She told Lambert wistfully:
I want one thing: for my books to be published. I just dream that my story will finally reach readers. At least I would hope I can convince the readers of my book that I have had nothing to do with my father’s philosophy and what he did. Then I shall feel I have done something. Without that, I see my life as totally useless.35
She smoothed with delicate hands the cloth covering the table they were sitting at and smiled at Lambert. “It’s been a heavy life, my dear: heavy to listen to; heavy to live.”
That November, she sent Rosa Shand a one-line Christmas card: “Dearest Rosa, I think—I’m alive after this dreadful year. It must be better now.”36 But her optimism had begun to sound a little phony. Even to her.
Chapter 34
“Never Wear a Tight Skirt If You Intend to Commit Suicide”
Svetlana and Olga together, c. 1994.
(Meryle Secrest Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Courtesy of Chrese Evans)
On May 3, 1991, Svetlana’s friend Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide. He wrapped a plastic bag around his head and suffocated to death, leaving a note: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity.”1 When she read about his death in the London newspapers, Svetlana was profoundly shocked. Memories flooded in of the times she and Olga had visited him in New York—he’d taken them on a ride in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park while his wife, Kiki, snapped photos. He’d signed her copy of his novel The Painted Bird, “For Svetlana who understands.”2 What did she understand? She must have known that Kosinski had lived since 1982 under accusations of plagiarism, of employing ghostwriters, and of having willfully distorted the facts of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Kosinski’s defenders, like Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security adviser during the Carter administration), claimed that the Communist government of his native Poland had smeared him.3 Was this what Svetlana, equally slandered by the Soviet Communists, understood? But she believed Kosinski had a good life: a beautiful wife, a lovely apartment, his books published. And now he was what she called a suicider.
The news of Kosinski’s suicide sent her spiraling downward. She was living without money in gray, rainy London with no idea what cards fate was about to deal her. One day that May she walked to London Bridge and looked down into the muddy waters of the Thames. Hiking up her narrow skirt, she tried to climb the railing. A strong hand pulled her back to the pavement. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a stocky figure with a red Irish face and gray hair in a dark raincoat walking quickly from the scene. Two young constables picked her up and packed her into a police car. As they drove her home, they chatted about the soccer match on the radio. When they arrived at her door, they told her sternly, “Never do that again!” In bed that night, she tried to put a plastic bag over her head. It didn’t work. She fell asleep. The next morning she awoke and it all seemed a terrible nightmare.4
When Olga met her mother later that week for their ritual lunch in a pub, Svetlana told her about the attempted suicide. She spoke casually, as if she were talking about a walk in the park.5 But something had changed. Svetlana now understood what suicide was about. It happened in a crazy moment and for crazy reasons. It was a dark day, it was raining, the wind blew your umbrella inside out, someone didn’t keep an appointment for lunch, something triggered your despair. “You have to be very mad, mad like hell, with everybody or somebody or anybody or with everything.”6 Her father had shouted at her mother at a dinner party: “Hey you.” If Nadya’s suicide hadn’t worked, she would have gotten up the next day and continued. Svetlana recalled her nanny saying that when the body was found, it looked as if her mother had been crawling toward the door, as if she regretted what she had done. Nadya might have been saved.7
At the pub, Svetlana even joked with Olga. “Never wear a tight skirt if you intend to commit suicide.” Olga believed her mother now understood her own mother’s despair. Suicide could simply be an impulsive accident, when no one was there to stop it. Olga felt Svetlana had finally forgiven her own mother for abandoning her.
That July Olga decided she would fly to Wisconsin on her holiday break from the bank. She wanted to try again with her father. She would surprise him. A week before she was due to fly out, she received word that Wes had suffered a stroke. When she arrived at Taliesin on the evening of July 16, her father was already unconscious, and he died during the night. She immediately phoned her mother to tell her. Svetlana didn’t cry but kept repeating, “‘Oh God, oh God, he was such a good man,’ and then her voice trailed into silence, as if she’d left the phone on the counter and just walked off.”8
Back in her charity digs in London, Svetlana wept for her ex-husband: “I didn’t know how deeply he was still in me. He was a good man in many ways—it was the unfortunate surroundings (in Taliesin, etc.)—many envies & hatreds around us that destroyed what could be—in other circumstances—a good family life.”9 She believed that Olga felt the same way—her daughter discovered she loved her father after he died.
