Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana always kept up-to-date with Russian politics. She confessed to Bob Rayle in 1997 that even she had not thought that the USSR would “utterly collapse” so soon. She’d expected changes within the Party, as happened in China, but “events went ahead of everybody’s thinking.” But with her usual sarcasm, she warned Bob that perhaps the changes weren’t so profound. “Old drunk Yeltsin and all the ‘apparatus’ behind him are still the old ‘bolshis,’ only now masquerading to be something else.”16

  When her friend the volcanologist Thomas Miller told her he was planning a visit to Russia in January 2000, she told him to be very careful, especially if he intended to bring money to scientists, which could easily be construed as foreign interference. Miller believed that Svetlana’s “sense of how power worked was impeccable.”17 On December 31, 1999, when Vladimir Putin became acting president after Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, she warned Miller:

  Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I do hope and believe the people will not vote him into the Presidency—but, then of course elections always could be rigged. . . . The Tchetchen [Chechen] War—“the Glorious One”—was provoked by the old Russian method of provocation. The Tchetchens—feisty as they are—would never go outside their mountains to bomb “cities in Russia-proper”! That is just not the way of doing their Guerrilla-war—it was done by the KGB itself. And when Artem Borovik (investigative reporter) wanted to see more deeply into this business of Tchetchen War, and how it was started, he was quietly disposed of by the same forces.*

  I know all this—from the Times of Classic Communism & Cold War. The foreign leaders of these Democracies should boycott Putin—but, instead, they are waiting to embrace him, with good jugs of vodka. Ah, Thomas, be careful. The times of would-be-democracy are finished in Russia.18

  She reserved most of her political invective for her letters to Bob Rayle. Surely he could understand what she was talking about when she railed against the current American administration’s naïveté—or was it cynicism—as they misread what was going on in the new Russia. She wrote to say she was appalled when Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000.

  Russia has changed the flag and some names, to be sure—yet it is still the same USSR, so far as I am concerned. And these days—when a shadowy KGB colonel got on the top (because he was wise enough to guarantee Boris Yeltsin to be spared from public investigation—and—most probably prosecution—in that field of corruption & money stealing—when the New Man in Kremlin is being pronounced by my local Public Radio as the “sure hero of the Russians,” as their “sure choice” for the next president—I can only swear in Russian (which is a very heavy swear, but no one understands, thank God). . . .

  Thinking about Russia (and how little it is understood here in these United States) ruins my sleep.19

  She told Michael Coyne that Putin was reviving her father’s cult of personality. Coyne recalled: “The things Putin was doing to instill the memory of Stalin, whether it would be statuary or different things, she did not agree with.”20 And, slowly, Svetlana began to believe that she, too, would become one of these symbols. She told Bob Rayle that she feared she might be deported back to Russia. Or after her death, perhaps a will might be fabricated stating that she wanted her remains to be buried in her homeland.21

  For Rayle, of course, this was clearly paranoid. And it may have been. It was unlikely that President Putin was concerned with repatriating Stalin’s daughter, alive or dead. But Svetlana was thinking like a Russian to whom symbols meant a great deal. Her paranoia had a logic: it was not she, Lana Peters, the Russians would be interested in; they would be interested in finishing the story of Stalin’s greatness—the return of the prodigal daughter whom the West had stolen, but who had never really abandoned her father. It didn’t seem to her inconceivable that her ashes would be part of the statuary to commemorate the resurrection of the great Stalin.

  She wrote back to Rayle, who had obviously dismissed her concerns.

  I am pleased to know, though, that the idea of my “being sent home” upon requests of the communists or KGBists, strikes you as insane. I think—it is insane, too. But so is the whole business of Chechen war; and of the former red spy becoming new President of Russia. People know who I am—here and there—and is ENOUGH. . . . Nobody needs me there as Lana Peters; they need me as Svetlana Stalin.22

  She told Rayle that, of course, everyone in Russia in her childhood had grown up paranoid and fearful. What did he expect? But if she were ever deported to Russia, she would arrive dead because she would kill herself on the way.

  Svetlana perceived, again faster than many, what was happening to human rights in Russia under the surface. She saw the growing strength of the FSB (the former KGB), the restrictions on the media, the arrest of business oligarchs as a warning to stay out of politics, and later the passage of legislation that forced burdensome reporting requirements on Russian and foreign NCOs (noncommercial organizations), essentially charities and human rights organizations.23 She lamented that the Russian people looked the other way; their standard of living had vastly improved as oil and gas sales boomed, but graft and corruption were rampant and, anyway, they were fed nationalist propaganda and the history of Russia’s greatness “as if it were mother’s milk.”24

  Perhaps for everyone in old age the world constricts and fear expands to fill the small circle of one’s existence. Kathy Rossing was aware that Svetlana often lived in fear. She now believed that Russian intelligence agents might abduct her on the streets of Richland Center. When Kathy dismissed the idea, Svetlana replied, ”You don’t know what they could do. I saw people disappear. You don’t understand. I saw people disappear all around me and they didn’t come back.” And Kathy thought, You’re right. I’m coming from a different background . . . . “Lana could see a lot of things that had been present in her dad’s government coming back. She thought Putin idolized her father and was fashioning himself after him. She always feared it would be her son Joseph’s responsibility to come for her body.”

