Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  He wants glasnost—openness, but where are the independent open newspapers in which people could vent out their opinions? There are still none. Unless they change and undermine their own one-party-regime and allow—legitimately—other parties—they can’t have “openness.” It’s all words, words, words still. But it will come, nevertheless, if not Gorbachev, the next fellow on the top will have to call for reforms, anyway.7

  However, despite the shrewdness of her assessment of Gorbachev, Svetlana found that the audience wanted to ask questions only about her father, which made her feel so helpless that she thought she might have a nervous collapse. This was the end of her lecturing career. She told Rosa Shand, “I am always in the clouds of some or another illusion—a positive or a negative one. . . . I’ll NEVER learn to live in the American reality. It is beyond me.”8

  Svetlana didn’t know it, but there was a scheme behind the scenes to find money for her. She had purposefully not sent George and Annelise Kennan her letter of desperation. She could not beg from them, but friends forwarded her letter, and Kennan decided to step in. He wrote to Frank Carlucci, assistant to the president for national security affairs, enclosing a copy of the “circular letter” that “Svetlana (Djugashvili) Peters” had sent to friends. Having given a précis of Svetlana’s history, Kennan remarked:

  Obviously she has brought her troubles upon herself and deserves little personal sympathy. . . . However, a number of her former friends, while fully realizing her responsibility for her own plight, would find it difficult to stand by and watch her becoming a bag woman; and I question whether it would be advisable, from the standpoint of our government to permit this to happen. . . . In view of the sensible and generous way in which she was treated by the Soviet authorities [when she returned in 1984], I think it would make a bad impression, invite invidious comparisons, and not be in the interests of our government, if she and her daughter (who is a nice girl and innocent of all complicity in her mother’s follies) were to become public charges. At the least, such a turn of events would lend itself to adverse propagandistic exploitation.9

  Kennan suggested that a small annuity of $300,000 be set aside, from which regular payments could be made to Svetlana—“necessarily clandestinely.” Within a few weeks, Fritz Ermarth from the CIA phoned Kennan to say that he was confident the matter could be resolved, though it would take a bit of time.10

  With Olgivanna Wright dead, Svetlana concluded that Taliesin was safe. Now she wanted only peace with Wesley Peters. Mostly she wanted Olga to have a relationship with her father and tried to persuade her to visit him. She’d tell Olga, “You know, he’s a good man. You shouldn’t hate him; you shouldn’t say bad things about him.” Olga would reply, “You know, Mommy, I won’t talk to you about it. We’ll just agree not to talk about it. I can’t change what I’ve seen.”11

  However, on her Easter vacation that spring of 1987, Olga yielded to her mother’s pressure and finally visited Wesley. People at Taliesin remembered the sixteen-year-old Olga, beautiful now, with her long hair spilling over her shoulders, sitting at the piano and singing Georgian songs in an ethereal voice,12 but Olga herself found the communal life at Taliesin distressing and certainly felt no connection with her father. She told her mother she was grateful to her. “You gave me a great life. You took me out of there.”13 She was relieved when she got back to Friends’ School.

  Over the next winter in her hunting lodge, Svetlana worked on a new manuscript called “A Book for Granddaughters.” It was to be an account of her and Olga’s return to the USSR. She wrote her endless letters and did some translations. Knowing that her finances were precarious, her old friend Bob Rayle stepped in. “I tried to offer her CIA help, but she invariably refused.”14 Finally he managed to put her in touch with Ilya Levkov, a Russian émigré who ran a small press in New York called Liberty Publishing. That winter Levkov brought out The Faraway Music in Russian. The advance was minimal, but he also gave Svetlana the occasional book to translate into Russian, which brought in a bit of money. In January 1988, she flew to England, staying in Cambridge with Philippa Hill and spending time with Olga. There was some thought of her trying to settle there again, but it was only a brief illusion. After her flight back to Chicago, her bus to Wisconsin got caught in a winter blizzard. Her isolation in her hunting lodge in the backwoods began to seem daunting. She thought of relocating, but where?15

  In June 1988, Svetlana wrote to Rosa Shand with surprising news. She had something to confess. She had fallen in love. The man’s name was Tom Turner. “After years and years of ‘frozen heart’ I do love a man—and I cannot tell you what a great joy, regeneration and light this is to me. All is still in the stage of ‘unfoldment.’”