Olga had grown from being Svetlana’s child to being her closest friend. When Svetlana came to live in London, Olga recalled, “By this time, the earth was really small for us. It didn’t really matter where we lived. We would always see each other, we would always be together.” With her daughter, Svetlana never held back. “We talked about so many painful things.” Olga could look at her mother and father’s marriage from a distance. When Svetlana met Wes, she didn’t have the sense of calm she needed to make the right decision. “Blind to the many red flags at Taliesin, she had been swept off her feet.” Olga felt her father could never have given her mother the love she needed. “Nor, his particular genius aside, could he meet her intellectually brow to brow.”10
Olga saw her mother’s pain. Sometimes Svetlana would fall into what Olga described as “the night terrors of a child alone and lost.” “It would be like a cloud passing over. It was as if her brain started with a thought and ran with it to the point she no longer had any control over the thought or where it was going.” Sometimes it happened when Svetlana was writing, but sometimes there seemed to be nothing that provoked it, or it would be a trivial moment, “the milk boiling over.” “She would be inconsolable.” “Something triggered a volcano of thoughts, memories, pain, anguish, fear about something coming up, surfacing to overwhelm her.” Olga saw her mother, so deeply misunderstood, as a woman who needed unconditional love. “The people who have stuck by her the longest, who have remained friends, are the ones who saw that. They’d seen the volcano.”11
Svetlana always seemed able to find friends. That July she met Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky, whose husband was a member of the aristocratic Lobanov-Rostovsky family. A few days before, Nina had set off for the supermarket when the porter at her block of flats in North Kensington stopped her to ask, “Madame, do you know who I saw walking by this morning? Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Stalin.”
Nina replied, “Is that possible, David? What would she be doing in this neighborhood?” David said, “I think she was on her way to the Morpeth Society in the next block of flats. Shall I send her up to you if I see her again?” Certain he had made a mistake, Nina said, “Yes, you do that, David.”12
On July 17—Nina remembered the date precisely—she was in her kitchen preparing for a dinner party when the doorbell rang. Assuming one of her guests had been kind enough to send flowers, she opened the door and there stood Svetlana, looking just like her photographs. Nina recalled the encounter as if it were a play.
SVETLANA: “Sorry to intrude, but your doorman said some Russians lived here and that I would be welcome.”
ME: “Would you care for a cup of tea?”
SVETLANA (stepping across the threshold): “Have you ever known any Russian to turn down tea?”
We introduced ourselves formally. I explained that I was French and also preparing a ragout for a dinner party, and she followed me into the kitchen. I made a big teapot
of strong tea, and Svetlana had several cups with five teaspoons of sugar in each cup. I also offered her some of the raspberries we were having for dessert. She sniffed them appreciatively and remarked, “English raspberries and other fruit smell almost as fragrant as those in Russia. I missed that in America. Fruit there has no fragrance. . . .” She talked a lot and I listened.13
That night Nina asked her husband if he minded that Stalin’s daughter had visited. Stalin had imprisoned his entire family and executed his father, Dmitri Ivanovich Lobanov-Rostovsky, in 1948. He said he didn’t mind as long as she made sure Svetlana never came when he was home.14 Svetlana began to stop by regularly.
