Though it was illegal, many Russians were secretly converting to Christianity in the early 1960s as a protest against Communism. For some, this was a nostalgic return to a vanished Russia. Others felt a genuine longing for spiritual values. But for Stalin’s daughter to break the Party rules was dangerous. In order to protect them both, Father Nikolai Alexandrovich Golubtsov baptized her privately and did not record her name in the church register. She would always recall Father Nikolai’s words of reassurance. “He said God loved me, even if I was Stalin’s daughter.”7 The remark suggests a depth of loneliness that is devastating.
Accustomed as she was to ideological conformity, Svetlana must have been deeply moved to find herself in the Church of the Deposition of the Shroud, with its beautiful onion domes, hidden in a Moscow suburb. The tiny vaulted stone chapels drawing the gaze upward, the burning incense and many candles lighting the gloom, and the hypnotic chanting of the choir, would have been intoxicating after the gray uniformity of Moscow. Since the days when she had wondered at the smiling Buddhas in the yurts at Zubalovo, Svetlana had tasted metaphysical longing. Her compulsive search through world religions began with her baptism. She read voraciously—about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity—and would eventually try many in her search for inward peace.
She must have had many motives for converting, but one, she maintained, was her brother’s death. In January 1961, Khrushchev had arranged his release from Vladimirskaya Prison, but Vasili lasted only three months, racing around Moscow and drinking with his Georgian cronies at his favorite restaurant, Aragvi, before he disappeared. The family finally located him in Lefortovo Prison, but he was so ill that he didn’t have to serve out his term. With his retired general’s pension, he moved to Kazan. Broke and broken, he died on March 19, 1962, at the age of forty-one, after a bout of drinking, leaving behind four wives and several children. Svetlana remembered the boy who had shown such promise before his mother abandoned him. She no longer hated him.8
That same year, 1962, Svetlana reconnected with her past in a way that was both moving and devastating. She met her cousin, Ivan (Johnreed) Svanidze, whom she had not seen since the arrest of his father and mother in 1937. Stalin had had his father executed in 1941. His mother was executed in 1942. As a child, Svetlana had adored her aunt and uncle. It was Uncle Alyosha who brought the yurts to Zubalovo, told the children stories of the ancient Persians and Hittites, and recited Georgian poetry. When Svetlana met their son, Ivan (as he now called himself, having dropped the Johnreed), after twenty-five years of silence, probably at the Institute for African Studies, where he was a researcher, they both plunged back into that past with fervor. But the encounter had its dark side.
Svetlana was devastated when Svanidze showed her letters his parents had written him from prison before their executions. They had assumed he was being taken care of by his relatives, but this was not the case. Knowing the price exacted for associating with children of “enemies of the people,” the family had been afraid to shelter him. When Svetlana’s brother Yakov tried to help him, his wife pleaded that they would be putting themselves at risk.9
Under Stalin’s iron rule, children of “enemies of the people” became enemies themselves. Supposedly, after the Svanidzes’ arrest, his nanny took in the eleven-year-old Ivan, until she herself was denounced. He was then sent to an orphanage for children of the condemned and lived for several years in a compound behind barbed wire. Orphans in wartime were like flotsam, dispensable, the last to be fed. To this boy who had spent his childhood in affluent Germany and later in London and Geneva when his father was head of the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade, the shock must have been incalculable.
At seventeen Ivan was exiled to Kazakhstan to work in the mines. He was finally given permission to live in Moscow in 1956. Like most survivors, he came back broken and haunted. On his return, he made no effort to contact his relatives. He enrolled in Moscow University, obtaining a doctoral degree in African studies, but never fully recovered his health.
Svetlana would later say, “We suddenly found each other. . . . I simply couldn’t let go.”10 In late 1962, she married Ivan Svanidze in the Russian Orthodox Church. It was as if two neuroses met—though his experience was much darker than hers, they were both Stalin’s victims. The marriage was doomed from the outset and lasted less than a year. Yakov’s daughter, Gulia, remembered Svetlana and Svanidze visiting, but as Gulia put it, “Ivan had suffered a great deal; he was nervous, susceptible, and also had an extremely difficult character.”11
Svetlana and Ivan separated, and though she always spoke of him warmly, she didn’t publicly admit to the marriage. Perhaps she was ashamed. Salving her own loneliness, she had only exacerbated his pain. A divorce notice was published in the evening newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva.12 It must be said that while she was accumulating divorces—she now had three—she was not the only Soviet citizen to do so. Under the emotional trauma of decades of dictatorship, divorce was common.