  A Texan by birth, Tom Turner was a fifty-two-year-old bachelor, ten years younger than Svetlana. He lived in Saint Louis. They had met two years previously in Illinois at the home of a friend and had kept up a friendship by correspondence, but recently they had begun to see each other. Svetlana told Rosa only a few friends knew their secret.

  It’s just all developing beautifully BETWEEN us two. . . . I think it CAN develop into the most happy and wonderful relationship for us both. . . . I should NOT think ahead of time—this is NO GOOD. . . . Please, keep this secret. Sometimes I’m so happy—that I want to shout: “Tom is a wonderful man!” but I shouldn’t.16

  It was as if she were afraid to anticipate happiness, expecting that if she spoke, it would be whisked away. They would spend long hours on the telephone, and she would take the four-hundred-mile trip by bus to spend the weekend with him in Saint Louis, or he would come to visit her in Wisconsin.

  Turner had an interesting background. He had apprenticed as an architect with Buckminster Fuller, but had then worked as a businessman. He was also a Dominican tertiary, or lay brother. Such individuals, married and single, worked in the community. He loved music and all things Russian. Completely indifferent to Svetlana’s parentage, he delighted in taking her to meet his friends. Olga was still at school in England and never met Turner, but Svetlana wrote her long letters describing their lovely evenings cooking meals together—apparently Tom told her she was a great cook and would make a wonderful wife.17 At one moment Olga thought they were getting married, something she secretly longed for. And then came the dreadful news. Several months into their friendship, Tom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

  It would seem that Svetlana’s life was destined to turn in tragic circles. Once she had helped Brajesh Singh to die; now she would have to comfort a dying Tom Turner—which she did. Tom was not bedridden until the very end of his illness. Their loving relationship, with its terrible undertone, continued to the end.

  Even as Tom Turner was dying, Svetlana suffered another collapse of her hopes. At the end of January 1989, three months shy of her eighteenth birthday, Olga shocked her mother by running away from school with a “sweet hippie boyfriend” named Hayden. One weekend when Olga was given leave from school to visit Hayden’s family’s estate—his father was a wealthy London banker—the two young lovers fled to Brighton. They were living in a Brighton bedsit: one room with a communal kitchen and bathroom. As soon as Svetlana found out her daughter had quit school, she commandeered friends to go to Brighton and knock on Olga and Hayden’s door—they were too poor to have a phone—but no one seemed able to persuade Olga to return to Friends’ School. Frustrated, Svetlana contacted Hayden’s father and booked a flight to London on February 5. They would drive to Brighton together to bring their children home.

  One morning Hayden looked out of the window of the bedsit. “Oh my god! It’s my dad.” Olga looked out the window and said, “Oh my god! It’s my mom.” They invited their respective parents in for tea, and all four squatted on the floor, because apart from a mattress draped in Indian fabric, they had no furniture. When she looked back at that morning, Olga remembered her mother fondly.

  She had flown all that way to talk some sense into me and basically take me back to school. But when she
saw how much we were in love, Mom—being such a romantic—just couldn’t bring herself to separate us. We were such a beautiful pair and totally happy. She saw something from her past. Her father had done this to her when she was only sixteen, when she fell in love with Kapler. She wasn’t going to do this to me. I guess she hoped that I would be able to sort this out for myself. Which I did. Hayden and I eventually went back to London and broke up. But my mother had to drive back to London that day with Hayden’s angry father who was fuming: “Are you kidding me? You’re not going to . . . no . . . that’s not how we do this. . . .” But we were left there, yes.18

  A disconsolate Svetlana flew back to Wisconsin. Of course she was angry. It would be Olga who didn’t have the A-level marks to get into college. Her dreams for her daughter’s education were dashed, while Hayden had his wealthy father behind him. In April, she put her hunting lodge up for sale and moved into an apartment in Madison.

