Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  She protested Volodya’s efforts to whitewash the record of her brother Vasili—Vasili who had had the air force general Alexander Novikov thrown into prison simply for questioning him, who “despised the law” in his mistreatment of his first wife and children, and who’d gone on drunken binges. Now he was to be forgiven because “he is ours.”

  But the deepest blow to Svetlana was that Volodya said her mother’s suicide was the result of “her sickness.” She answered, “Enough, Volodya. It seems to me that I am in a dark, solitary hall of the Kremlin where, slowly, the accusers of my MOTHER appear with their verdict. SHE WAS, in truth, THE VICTIM of the system.” Volodya had expunged her mother from history as merely “some sick woman.”

  Svetlana believed Volodya didn’t write this apologist book alone, and in fact some members of the Alliluyev family would later concur that there were odd insertions, possibly as a condition of publication.4 The book included “A Letter of Gratitude from Peasants to Redens,” Volodya’s father. What gratitude, Svetlana wanted to know, when the Chekists like Redens used brutal violence to force collectivization in the villages? The book suggested that the purges of the 1930s and of the war years, including the exile of entire ethnic groups, had been a “lawful defense of the rear”—and then blamed the KGB’s Yezhov and Yagoda for any excesses, which had been “corrected by the justice of Lavrenty Beria.” “How could Volodya write such things?” she asked. His own parents were victims of “our most dangerous relative of all—uncle Josef.”

  Her final damning comment was that Volodya emerged from his pages as a “convinced anti-Semite.” Yulia Meltzer (wife of Yakov), Aleksei Kapler, and old Morozov (Svetlana’s first husband’s father)

  were all sent to prison by that same mighty relative of ours [Stalin]. Volodya has not a word of compassion for them. Has he totally forgotten those deeds? And what about all the ugly anti-Semitism of my brother Vasili who called my son a “zhidenok” [little Yid]. Grandfather and Grandmother Alliluyev had no such attitudes. These came later, introduced in the later years by the very same OGPU, VChK, MVD, KGB—by their cruel, middle-class, fascist trends. . . .

  Escape into the past is the worst sickness that can ever happen to us. . . . That wonderful past that suddenly sent out its deadly whiffs, like an opened grave. Why does our Volodya need that?5

  She wrote to Philippa Hill that under her cousin’s name, the Communist apparatchiks were trying to restore the “ancient regime.” Millions of Russians were now longing for “the Glorious Past under that wise man, our unique incomparable leader (my father).” “What a lovely Superpower we’ve been. . . . One cannot blame them. They were duped and duped.”6

  The very next month, a disparaging article appeared in the London Times. Quoting the words of an Italian priest in the popular weekly Chi, the journalist Richard Beeston, stationed in Moscow, wrote, “Now at the age of 70, Svetlana Alliluyeva has reportedly decided to spend her remaining years as a nun, in her words, ‘to atone for the sins of my father.’”7 Apparently a Catholic nun in Chicago had revealed Svetlana’s address in Cornwall. Svetlana wrote to Philippa Hill that these reports made her sound like a silly old fool. Why? The timing of the Times article was too coincidental. “I must assume this is the KGB’s reply to my kick to them!”8 Though many might call her paranoid, Svetlana could be forgiven for believing that, Victor Louis being dead, the KGB had found someone else to plant embarrassing anecdotes about her in the international press.

  Within a week, she was outed in Cornwall. David Jones, a journalist for the Daily Mail, tracked her down.

  The teashop doorbell tinkles softly, and a squat, heavy-set old woman, with rheumy eyes and broken red veins ribboning her cheeks, peers suspiciously inside. It is a crisp winter morning in a remote West Country seaside village, and the place is deserted. Even so, she pulls down her black beret, raises the collar of her camel overcoat, and requests a table in the most conspiratorial corner. . . . Svetlana Peters (née Stalin)—her voice a strange mixture of drawing-room English and East European idioms—says, “Tell me please how did you find me here?”