Nina soon discovered that friendship with Svetlana could be demanding. “She was highly intelligent, well educated, well read and could be warm, charming, and good company. She was a superb and poetic writer.” But she was also mercurial. When some perceived hurt set her off, she would rage, send an angry letter, and then apologize. “Poor Svetlana. It was as though she had been flayed. She was super-sensitive and everything hurt.”15
That summer of 1991, Svetlana suddenly had some wonderful news. She discovered that A Book for Granddaughters had been published in June in the Moscow magazine Oktyabr.16 She’d sent the manuscript to her old friend Olga Rifkina, who had submitted it to the magazine without telling her. Because the Soviet Union had not signed the international copyright agreement, it wasn’t unusual for a writer to find out, after the fact, that his or her work had been published without permission. But the way Svetlana found out was totally unexpected. She received a letter from her daughter Katya saying that she liked her book. A Book for Granddaughters ended with an appeal to Katya:
And besides, only one look at the map shows you that not far from America’s Alaskan shores, lie the shores of Soviet Kamchatka where my dear volcanologist, Katherine [Katya] lives and works and where my granddaughter Annie [Anya] will soon be going to school. I love geographical maps where huge spaces and distances are separated only by finger lengths. How close to each other are Kamchatka and Oregon: separated only by a big lake. . . . Someday my Katherine could be invited to cross the ocean to study Mt. [Saint] Helen’s volcano—for by then she will have become a leading specialist. And then—freed from the propaganda and brainwashing and artificial hatred—why not meet her American sister?17
Soon Svetlana received a phone call from Katya. It was shocking to hear her voice after twenty-five years of silence. She sounded like herself, like the sixteen-year–old adolescent Svetlana had abandoned in 1966. Katya’s young daughter Anya even wrote her grandmother a note: “Do you love animals?” Svetlana was ecstatic. Knowing how poor she was, Nina gave her money to buy phone cards to call her daughter on public pay phones, because her residence had no phone.
That September, through Russian contacts, Svetlana sought out an American volcanologist, Thomas Miller, who made annual trips from his home base in Alaska to consult with volcanologists in Kamchatka. Miller had first gone to Russia in August 1991 in the middle of the unsuccessful coup d’état by the Communist Party hard-liners against Mikhail Gorbachev that eventually brought Boris Yeltsin to power. Miller found himself becoming an unofficial courier, carrying fifty to sixty letters out of Kamchatka to mail to various people around the world.18 Svetlana asked him to carry a letter to her daughter, Mrs. Katherine Zhdanov, in Kluchi.
Soon Svetlana conceived the idea of bringing Katya and Anya to London for a brief visit. She even discussed with Tom Miller the possible plane route her daughter might take.19 She asked Nina for £1,500 to pay for the plane tickets. Nina didn’t have that kind of money, and furthermore knew her husband would be furious at Svetlana’s presumption. Instead, she told Svetlana that the tenant upstairs was a respected Lebanese journalist who greatly admired her books and would certainly be willing to pay that amount to interview her. Svetlana went red and exploded. “Who did I think she was, willing to accept money to talk about herself? . . . She marched out and sent me several rough letters.”20 It took six months for their friendship to be repaired.
When Tom Miller wrote that he had met Katya professionally, Svetlana asked eagerly, “Does she speak a bit of English?” She knew so little about her daughter’s life now—the idea of her tiny willful Katya monitoring erupting volcanoes amused her. “I’m sure they would erupt exactly when she presses some button on her desk.”21 She asked Miller to carry small trinkets to her granddaughter. Under Svetlana’s pressure, Olga also sent a letter from America for Miller to deliver to her sister.
Miller, in fact, understood that Katya was an alcoholic, or a recovering alcoholic, and like her grandfather, rather authoritarian, although he didn’t tell Svetlana this. But then, there was so little to tell. Katya had the reputation of being a recluse who came out of her cabin only to collect the newspaper or go to her workstation. Other Russians refused to speak about her. “Leave her alone,” they said. “She’s a widow. She’s had enough.”22 Katya sent Svetlana the occasional note, though she said almost nothing about her life. Olga remembered her mother eagerly opening a letter from Katya that contained a photograph, only to discover it was a photograph of a volcano. The letter described the volcano in precise detail.23
Despite her disavowals, being indigent in London must have been humiliating for Svetlana—she couldn’t afford to phone her daughter, buy her a plane ticket, or even put her up, though it is doubtful Katya would ever have come. Still, to most friends, Svetlana claimed to accept her poverty, and certainly few remembered her complaining. She wrote to Rosa Shand:
I prefer to live as I do. There is always some balance—Harmony—Equilibrium—in the General Plan of our lives, designed, no doubt, by the Creator: and if I had my first 40 years living on the top of society (in USSR)—then I must end up in total humility, humbled to this simple frugality where I am now. All is right, all is correct; and the Balance is restored.24
There is certainly a willful pride in this declaration, but she was not entirely convincing.