  Tom Turner died on June 3, 1989. When Svetlana attended his funeral in Saint Louis, she was moved to find how warmly his family accepted her. She wrote a bleak note to Philippa Hill in Cambridge. When her “dearest closest friend” died, although “both he and I knew it was coming, his death was a blow. NOT HAVING HIM around in the flesh IS very sad.”19 The note is poignant in its stoicism. Svetlana had been well trained in loss.

  In August, two months after Tom Turner died, Svetlana was admitted to the emergency ward of a Madison hospital suffering an apparent heart attack.

  She wrote to Philippa Hill that she felt she was sinking lower and lower from her “ideal.” “Anger makes a sickly heart. . . . I am cracking on every seam.” And then she went on a rant. She was angry at “stupid publishers, stupid newspapers, stupid politicians on my TV every night. Even stupid Gorbachev who BLEW such a GOOD CHANCE of BIG REFORMS in the USSR. . . . He missed his Supreme Hour.” She ended her letter to Philippa, “Well, poor late Tom loved to talk about this, politics and all. Now I have nobody to talk with. Darn it. It’s so sad.”20 Then she got the bill for her emergency stay in the hospital, which almost wiped out her savings.

  How Svetlana survived financially was always mysterious, but it would seem that George Kennan’s appeal to Fritz Ermarth to help her—“necessarily clandestinely”—had been answered. For some time, she had been receiving regular monthly payments for translation work from a Washington agency.21 She claimed she did not know the name of her “benefactors.” She told George and Annelise Kennan, “I do not know WHO decides my fate. I suppose people in Washington. . . . Nameless shadows. All top secret. I NEVER was asked.”22

  But she had begun to feel uneasy about the whole thing. While the checks arrived regularly, often no translation work followed. One of the checks had the name and address of a publishing house called Crocker located in Massachusetts. She wrote to inquire about her assignments but received no answer.

  After Christmas, she wrote to Rosa Shand that she had made a new discovery. “The CIA people in Wash DC decided to pay me a ‘pension’ under a cover-up of a translation work. Can you imagine that stupidity? . . . [They] think that paying me money they are NOT humiliating me.”23 She told Rosa that she had contacted her employer and he (she did not identify who this was but implied it was a CIA officer) informed her that the firm did not exist. “We thought you understood.”

  Irate, she protested, “I felt like I was taken in. It was a cover-up.” “I had never been anyone’s spy and I couldn’t live on a pension or assistance, whatever, from the CIA.”24

  Was her outrage sincere? Did she not suspect that her benefactors might be the CIA? It would seem that in her mind, as long as she was doing legitimate translation work, being unsure of the Washington source was not a problem. Many Soviet dissidents were supported in some way. The previous year, there had been Senate hearings, chaired by Senator Sam Nunn, to look into the general state of Soviet defectors in the United States; she’d been disappointed when she wasn’t called to testify.25 However, accepting a regular stipend directly from the CIA was another matter; it put her on a par with the KGB’s Victor Louis. Bob Rayle insisted she invariably refused his offers of CIA support. Perhaps, being Russian, she could imagine that one day she would be asked to pay back the CIA’s generosity.

  Precipitately, Svetlana decided to bolt. It had been a desolate fall alone in her Madison apartment, without Tom, without Olga. She had reached another dead end. As the Soviet Union disintegrated and “Gorby-mania” pervaded America, she was certain her newly completed manuscript, “A Book for Granddaughters,” would never be published in the United States. She had an open invitation to visit an old friend, Madame Helen Zamoyska, in Muret, France, and the Sinyavskys, with whom she had resumed correspondence, had implied that she might be able to find a French publisher. Underneath everything was, of course, her longing to be closer to Olga.

  When Olga came home that December, Svetlana told her she was moving to France. The move, as usual, was hurried. Olga carried their old furniture off to secondhand stores, haggled over prices, and packed up the remainder of her mother’s things, which were to be shipped to England. Svetlana had a last meal with Wesley Peters at their traditional restaurant, the Don Q Inn in nearby Dodgeville. He was sweet; the talk was good; they spoke of Olga’s future education. And then she was gone.

  She traveled first to the south of France, and then spent several weeks at a retreat at a Roman Catholic nunnery in Toulouse, about which she often spoke nostalgically. She visited the Sinyavskys in Paris, but it turned out they were not helpful in finding her a French publisher. She clearly hadn’t heard the gossip they’d passed on to the London Times in 1984 about her having been lured back to the USSR by KGB agent Oleg Bitov. Had she known, she might have saved herself a frustrating trip.