  This was the description of a bag lady. Svetlana had lost her possessions, her looks, her identity. Only her dignity and self-will were left. Jones quoted her disclaimer about her supposed retreat to an Italian convent. “I don’t need a priest. I am fine on my own.” She concluded the interview abruptly. “Enough now. . . . And listen to me—when we walk out of here, you go left and I go right.”9

  She wrote again to Philippa Hill: “We must never forget about the continuity of Russian police methods and succession of all their leadership’s violent cruelty when nothing else works. I’ve put my foot in the middle of the boiling pot of present-day passions and thus I cannot expect to be greeted there by the Old Order Supporters—only by the liberal side.”10 Two years later, in 1998, when the human rights activist Galina Starovoitova was gunned down in the entrance to her apartment building in Saint Petersburg, the murder only confirmed for Svetlana what she already believed. The FSB (as the new KGB was abbreviated) was a parallel power structure in Boris Yeltsin’s “democratic” Russia and could act with impunity. Writing to Philippa about Starovoitova’s assassination, she said, “My dear, they haven’t changed a bit. Such a horror.”11

  Very shortly after her interview for the Daily Mail, Svetlana moved again. Abbeyfield had a vacancy in an old Victorian house in nearby Redruth, just when she needed it. She told Mary Burkett she was packing her yurt and locating to a new pasture—it was the gypsy wandering impulse she’d inherited from her grandfather Sergei. She moved to 52 Clinton Road, Redruth, and said she loved the small town with its narrow Victorian streets. And the sea was only thirty minutes away by bus.

  The following year, Svetlana lived mostly through her correspondence, though the occasional friend visited. She managed to get back to the United States for a month’s visit with Olga in Wisconsin and told Philippa Hill and Mary Burkett how loving and even overprotective her daughter had become. Olga was now phoning, sending presents, and writing regularly to ask what her mother needed. With no one to talk to, Svetlana walked over the hills and along seaside footpaths and took photographs of local landscapes. When she was a teenager, her brother Vasili had taught her how to develop photographs in his Kremlin darkroom. Philippa sent her a gift of a free pass to the Tate art gallery in Saint Ives. She also sent her money for walking shoes, for which Svetlana was exceedingly grateful.

  In January 1997, the Abbeyfield Society found itself in a sudden financial crisis, and it seemed Svetlana would have to move to a new hostel. She refused. Olga had said that, in case of emergency, she should just come home. Svetlana could live with her. Svetlana moved briefly to a Carr-Gomm house at 7 Carack Street in Saint Ives and waited impatiently as Olga bought a house in Spring Green. She and Olga set the date of her return to America for November. She wrote to Mary Burkett, “Just eight months now . . . Oh to be with my Olga in her kitchen and to cook my own food. . . . What has become of my life, Mary? . . . I have a feeling that all will change as soon as I cross the Atlantic. I do not even care how, just change.”12

  Linda Kelly soon phoned Svetlana with the shocking news that Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky’s sister in Paris had committed suicide. Svetlana knew what this meant and, dredging up painful thoughts of her mother, tried to console Nina.

  Linda Kelly said that your sister in Paris died tragically—and I know there will be a void in your life. . . . It’s always so sad and frightening when one chooses that sort of death—it’s certainly a case of some momentary madness, about which one (I’m sure) regrets at the second of conscious thinking. Those close who are left—are left in horror and disbelief—but it’s too late—and actually their interference earlier wouldn’t change what has been inwardly decided by those who perform a violent act. Sixty-five years after my mother did the same—I still cannot comprehend—accept—forgive—it. It bothers me that she was one of the most dearly beloved persons for me—and that I am, even now, unable to understan
d her. And—if she only knew the amount of terrible destruction she’d cause to others around her—she, most probably, would stop at the last moment. She made me study C. G. Jung for decades, to find in his work an explanation—but I’ve found only an absolute division between the conscious and the unconscious, the abyss between the two, and too few hints about how to explain the latter in terms of the former. Enough of this! You have enough pain, without me.

  She told Nina she was now returning to the United States. While she often felt “ostracized, humiliated, put down” by many, Nina had always been kind. “You’ve been informal with me, un-prejudiced, willing to understand, and most generous. What else can one demand? Please do not remember me as a totally dreadful beast and as an ungrateful woman—for I am neither.”13 One can imagine Svetlana’s care in underlining those words as she wrote her letter so that they would carry the full weight of her gratitude.

