Their fathers, after all, stood behind them. Behind Joseph stood Grisha [Grigori] Morozov; and behind Katya, Yuri Zhdanov: fathers who had different attitudes to Svetlana, who had different attitudes toward her departure, and who had different attitudes toward their children. Even though she was a young girl, Katya always was and remained a person with her own views on human relationship, on the world and its events. She was also a little personality. And she did not forgive Svetlana. She perceived it as a betrayal—not of motherland or the flag—but as a betrayal, that her mother betrayed her. She had a closer relationship with her mother than Osia. And Osia, because of his character, he could have forgiven Svetlana everything if she had taken him with her. And Katya, if she were there with her mother, she would not have let her stay. They were absolutely different kids.

  Burdonsky and Svetlana talked of Stalin, particularly about his death. Svetlana recalled Stalin’s last gesture, which still haunted her—that fist rising in defiance. “It was rage, a raging rejection of death. His soul had finally fractured.” She recalled how, toward the end, her father had asked her to visit. “You know, I came there and by the second day I was going mad. It was very difficult to communicate with him because he always had an internal dialogue. It was not possible to get inside that conversation.” And she said, “For me it was torture. And he saw this and said, ‘Leave. I can see that you are suffering. Leave!’”

  Sixty years later, when Burdonsky visited Stalin’s dacha with a filmmaker, he was frightened by the loneliness Stalin’s rooms exuded. “Power robs a person emotionally, sucks absolutely all the juices out of you. It’s never ending. The man of power alone on a cold mountain peak. Svetlana knew this.”

  Burdonsky understood that Svetlana’s attitude toward her father continually changed. “At times one attitude would prevail—a sort of love, yes, but at another, on the contrary, she completely rejected him.” Anyone trying to fathom her attitude had to understand its complexity.

  Stalin became a kind of sinkhole, a myth, a sort of gutter where everything is drained. His whole identity—contradictory and difficult—became almost invisible in all this. Just a silhouette. Svetlana knew so much truth about him, even in comparison to all of us, not to mention in comparison to those writing about him. Legends attached to his name. This evoked rage in her. I think that some form of explosion—explosions of rage—were characteristic of her. I think this was because of a sense of internal helplessness. Of helplessness to have any effect or influence.

  Burdonsky had thought long and hard about his aunt Svetlana.

  She was a mixture of traits that do not mix. She had some sort of ceaseless femininity. Simultaneously she had an unbendable will, even maybe a touch of dryness. Svetlana’s sharpened feeling of loneliness, her reclusiveness (and she was a very closed-in person) originates from her childhood, of course. The harshness and dryness were natural to her also; they were a form of defensive veil.

  Burdonsky believed that his father, Vasili, had been weak. He was “a product of the people, the freeloaders and leeches, who surrounded him.” But Svetlana was her father’s daughter. She had his “organized intelligence,” his “unbelievable will.” But she did not have his evil.

  It is easy to accuse everyone. The most difficult thing is to place yourself in Svetlana’s place. Not one of us has been in that place. And no one knows what it is like. I can only say one thing. . . . Princesses or daughters of some leaders . . . all of their attempts to be more human, to simply be a woman, to simply be a mother, to simply be a citizen—they are all doomed. They are all doomed. There are no desert islands. They will be reached and found everywhere. Her fate is so interesting . . . just on its own it is so interesting—her whole path, her whole search for some spiritual shelter, which she could never find. . . . I understood that she would never find it, even though she thought she would. She is one of the most tragic figures that I know—tragic figures. And fate treated her very cruelly. And unjustly.38

  But perhaps Svetlana herself is most succinct in describing the tragedy of her life. “You are Stalin’s daughter. Actually you are already dead. Your life is already finished. You can’t live your own life. You can’t live any life. You exist only in reference to a name.”39

  Faced with the disaster of her return to Moscow, Svetlana knew she had to run again. But where could she take Olga now? She thought of Tbilisi, which she had visited only once long ago when she had gone there with Vasili and her half brother, Yakov, to meet Stalin’s mother. In her memory Georgia was something like Greece—warm, fertile, foreign.

  She wrote to the government asking permission to move to a remoter part of the Soviet Union, away from attacks by the Western press. She promised to cooperate with the local authorities in Tbilisi and to refrain from speaking to the foreign press or being too visible. She knew how to write this kind of letter and was ready to promise almost anything to get out of Moscow. She was sure life in Georgia would be independent (at least to a degree) from the center, because Georgia existed on the borderland between the Asian and Russian worlds.

  Chapter 32

  Tbilisi Interlude

  In this photograph from 1986, Soviet Politburo members vote during a session. Front row, left to right: Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov, Andrei Gromyko, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Middle row, left to right: Vitaly Vorotnikov, Lev Zaikov, and Mikhail Solomentsev. Top row: Moscow Party boss Boris Yeltsin (left) and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.