  Where could she go? She had decamped completely from Wisconsin. The only place her feet could take her now was England. Olga was working in a bank and renting digs in Muswell Hill with three friends. She invited her mother to join her. Svetlana stayed four months, but of course this arrangement couldn’t last.

  It was as if Svetlana had stepped into a void, but then a stone rose to give her a footing. Her former landlord in Cambridge, professor Robert Denman, put her in touch with Sir Richard Carr-Gomm, a philanthropist who had founded the Morpeth Society, a nonprofit charity that ran a number of privately funded housing complexes in London for distressed gentlefolk and indigent people.26 Svetlana moved into 24 Delgarno Gardens in North Kensington, where she had a room and shared the communal kitchen and bathroom with five other residents—a strange echo of the old communal apartments in Moscow.

  To friends in America, she extolled British benevolence. “English charity workers are quite special folks.”27 The city offered so many things free to seniors: city transport, concerts, libraries where she was able to study subjects she had always wanted to pursue. Her favorite excursion was to Regent’s Park, where she sat to write her letters. She assured friends, “I don’t mind to live on charity check. I don’t mind to have furniture from a charity truck. I don’t mind. It doesn’t humiliate me at all. I didn’t want to live on considerable pension, originating from CIA, because I don’t think it’s right. I had four books which could be published, and I could have money from my literary work.”28

  She was receiving about €60 a week from the Carr-Gomm Society, with which she paid her room and board and living expenses.29 She spoke affectionately of fellow residents: “an American, a Chinese cook, a reformed alcoholic, a one-time housekeeper, a gay man of 24.” The tedious part was sharing the bathroom, which nobody bothered to clean. Nevertheless, she would tell a British friend, “Fate always sends me unusual people who pull me out of the abyss.”30

  Svetlana started to march in London peace rallies to protest nuclear weapons. This was not a new obsession. A few years back, she’d written to George Kennan, “OH, HOW I WOULD LOVE to live under a government which does not possess atom bombs and does not threaten anyone.”31 “George, you are a great peacemaker. . . . PLEASE DO SOM
ETHING. RIGHT NOW. SOMETHING REALLY BIG.”32 Svetlana herself might have been able to muster considerable publicity for the antinuclear cause, if it were known that Stalin’s daughter was marching in London peace rallies, but she preferred to remain anonymous, always afraid of enemies who would twist her motives. When her friend Philippa Hill made the mistake of calling her her “own worst enemy,” she responded, surprisingly temperately:

  I do not think that I am my own worst enemy—simply because I do have so many Good & Terrible Enemies—so many as you, my dear, would never have. . . . My Enemies—are really not mine, but my Father’s. But they use me as a substitute image. Every psychiatrist would explain this to you. I have to confront very real enmity, very real malice, and very real obstacles.33

  Angela Lambert, a journalist for the Independent, managed to track Svetlana down in March 1990 soon after her arrival in London. Lambert must have touched something in Svetlana, for she spoke with remarkable candor. She said she no longer held the “pleasant illusion” that she could escape the label of Stalin’s daughter, and added, “It was partly my own fault”:

  I lived my life the way I could—though I could have lived it better—within a certain limited framework called Fate. There is something fatal about my life. You can’t regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter. I was born into my parents’ fate. I was born under that name, that cross, and I never managed to jump out of it. I just passively followed the road of my pilgrimage.34

  Passive was hardly the word that many would have applied to Svetlana, but it was the way she thought of herself.

  Those who saw Svetlana as the Kremlin princess seemed to think she’d been brought up in fairy-tale indulgence. Instead, like all Soviet citizens, she had been trained to follow a strict code of obedience. Soviets were told where to live, where to work, where they couldn’t travel. Svetlana looked to others—to the protectors, the mentors, the guides—for the direction she must take. This was what she meant by her passivity. But then she would rage: at herself, and at them for controlling her. “I could never emerge in my own capacity,” she lamented. She didn’t recognize that she had stood up to them all.