Svetlana sought solace in her circle of close friends, many of whom were members of the intelligentsia. Dmitri Tolstoy and his wife, Tatyana, lived in Leningrad. She would slip away for a few days to visit them whenever she could. Dmitri was the son of Count Aleksei Tolstoy, cousin to the more famous Leo Tolstoy. The count, revered in the Soviet Union for his historical novels, had divorced Dmitri’s mother, Julia Rozhansky, and had lived in a mansion in Moscow while the countess lived in penury in a communal apartment stuffed with the tattered remnants of her former life. Svetlana loved the feel of history in the Tolstoy apartment—the eighteenth-century Dutch cupboard, the precious cheval glass, the antique chairs.
Dmitri Tolstoy was a composer, but, because he’d refused to become a member of the Communist Party, his operas went unproduced, while he earned his living giving music lessons. Yet however reduced the Tolstoys’ circumstances, they still gave parties where they read the works of prerevolutionary poets and passed around illegal samizdat manuscripts, like the banned poems of the new rising star in Leningrad, the poet Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky would be put on trial for parasitism in 1964 and sentenced to five years of internal exile.13
It was at one such party that Svetlana met Lily Golden. Golden remembered her first impression of Svetlana thus: “A red-haired, green-eyed, rather short woman who was dressed very simply and whose eyes reflected the immense pain of knowledge denied to others.”14 Lily Golden was a researcher at the Institute of African Studies and the author of numerous books and articles on African music and culture. She was also the first to research the impoverished and isolated black communities in the Caucasus, descendants of former slaves who had escaped to the mountains of Abkhazia and whose existence the Soviets would have preferred to keep secret. She had an extraordinary history. Her father, Oliver Golden, was a black American who had fled Mississippi after World War I and ended up in Chicago, where he became a dedicated Marxist. He always said, “The first white American to shake [my] hand and shake it as an equal was a Communist.”15 Her mother, Bertha Bialek, was Jewish. Because it was impossible to live in America as an interracial couple, they had sailed to the Soviet Union in 1931, dreaming of helping to build a just, more equitable society. They personally escaped the repression of the 1930s, but watched helplessly as friends disappeared. Their only child, Lily, one of the few black Russians in Moscow, had grown up in Tashkent.
The evening Lily met Svetlana at the Tolstoys’ party, the group paid a visit to Professor Victor Manuylov, a literary critic and historian of Russian poetry who lived in a communal apartment nearby. His single room was stuffed with books that overflowed into the communal bathroom. He greeted them kindly, lighting the samovar and speaking of Saint Petersburg in the old days, and then suddenly said to Lily and Svetlana, “Show me your hands! Sometimes I have success in palm reading.”
When he examined Svetlana’s hand, he exclaimed that he “had never seen a hand like it. This belongs to an extraordinary person!” Lily remembered his prediction for Svetlana: “Your life divides
into three periods. The first, finished long ago, was one of cloudless bliss. Your present period is difficult. You are fighting to get together with a foreign prince . . . he will sicken and die. Then you will begin the third period, when you will cross oceans and travel far away.”16 Uncannily, he had described the exact trajectory of Svetlana’s life. She would meet a prince, an Indian rajah named Brajesh Singh, and would eventually cross oceans.
Lily became curious. “Who is this Svetlana?” she asked Tatyana Tolstoy and was told, “Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter.” Lily was shocked. “It was difficult to place this simply dressed, modest young woman . . . amid the horror that must surround her life.”17
As she came to know Svetlana, Lily would say, “She was a very kind, tender-hearted person. . . . It was impossible for her to escape her terrible heritage. She simply couldn’t trust people; how could you if you were Stalin’s daughter?” People treated her “as some kind of freak.”18 Svetlana came to love Lily, who brought gaiety and freshness into her household. They would comb through Lily’s large collection of recordings of African folk songs and spirituals. She taught Svetlana’s son, Joseph, to dance the twist.