  Mary Burkett came to Cornwall for a last visit. “We sat on the island and the sun came out and the seagulls flew around us. We had a sort of closing time. She was going off to America, going into the unknown, and looking forward to it.14

  On November 3, Svetlana was gone. The last few years had been hard—living, as she put it, “on the level of an English derelict.”15 It seemed the only regret she expressed at the time was that she couldn’t find someone at the group home willing to take her ten potted geraniums, which were now blooming.

  Chapter 36

  Final Return

  Svetlana in Spring Green, Wisconsin, in 2002 with her cat Black Nose.

  (Courtesy of John Amarantides)

  Svetlana was happy to be back in Spring Green. She was now seventy-one, and it seemed to her that she had come full circle—she insisted this would be her last migration. It was characteristic that she said the years in England had been “a total waste of time,”1 until she could reflect and become nostalgic, as if she had to shed the past completely before picking through it piecemeal to remember the good moments.

  Olga had bought the house she had been renting and moved tenants into the upstairs apartment to help pay the mortgage. She had filled the house with her Indian and Tibetan embroideries and statues. Mother, daughter, and two cats settled in for a lovely Thanksgiving and Christmas. Svetlana wrote to Mary Burkett that Olga had now become her “guardian, friend, and everything else.” She was totally in her daughter’s “young hands,” but it was a weird feeling: “I love independence.”2 This was a familiar psychological ambivalence—to need to subsume herself totally in another and yet to be in charge. She tried to be careful not to criticize Olga. She sent friends photos of the Wisconsin River with its islands full of flowers and of her favorite spot, Orion Boat Landing, assuring them she loved Spring Green.

  The arrangement worked for about fourteen months, until both Olga and Svetlana conceded that, as much as they tried to pretend otherwise, the generation gap between twenty-seven and seventy-two was too wide to bridge. Svetlana complained to her old friend Bob Rayle that Olga was a sociable creature, like her father, and loved company and loud music (the kind that set Svetlana’s teeth on edge). The house was like a railway station with an open door.3

  For Olga the months were hard. “She was my ‘old’ mother . . . she could age, but I couldn’t. She got older and wiser, and I stayed young.” As much as she loved her mother, it was clearly impossible for them to live together, but sometimes her compassion for her mother cracked her heart. “I think it was living that was the hard part for her. My mother never mastered that one . . . surviving but not living.”4

  By now, as an American senior citizen who had paid taxes and met the requirements, Svetlana was eligible for Social Security. By mutual agreement, she moved to a seniors residence in February 1999. Svetlana concluded, “I have to find ways to be happy where I am.” She had her books, her radio, her daughter’s visits, and her few good friends.

  Elizabeth Coyne, who had helped her with the infant Olga at Taliesin all those years back and to whom she had given the Taliesin piano, had died tragically in a car accident, but Elizabeth’s children, Michael Coyne and Kathy Rossing, remembered Svetlana warmly and attached her name to those exotic presents she’d given their mother. Wedding gifts for Svetlana and Wes had poured in from all over the world in 1970, and Svetlana sent some of them home to the children. Kathy still remembered a box of designer perfumes, all in little vials. “For a child, it was wonderful!” To them, Svetlana was simply Lana. “It was not important who her father was.”

  Kathy Rossing devoted much time to Svetlana because she was moved by the simplicity of Svetlana’s relationship with Jennifer, her adult disabled daughter. “Our daughter has a kind of radar. I think she was born with it. She can tell who is sincere and who is not and Lana had the same radar.” Lana loved to browse in the secondhand stores with Kathy and would buy little trinkets for her daughter, saying, ‘Here. Take these for Jenny.’”5

  At the beginning of 2001, Olga moved to the West Coast for work and to undertake a degree in accounting. Svetlana was desolate and wondered how she would survive without seeing Olga three or four times a week. Of course she was caustic; she was to be left behind to take care of Olga’s two old cats.6 Yet she was proud of Olga and would boast to friends that her daughter had initiative.7 Olga would send her money whenever she could, and they talked regularly each weekend.

  Still, for Svetlana money was always tight. She would have been the first to say the gift catalogs coming through the mail were her downfall. As Kathy Rossing remembered, “She loved those catalogs, the underlining and the circling. ‘And what do you think about this?’ she’d ask. ‘Way overpriced,’ I’d respond. And the post couldn’t read her handwriting, and I would be the one to phone to track down the missing items.”8

  When Olga came for Christmas, there would be an exchange of presents. Svetlana loved to get gifts. “She was like a child in that respect. She’d just get giddy when you’d come with a bag, the anticipation of it. She didn’t have a lot of people bringing her gifts, so when she got them, it was a fun time for her, as it was for us.”