Svetlana was in the hands of social workers who proved very kind. When she complained that the loud music of her young fellow residents kept her from sleeping, one social worker, a Nigerian student named Samson, immediately took on her case and, with her doctor’s help, got her moved to a new room at the Ladbroke Grove residence belonging to the Carr-Gomm Charitable Society. As soon as she walked into her room at 280 Ladbroke Grove, she was taken aback by the aura of the place. “It was sunny. It was peaceful. It was perfect.”25
Svetlana owned nothing, not a single stick of furniture, but at the charity depot, she was soon able to secure a secondhand table, a bed, a chair, and even a refrigerator, which she was allowed to keep in her room. She settled in. Looking back, she would say, “I was a perfect old pauper. In fact, I was very cheerful.” Svetlana would say there was nothing terrible in wanting to own things. She had loved to buy and sell properties in the United States, but when “it is taken away from me, I don’t cry about it. It doesn’t affect me at all.”26 She and Samson were soon fond of each other and would fall into each other’s arms when they met. He eventually discovered who she was, but she felt he was too young for “Stalin’s daughter” to mean anything to him.
Now Svetlana was finally on her own. Olga had briefly married her best friend, a young Welshman, partly in order to be able to work in London. At their wedding, Svetlana wore a paper boater hat as a sign of protest, because one was supposed to marry for love. Olga, who’d inherited her mother’s sarcastic streak, found this fantastically amusing.27 But now she decided to move back to Wisconsin to work in the Tibetan craft shop in Spring Green where she’d had summer jobs. For the next several years, Olga visited her mother in London on stopovers during her expeditions to Nepal, Dharamsala, and other Asian destinations to purchase Tibetan art and textiles.
Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky could see that Svetlana was lonely without her daughter and began to invite her to the odd dinner party when her husband was away on business. At one such party, Svetlana met Hugh and Vane
ssa Thomas. He’d written a seminal book, which Svetlana deeply admired, on the Spanish Civil War, and soon she was a regular visitor to their home. Vanessa found her compelling.
I remember Hugh and I thought she was like a little princess, living in this cell up the road. She was so simple, but she was awfully grand because she was very educated. She spoke French, and German, and very good English. She had very good manners, but humble—she was the daughter of the head of state of half the world! I don’t mean she put on airs at all. She was grand in a way a princess would be if she were living in a cell. She never behaved as a pauper, never spoke about money. She was loftily above it in an essential way. She sort of gracefully fitted in. Of course we talked about our children. We were both besotted by our daughters.28
Vanessa’s son Inigo Thomas worked for the London Review of Books and sent a request to Svetlana to write something for it. However, he made the mistake of addressing his letter to “Svetlana Alliluyeva.” Svetlana rang up Vanessa almost apoplectic, saying she was not using that name and their son had exposed her. Vanessa apologized profusely, but she already took Svetlana’s explosions as simply part of the landscape. “Svetlana longed for an explosion so that we could all pick it up again. I’m very English. I couldn’t take all that Russian drama seriously.”
Indeed, when Thomas also phoned to apologize, Svetlana invited him to tea. He remembered being shocked at finding Stalin’s daughter in her charity digs: “broke, homeless, stateless, restless, pensionless.”29 She made him tea in the Formica kitchen with its worn floor and hard fluorescent lighting, ignoring her fellow resident, who was cooking an omelet on the communal stove. They drank their tea in her tidy bedroom, which held only a small bed folded into a sofa, a bookshelf, a chair, and a dressing table. There wasn’t a single photograph or painting on the wall, but on the dresser stood a bust of Olga made by the sculptor Shenda Amery.
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