  Svetlana hired a lawyer in Spring Green to draw up a legal document that would prohibit Joseph from getting access to her body or her remains. Kathy and her brother helped pay her lawyer’s fees in order to ease her mind. She gave Kathy a list of names at the State Department and other contacts. “If she came up missing, that’s where she would be, and we needed to get the government involved to get her back here.”25

  Svetlana wrote to Bob Rayle that she was in physical pain. She was feeling old, she was feeling used, and she wanted the last word. “I want my reputation & character of a decent woman restored. I want my name as a writer, who writes her books without ghost-hired-persons, to be restored. I want my name Svetlana not to sound as a threat.”26 Her deepest concern was that people still believed she was a rich woman.27 Some even said she was masquerading as a welfare recipient. One of Olga’s boyfriends had asked her, “Do you have access to those funds, stashed in Switzerland?” A Hungarian expatriate kept pestering her: “Tell me, in secret, where do you keep those funds of yours?”28 That she herself had decided to stop in Switzerland was a lie “worthy of the Kremlin.” She complained to Bob, “It hurts me and affects my life UNTIL this day.”

  In 2005, at age seventy-nine, Svetlana wrote Bob and Ramona Rayle a series of numbered letters. It was as if she hoped to repeat the structure of her first book Twenty Letters to a Friend. These letters were meant to correct the calumnies of the past. Returning to old wounds, she retold the narrative of her defection and arrival in America, raging at the lawyers, the bankers, the diplomats, and the journalists who had swindled and slandered her.

  Svetlana’s rage was intemperate and almost impressive. Once started, she couldn’t control her invective and would give vent without restraint, leading many to compare her rages to Stalin’s. But one could also say that her anger was particularly Russian; it served as a purgative. She could never understand the American habit
of diplomatic niceties. “Oh, how I hate that American habit,” she’d complain. “‘How are you?’ ‘Fine!’ ‘Great!’ You might be just widowed, but you HAVE to say FINE!”29 She nursed her hurt; she felt she had been used, whatever the diplomatic expediencies. But her “Letters to Bob and Ramona Rayle” petered out when her anger did, and she dropped the idea.

  Svetlana met Marie Anderson in the fall of 2005. A friend had asked Marie if she could help move Svetlana to a new residence—just a few boxes—because she had a car. Svetlana had lost none of her persuasiveness. Marie took to driving her when she needed to go somewhere. She vividly remembered the time they returned to Svetlana’s apartment in Richland Center to find a stranger sitting in the foyer. In a heavily accented voice, he’d asked if they knew Lana Peters. He’d tried knocking on her door, but she hadn’t answered. Marie responded, “No, not really,” and Svetlana said, “Maybe she’s gone for the weekend.” After they returned to her room, Marie stayed with Svetlana, who was clearly frightened. It wasn’t very long before there was a knock on the door. It was a local police officer, who knew who Svetlana was. Apparently the man, accompanied by a woman, was driving a rental car with New York plates. The woman had phoned the owner of the retirement home, and the owner, becoming suspicious, had called the police to check on Lana. The stranger claimed that all he wanted was to ask Svetlana to sign her book. The police escorted the couple out of town.30

  On a trip through Spring Green in 2006, Bob and Ramona Rayle stopped to visit Svetlana one afternoon. She took them to visit the grave of Wesley Peters, and then they went to a restaurant where she and Bob reminisced about their time in India in 1967. How had she had the strength to make such a monumental decision? In a follow-up letter, she wrote: “Nowadays, weak and fearful, I often get amazed that I’d done that. I was afraid of nothing—then. I love to recall those days . . . such fun it was.”31 Her defection was her stamp on the world. She had “slapped the Soviet government in the face.”32 She had fooled them all.

  In 2010, the journalist David Jones, who had interviewed her in remote Cornwall fourteen years before, tracked her down again to Richland Center, where, as he wrote, “Lana Peters, or Svetlana Stalin, as she was known before marriage removed the stain of her surname,” was “hiding.” Jones was shocked by the change in her appearance. Bent with scoliosis and wearing a gray tracksuit and pink blouse, she looked “every inch the American retiree.” When he remarked on this, she asked, “Why not?” She’d been in America so long, she felt American. She liked hamburgers, American films, and speaking English. He wanted to know if she’d forgiven her father, a question that sparked “her legendary temper.” “I don’t forgive anything or anybody! If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and auntie, I will never forgive him. Never! . . . He broke my life. I want to explain to you, he broke my life!”33 This would turn out to be her last interview.

  Yet Olga believed that somehow, in the last two years of her life, her mother reached an unexpected peace. “She suddenly took things in stride. . . . When things happened that, before, would have knocked her for six, she would be able to laugh herself out of anger.” Olga would say to herself, Who are you and what have you done with my mother? “We just got back our really joyous happy days. It was fun.”34

  Perhaps one of the things that consoled Svetlana was that a new friend, the author Nicholas Thompson, had been kind enough to contact the Washington copyright office regarding Twenty Letters to a Friend, and secured the copyright of her book under her own name. Priscilla Johnson McMillan also generously allowed her rights to the English translation to revert to Svetlana.35 She could now leave her book to her daughter.