Soon Lily began to see what it meant to be Stalin’s daughter. In the Moscow streets, people looked at Lily with curiosity because she was black. But when Svetlana walked out, people often looked with contempt. When Svetlana got a job at the Institute of World Economics and International Affairs—she wanted to leave the Gorky Institute—she lasted only a few days. “Every few minutes the door would open and someone would stare in with undisguised hate. The fact that the raw emotion was directed against her father was unimportant.”19
Lily also knew Ivan Svanidze as a talented scholar at her institute. She believed that in marrying him, Svetlana was seeking absolution for Stalin’s crimes. She told her own daughter, Yelena Khanga: “[Svetlana] did everything she could to help people who returned from the camps in the late fifties.”20 Lily also understood why the relationship ended abruptly. Svanidze had been “deranged” by his multiple imprisonments and was impossible to live with. According to Lily, he had become paranoid about his own Jewish origins and removed all his Jewish mother’s portraits from the walls. And he hated Svetlana’s son because Joseph was half Jewish.21
Lily had a special reason to be grateful to Svetlana. She was aware that Svetlana rarely exploited her privileges and contacts to gain special favors, but she made an exception in Lily’s case. When Lily’s husband, a political revolutionary from Zanzibar, was assassinated and Lily was left in poverty to bring up her daughter alone, Svetlana used her influence to get Lily a monthly allowance. Lily would remain at Svetlana’s side through many of the coming traumas, even helping her children after she defected.
Another of Svetlana’s crucial friends was Fyodor Volkenstein, a professor of chemistry in Moscow and Dmitri Tolstoy’s half brother. During their long conversations together, Volkenstein began to urge her to write a memoir of her family. “But how can I do this?” she demurred. “Write! Write! You can do it,” he told her. “Start as if you were writing me a letter, the rest will come of itself.”22
In 1962, Svetlana received an unexpected visit from a French writer and editor, Marquis Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie. His friend Ilya Ehrenburg had discouraged him from seeking her out because it was dangerous, but he had found her address on his own. He simply arrived at her doorstep and explained that he was writing an article about her father and wanted to check some biographical facts. By law, she should have refused to admit him because he was a foreigner, but she was tired of Soviet rules, and they talked for hours. Among Moscow intellectuals, d’Astier was considered pro-Communist but a liberal pacifist.
Shortly after d’Astier’s first visit, Deputy Chairman Mikoyan invited Svetlana to his dacha and, while he assured her it wasn’t forbidden to meet foreigners, he said it was “better not to.” Then Mikoyan asked her if she’d ever considered writing her own memoirs. If she had, it would be unwise to give them to foreigners; she would never have peace again. Sensing a risk, Svetlana assured him she had no intention of writing a book. D’Astier took to visiting each time he came to Moscow, and after each visit she was summoned to the Central Committee and asked—but politely—“What did that Frenchman want?”23
In fact, Svetlana was writing her memoir. She had taken Fyodor Volkenstein’s suggestion and was writing her story in the form of letters to him. She would call this book Twenty Letters to a Friend. Her old friend Olga Rifkina remembered how, at one point in the summer of 1963 working in her Zhukovka dacha, Svetlana became very secretive about what she was writing. “She started to get worried that the authorities would get interested in it. That they would take it away . . . That they would destroy it.”24 In thirty-five days, she wrote her book as a conversation with an “unidentified interlocutor.” For his safety, she never named Volkenstein as the friend. She was writing, as they said in the USSR, “for the drawer.”
She managed to get her manuscript to Professor Manuylov, who had read her and Lily Golden’s palms that evening in Leningrad. He called her in the middle of the night. “Oh, this is so wonderful, I cannot put it down,” he said. Knowing her telephone was bugged, she asked, “What are you talking about?” Recovering himself, he replied, “Oh, yes, I’m talking about one book I’m reading here.” He was so excited, he’d forgotten the Soviet rule of discretion.