  (AP Photo/Boris Yurchenko)

  On December 1, 1984, Svetlana and Olga left for Georgia. They had been in Moscow only slightly more than a month. The peaks and valleys of the Caucasian Ridge gleamed white with snow as they flew over what Svetlana remembered as a tropical landscape. It was winter in Tbilisi and cold, though not as cold as Moscow. At the airport, officials again met them, but the Georgians seemed more casual. Mother and daughter were driven to a modern state residence and assigned a two-bedroom apartment at the far end of Chavchavadze Prospect on the edge of the city.

  In Olga’s young eyes, it was a “palace” where the important people stayed. She remembered it as feeling like a kind of compound; the grounds included a farm with reindeer, which she took to visiting every day. She and her mother were housed in the main building with glass doors and marble floors; the complex had its own cinema. They ate in the grandiose dining room and had a cleaning staff and a driver whom they could call on. All Party members and visiting dignitaries had chauffeurs. Their driver, Jora, turned out to be a wonderful guide to Georgia.1

  At Svetlana’s insistence, they were moved to a smaller, unfurnished apartment in the complex. She and Olga hunted through the local shops and markets, filling the apartment with Georgian crafts and artifacts, which made the place feel better, but they soon found themselves listening to speeches in the dining hall. Svetlana would later complain that the then–Party boss Eduard Shevardnadze had orchestrated all this, placing them on the edge of the city precisely so that they would need a driver who could report on their activities. It was the same VIP treatment as in Moscow, but at
least here things were less ostentatious.

  For Olga it was dumbfounding.

  I was showered with pretty much anything and everything—but it was just so unreal. I was brought friends to play with whose parents were accepted Party members. Everybody was trying to do anything to keep me happy. If I got sick, we’d go to the doctors. There would be a line of people. I’d get shoveled to the front. And always stared at. Everywhere I went, I had a chauffeur who was consequently also a chaperone. I wanted to ride a horse—I loved horseback riding. The next thing I knew, I had a personal trainer and was training for racing. I wanted to swim. No, I couldn’t just go swimming. I was trained by an Olympic champion. I wanted to play piano—they’d send a concert pianist. I liked to draw. I was suddenly going to the best art institute. I was thirteen years old! It seemed people didn’t have hobbies there. You trained to do something for life.2

  Olga had private teachers of Russian and Georgian, and lessons in math and geography; she attended the Riding School with her instructor, Zurab, and went for her art classes. Life found a kind of rhythm. She formed a tight bond with the family of her Georgian teacher, Londa Gedevanishvili. She and her mother often visited this family, feeling accepted for themselves and not for their genealogy. Olga called the Gedevanishvilis’ affection a particular kind of Georgian love: Londa kept sending them roses and fruit, which they would find at their apartment door.

  Svetlana decided one morning to phone a distant relative of the Alliluyev family, Leila Sikmashvili, to ask if she would give Olga music and voice lessons. Leila was a talented musician and actress who had traveled internationally with theater groups playing from London to Australia.3 When Leila’s phone rang and the voice on the other end introduced herself as Svetlana Alliluyeva, Leila thought it was a prank and hung up.4 Svetlana called again and insisted she really was Svetlana Alliluyeva. Soon Leila was coming twice a week to teach Olga popular Georgian songs. Her Georgian friends took to calling her Oliko and claimed her as one of theirs. Hating the propaganda coming out of Moscow, the teenagers listened raptly to Olga’s stories of life in America.

  Meanwhile, Svetlana felt like a ghost walking in the streets of Tbilisi. People stared in shocked surprise, both those who worshipped Stalin as the favorite son of Georgia and those who had been victims of his crimes. In fact, Svetlana was often quite lonely. Many people, ingrained with the habit of fear and certain she was under the scrutiny of the KGB, avoided her. Offered the job of teaching Olga piano, the young pianist Tamara Dovgan turned it down. The job came with strings: “I am sure everyone had to report on Svetlana.” She felt pity for Svetlana, but friends advised her to keep her distance.5

  Svetlana and Olga spent their free time scouring the alleyways and streets of Tbilisi, an exquisite city that dates back to the fifth century and was built at a crossroad between Europe and Asia. Some of its streets were still lined with the palaces of nobility exiled under the tsars, and there were market bazaars and souks overflowing with exotic fruits and Georgian crafts. They often passed the seminary where Stalin had studied until he dropped out at the age of twenty to begin his revolutionary career. The seminary was now closed.

  Most Sundays Svetlana and Olga attended services at the Sioni Cathedral overlooking the Mtkvari River. Both were enchanted by the exquisite quality of the Georgian choir intoning the liturgy. Only here, it seemed to Svetlana, could people escape the grinding poverty and fearful repression that still pervaded Georgia. Only here did she feel anonymous and at peace. Of course, this was an illusion. Even at the Sioni, people knew who she was. When she sought a private audience with the patriarch, he was comforting. He told her, “You should write to your own children only words of love. Nothing else. They have forgotten what is love and forgiveness. Never blame them; never argue with them. Just tell them how much you love them.”6

  Svetlana kept writing to her daughter Katya, who had said, “No contact whatsoever.” All her letters came back. Katya’s father, Yuri Zhdanov, by now a professor of biochemistry at the university in Rostov, wrote a kind letter and sent pictures of Katya and her daughter, telling Svetlana to be patient. “Katya is incredibly self-sufficient and independent. Listens to no one’s advice.”7 Neither her son nor her grandson wrote or visited. Svetlana decided the authorities had brainwashed her children.