  Svetlana seemed to have reached the kind of resolution she’d written about to her friend Linda Kelly: “I came to the conclusion that the most important thing in life is NOT ‘Achievements,’ but that humble, yet very difficult—ability to remain myself.”36

  In 2011 Svetlana was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She wrote to Mary Burkett that May: “I’m falling apart.”37 And to Philippa Hill she said, “I am slowly preparing to leave this world.”38 She often talked with Kathy Rossing about death. To console her, Kathy told her about her own brother’s dying. He’d been sent home from the hospital. She’d come into his room—it was just twenty-four hours before he died—and he had said to her, “Shush. Mother’s here to get me.” She told Svetlana, “You’re going to see all those people who have passed before you, your nanny, your mom, and your grandma,” but Svetlana just looked at her and said, “What about the people I don’t want to see?” Kathy could tell from the look on her face whom she meant. “I didn’t know how to answer her. . . . Certainly I think she was fearful of death for a while, but then, I don’t know how, she resolved it within herself, and she seemed to be OK with going.”

  Svetlana wanted to be cremated and initially asked Kathy to ensure that her ashes were spread at Orion Boat Landing on the Wisconsin River. But then she said, “We can’t do that because when people find out my ashes are in there, they’ll think I polluted their river.” No matter how much Kathy reassured her that this could be done in secret—“We have a canoe. No one needs to know”—Svetlana remained adamant. Someone would find out. She also prepared a legal document. Mr. Stafford at the funeral home had instructions to collect her body at the hospital, take it immediately to the crematorium, and get her ashes to Olga—“done and shipped before anyone had a chance to do anything else with them.”39

  She gave Kathy a photograph that she wanted displayed at her memorial service. Kathy found it absolutely hilarious. It was an image of a wide and empty sea under a full moon, broken only by a whale’s tail breaching the surface and about to fall back down. Svetlana had written on the back: “Good-bye to you all from your Fish. (put the date: ___).”40

  In November, Svetlana took a sudden turn for the worse and was transported to the Pine Valley hospital. She specifically instructed the hospital staff not to call Olga. She didn’t want her daughter to see her dead body. She had seen her own mother’s corpse and had backed away in terror on that long-ago morning in the GUM building in Moscow. Ever after, she carried that last image of her mother in her mind. Kathy believed Svetlana wanted to spare her daughter. “I don’t think she realized the hurt it would cause her by shutting her out when she would have wanted to be the one there.” The doctors finally persuaded Svetlana to call Olga. They said, “Your daughter deserves to know.”

  Her decline had been so sudden that Olga didn’t know her mother was dying. She’d just spent the previous month with her, and they’d talked of Olga’s coming back for Christmas. Olga immediately booked a flight. When she arrived too late, the doctors told her it wouldn’t have mattered. They had instructions not to admit her to her mother’s hospital room. Olga was angry with her mother and hurt—her mother was still protecting her after all these years. She’d missed her father’s dying; she had wanted to be there for her mother.

  Kathy Rossing was with Svetlana at the end. Svetlana couldn’t speak but knew Kathy was there. She squeezed Kathy’s hand and stared at her with a strange look in her eyes. Kathy wrapped Svetlana’s hand around the scapular medal she always wore, yet it seemed “she wasn’t ready to go.” Kathy asked a nurse to call a local clergyman. When he came, he gave Svetlana words of peace to comfort her, and “it wasn’t but a matter of minutes and then she was gone. I think it was more than a coincidence. Once he said some words over her, she passed peacefully.”41 Unlike her father to the end, she didn’t struggle. “Her breathing just got shallower and shallower.” How difficult it is to perform one’s death. She did it gracefully.

  Svetlana died on November 22, 2011, in the month of misery at the age of eighty-five, as she had predicted she would, and a little more than two weeks after the anniversary of her own mother’s death seventy-nine years earlier.

  She left her last words for her daughter in a typed letter. She spoke as if she were writing not before her death, but after it.

  I am alw
ays with you, in loving ways. Remember that. We, who are now without bodily traits, only spirits, we love you on Earth nevertheless. Therefore, do not cry about us. Never, never cry about us. Because your cries only disturb us here. We cannot do anything about it. But we, the spirits now, always love you. We can feel sometimes. . . . You can feel sometimes . . . a warm wind or breath touching your skin. That is us. That are us. I know that, since I am now, too, only a spirit, only a soul . . . only? Oh, we can do a lot from here. We can protect you from a disaster, we can embrace you, there . . . like a warm cocoon. We can heal all your self-inflicted troubles because from here, high above Earth, we can see very well. And we can always help you out. But never, never cry about us, rather, think about us always with a smile. We love you forever and ever. I say WE . . . because we are many here, loving souls. Even my own so-perplexed mother; she finally got rid of those confusing earthly worries, and here she is a beautiful soul like she had been, indeed. We all love you. Do not cry about us. We love you. Your Mom. Sorry for bad typing, alas, I did not improve even here!42