  But then she loved to give gifts away. “You’d buy her something you thought she’d like, and as soon as she opened it, she might say, ‘Oh, this would be wonderful for so-and-so.’ She was so blatant about it. She wasn’t trying to be offensive; it was just the way she was.”9 Often Svetlana could barely make her money last to the end of the month, yet she was always giving things away. Once Michael Coyne gave her a hundred dollars to buy something for herself, only to discover that she had turned the money over to some women who had bought a barn and were adopting stray cats.10

  In her last years, Svetlana remained a nomad, but the geography she moved in was much reduced. She would move back and forth between two retirement homes, Ridgeview Commons and Richland Hill, and also back and forth within Spring Green. Partly it was because she loved to move, always thinking the next place would be better. But sometimes she would move because she thought journalists, or worse, had tracked her down.

  Of course, no matter the residence, it was always the same small room. Kathy remembered that its main feature was the four-tiered narrow shelf on which Svetlana kept all her cherished photos: she had pictures of Olga; of Nanny Alexandra Andreevna; of her mother, Nadya; and of her grandmother Olga. She had a photo of her beloved Black Sea and the wedding portrait of her and Wes.

  Michael Coyne remembered those rooms. While many people still thought Svetlana had a lavish lifestyle, she actually “lived on hand-me-downs, in holey sweaters, wrapped up in blankets.” She had an old VCR Olga had given her, and Coyne and Olga would search the Goodwill shops to find tapes of old movies for her. She still loved Elizabeth Taylor movies, since she remembered, when she was a child in the Kremlin, watching Taylor and those horses. Her little radio had an antenna, and she’d try to pick up the BBC. When one visited, one would find her reading, perhaps a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe or Anna Dostoyevsky’s memoir of her husband. Or writing. If she could, she woul
d try to persuade a friend to drive her to her favorite restaurant on her beloved Wisconsin River, where she would sit on the deck, eating a hamburger and drinking a glass of zinfandel, and watch the birds rise over the water as they had once done long ago at Zubalovo in her childhood.

  Coyne had grown up in the Cold War era and had heard about Stalin in school, but only as he got older did he begin to recognize who this “Lana” was. “I started to realize her importance in history, her pedigree, and what she’d actually done and how this affected diplomatic relations, but she was just another part of the family actually.” Of course he was curious about Stalin, but he didn’t ask questions because he didn’t want to destroy their friendship. He’d seen how this could happen. When the owner of an independent bookstore in Richland Center had grown curious about her past, she’d refused to set foot in the bookshop again. “My Mom, my sister Kathy, and I never pried. She was an individual. I never talked about her with friends. Few knew that I actually knew who she was. She was just Lana.”11

  By now Svetlana had developed severe scoliosis and had a terrible dowager’s hump on her back, to a degree that she had to use a walker, which she called her “four-wheel drive.”12 She reassured Coyne that he shouldn’t worry when she walked out “like Queen Victoria” with her cane. When she was young, her brother had taught her the right way to take a fall.13

  She’d go to the secondhand store to buy her clothes. She would find an oversize man’s shirt, rip out the seams, and resew it so that it fitted perfectly, almost disguising her deformity. She claimed to have learned this trick from her dressmakers in Moscow. Her closets were full of the Indian fabrics Olga sent, which she’d convert into pillows and clothes as gifts for friends. She also made herbal remedies and healing tinctures from Russian folk recipes she’d learned as a child from her nanny. Because he worked for the airlines, Coyne traveled a great deal, and whenever he returned from a trip, he always had small gifts for Lana: chocolates from Switzerland, tea from England. She’d listen to his stories about his travels as if living them vicariously. “She wasn’t a happy person. She would laugh once in a while, but she was very serious.” And she was still very opinionated. “If she didn’t like something, she’d let you know.”14 She also had a willed optimism. She liked to quote Aleksei Kapler: “My old, long ago dead friend [Kapler died in 1979] in Moscow used to say: ‘Life is like a zebra. You go through the black stripes, but you know that the white ones will follow.’”15