Svetlana took the next train to Leningrad. “My dear, it’s a finished book. How have you done it?” the professor asked.25 “We can publish this abroad.” She wasn’t surprised to discover that he might be able to do this—he may have been responsible for getting Joseph Brodsky’s manuscript out of the country—but she replied, “No. I don’t want anything like that right now.” She knew it would cause a great scandal, and she had to protect her children. “I perfectly understand,” he said, but he did take the manuscript to a typist, who typed three copies to be circulated among trusted friends.
Twenty Letters to a Friend is not a confession. It’s an exorcism. By writing her book as if to a friend, Svetlana was able to speak intimately and to dismiss all the censors sitting on her shoulder, including her father. She wanted this book to be about people, not about a political era, about all those whom she had loved and lost. The conceit of letters (there are no Dear Friend salutations) soon vanished under the weight of the story she had to tell.
Twenty Letters to a Friend begins with the terrible days of Stalin’s death, as if Svetlana needed to exorcise her father’s ghost in order to speak freely. She does not convey the monumentality of the event—the vozhd is dying—but rather she recounts the death as a daughter would. “Who loves this lonely man?” she asks, watching his ministers ricocheting between fear and ambition, Beria scrambling for ascendency. Only his servants. When a comatose Stalin raises his arm in his last moments, she sees this as a gesture of rage against life itself. He had wished to dominate life, but life had finally defeated him. His Kuntsevo dacha, with its emptiness and coffinlike gloom, is the monument he built. But there had been a sunnier, happier house, the Zubalovo of her childhood.
In a second letter, she conjures that house, before her mother died. It is a fantasy, of course. She introduces the Alliluyevs, in her mind benevolent figures, early idealistic revolutionaries with “no axes to grind.” They are “sincere, honest, kindly” and on an equal footing with her father. The “uncles,” like Mikoyan, Molotov, and Kliment Voroshilov, visit. She knows that, given a longer lens from which to view it, this world is cruel and murderous. Beneath the bucolic surface, a Dostoyevskian nightmare of competing ambitions will lead to the deaths of most of these people, but she wants the friend to whom she is writing to know Zubalovo as she knew it in her childhood.
Her intervening chapters recount the lives of her family—the Svanidzes, the Alliluyevs, the Redenses, all broken in different ways, all turned into enemies and sucked into the black hole that was her father. It is a double life, and perhaps this is her most important insight.
On the surface, it is normal; beneath, it is a world of cruel bereavements. She watches this terrible theater from backstage, seeing the illusion. It is scripted with a brutal fatality, and there is nothing she can do but watch, including viewing the audience out front, which, as she imagines it, sits incredulous, openmouthed, silent.
Finally, though she has put it off from grief, in the middle of the book she tells her friend about her mother’s suicide. She paints a portrait of the adolescent Nadya by including her mother’s letters to a friend, written when Nadya was living through the turbulent years of 1916 to 1918 and being pulled slowly into the “full fervor of revolutionary idealism.” By 1918 Nadya’s letters hint that she has fallen in love with Stalin. Svetlana explains that Nadya “had only begun to grow when the Revolution broke out, whereas he [Stalin] was already a man nearly forty, an age of hardened scepticism and cold calculation and all the other qualities important in a politician.”26 It is from her nanny’s account that she writes about the night of her mother’s suicide.
Then come “letters” recounting the fate of her family after 1932. People appear and disappear as they did in life, until there is almost no one left. She reserves a special letter for Aleksei Kapler, whose fate made clear the cruelty of which her father was capable. Unburdening herself, she talks of her marriages and children. Looking back, she sees her life as one of “cruel bereavements” and “disappointments and losses.”
And yet her last letter is devoted to her nanny Alexandra Andreevna, who, with her gaiety and kindness, is offered as an embodiment of all that is good and unchanging in Russia, a person without whom she would have “lost her mind.” She paints Alexandra Andreevna as a kind of Tolstoyan epic figure who watches the revolutionaries with stoicism, knowing they too will pass. Svetlana seems to suggest that it was her nanny who gave her a sense of morality and a conscience.
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