  Chauffeured by Jora, Svetlana and Olga would drive into the countryside as Svetlana tried to recover her Georgian roots. They visited the town of Gori, her father’s birthplace, where a monstrous shrine with Corinthian columns covered the humble two-room house with the one bed on which the Djugashvili family slept. There was no fireplace; cooking was done in a small pot on a karasinka (kerosene burner). Olga was appalled by the misery of it all.

  Nearby stood an equally monstrous two-story museum with marble entrance and rising staircase that now traced the history of Stalin’s glory. Svetlana detested the display and instead looked for mementos of her paternal grandmother. The only reminder of Stalin’s mother was a pair of her glasses. Though Svetlana had met her grandmother only once, she loved her for those last words to her son which had so amused him: “But what a pity you never became a priest.” They also visited the local school where Stalin began to study Russian. Svetlana told Olga her father’s Russian was quite good, though he never fully lost his Georgian accent. Svetlana had refused the invitation from the museum’s chief curator, Nina Ameridzhibe, to attend the ceremony marking the 105th anniversary of Stalin’s birth that December 21, just after they’d arrived. Ameridzhibe claimed that one million people visited the museum in 1984, breaking all previous records.8

  Still, whenever they went to a museum or even the church, people stared. Olga was young and resilient, but for Svetlana it was gut-wrenching.

  My greatest burden lay in the need of everyone to tell me “what a great man” my father was: some accompanied the words with tears, others with hugs and kisses, a few were satisfied with only stating that fact. I could not avoid the subject or the confrontations on beaches, in dining rooms, on the street. . . . They were obsessed with his name, his image, and, being obsessed, they could not leave me alone. It was a torture for me. I could not tell them how complex were my thoughts about my father and my relationship with him. Nor could I tell them what they wanted to hear—so they departed from me in anger. I was continually on edge and nervous.9

  Olga was angry at her mother’s mourning over Joseph. “You had me,” she would say. “Was that not enough for you? No! You wanted them all too. See what you’ve got! We should be living in England like we were. You asked for this!”10

  There were many things Olga loved about Georgia and the friends she made, but there were “a lot of hardships.” For one, her mother was drinking too much, and so was she. They would be invited to Georgian feasts that still followed the tradition of the tamada (toastmaster) proposing continuous toasts. “I was fourteen! In Georgia, there were endless dinners with four bottles of wine and you had to give toasts in a ram’s horn! Including the children. You couldn’t not toast.”

  Even more disturbing was the problem Olga was having with male attention. She had discovered that foreign girls were considered loose by Georgian standards, and already so tall and lovely, she was fair game. “I was always getting groped by older men. It was horrible, and if I was ever left alone . . . I just couldn’t stand being left alone. . . . I don’t think I’d even thought about boys yet.” And there was another problem. At fourteen, Olga was of marriageable age.

  In Tbilisi, they had a tradition: it was not unknown for a girl to be kidnapped. If you’d been out of your house, in another building with a man overnight, you had to marry him. Otherwise you were shunned from society. It happened to a fourteen-year-old girl I knew. It was terrifying. And I was a pretty good bachelorette. Kidnapping Stalin’s granddaughter would have been quite a prize! It was a risk.

  And then there was just the whole dark side to it, the whole behind the Curtain Communist side. I was living this weird sheltered, secluded life with about f
our different governesses coming every day. My mother stopped me from going out, trying to protect me from getting kidnapped. And what was she going to do? She couldn’t write. We were fighting a lot. I was really fiery. I just had a feeling of despair and was not able to plan a future. This is what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives! Of course it was wonderful going to the ballet, and seeing friends. And there were many good days. But I was playing it, as if I were this shallow social butterfly who could find herself happy in any situation.11

  Friends from Moscow visited. Stepan Mikoyan, who was with a Soviet Air Force group that was touring all the capitals of southern Russia to publicize aviation, stopped two days in Tbilisi and had dinner with Svetlana and Olga. To him, Svetlana seemed completely alone. “Maybe she was just conscious of a certain estrangement and isolation; quite a lot of people were feeling hostility towards her. The Stalinists hated her for having ‘betrayed’ her father, and the anti-Stalinists disliked her for being his daughter.”12

  Svetlana invited her cousin Kyra, the daughter of Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev, to come to Tbilisi for an extended visit. Like the rest of the family, Kyra was able to separate Svetlana from her memories of her incarceration and five years of exile under Stalin. She and Svetlana had been very close as children. They shared memories of parties in the Kremlin. “The time passed joyously. . . . Grandpa [Sergei] was not very jolly, but grandma [Olga] would pick up a guitar and sing.”13 Kyra remembered how she and Svetlana watched movies, especially the American ones with Deanna Durbin. When Kyra stayed overnight, she would sleep in Svetlana’s room. After nanny Alexandra Andreevna left, Svetlana “would ask me to dance. She would sit on the bed and I would dance to Strauss on the gramophone. Svetlana was a very nice girl.”14