Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  On March 29, Svetlana signed two powers of attorney to the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst. The first granted her attorneys the right to act on her behalf in all immigration matters; the second assigned them all rights over any current or future books she would write.

  When she signed the documents, Svetlana had only one thought in her head: to be cooperative. She knew how things happened. The leaders at the top spoke to each other and suddenly you vanished. When Greenbaum assured her that her book could make money, she said she hoped she might earn enough to have a car and a dog. She joked: It “should be a ‘gypsy’ dog since she was leading a gypsy life.”2

  On March 30, Greenbaum and Schwartz returned to New York. Now they needed to get Svetlana a visa to America. Greenbaum arranged a meeting with Attorney General Nick Katzenbach, along with Charles Bohlen from the State Department, who was an expert on the Soviet Union; and a number of CIA officers, including Donald Jameson, CIA branch chief in charge of handling Soviet defectors and other covert operations. By now Jameson, a victim of polio, was confined to a wheelchair; most likely he’d contracted the poliovirus from an East German defector whom he interrogated in 1955. Jamie, as he was called, was charming, deeply read in Russian literature, and personally committed to helping Svetlana.

  Alan Schwartz was present at the meeting.

  They were all at this table, talking about what happened, and it became clear the American government still didn’t want any part of this, at least on the surface. But we had to get some kind of security, knowing that if she came here, she wouldn’t be thrown out, she would have some documentation allowing her to stay. Without the intervention of Donald Jameson, I don’t know what would have happened to her. The best we could obtain for Svetlana was a six-month tourist visa.3

  Next Greenbaum telephoned Cass Canfield, the president of Harper & Row, with whom he’d recently worked on a lawsuit brought by Jacqueline Kennedy involving a biography Harper & Row was publishing. He asked if he could drop by Canfield’s home on East Thirty-Eighth Street that evening to talk about an urgent matter. When he got to the house, Canfield and Evan Thomas, the executive vice president, were waiting for him. He informed them that he represented Svetlana Alliluyeva, who in 1963 had written a book, which she was eager to publish. He assured them nobody knew she’d written a book. He added a proviso. The Swiss government had asked him to keep the existence of the book secret, and “there were other considerations that made it essential to keep this news confidential.”4

  Greenbaum did not explain the “other considerations,” but certainly he was alluding to the State Department’s wish to play this one low-key. In view of the need for secrecy, he said he and Alan Schwartz decided not to open Svetlana’s manuscript to general bidding, which would “disturb her security,” but to offer it only to Harper & Row. Canfield was indeed interested. After negotiations, on April 14, Harper & Row signed the contract, paying $250,000 for US English-language rights.

  Greenbaum next called Arthur Sulzberger, then the publisher of the New York Times, about serialization rights (he was close to the Sulzberger family). Sulzberger offered $225,000 for six installments. In a cooperative agreement with the Times, Life bought the rights to serialize the book two days after the Times for the sum of $400,000. Still to come would be Book of the Month Club rights ($325,000), and foreign book and serial rights. Greenbaum had accomplished all this by mid-April.5 No one had actually read the manuscript, but everyone was certain a book by Stalin’s daughter was eminently marketable.

  Now Greenbaum needed a translator. Kennan proposed several names, and soon Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a thirty-nine-year-old journalist and translator, was approached.6 McMillan had worked as a translator at the US Embassy in Moscow in the mid-1950s and had even met Svetlana briefly in 1956 when she tried to audit a course, The Soviet Novel, that Svetlana was teaching at Moscow University. The course was canceled; Khrushchev had just delivered his Secret Speech. Now McMillan was working on a book about Lee Harvey Oswald, whom she’d interviewed in Moscow in 1959 when she’d worked as a reporter for the North American News Alliance. The CIA had already vetted her.

  McMillan flew immediately to New York to meet Greenbaum. Svetlana’s manuscript had been delivered to Harper & Row at 10 East Fifty-Third Street, where it was kept under lock and key. She read the manuscript, written in longhand, over the course of a week, but wasn’t allowed to take it out of the building. When she was asked to write a précis needed to sell foreign rights, she had to do so from memory one night in her hotel room. The book moved her deeply. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes: to think that Stalin’s daughter was capable of writing this. And I never got over the great respect and awe that reading that manuscript imbued in me.”7

  Greenbaum thought it imperative for McMillan to meet Svetlana and persuaded Harper & Row to send her to Switzerland. As Greenbaum prepared her for the trip, she found herself in the middle of a comedy.

  The General [as friends called Greenbaum] delivered his instructions to me at the Williams Club in New York City, a very crowded restaurant where I ran into a couple of people I knew, and at the Algonquin, where everyone in New York would gather. General Greenbaum was very deaf and he would deliver me my instructions at the top of his voice and, so that he could hear me, I had to answer him at the top of my voice. It was a miracle that the whole thing wasn’t in the newspapers long before it was. . . . He drilled me on what I was supposed to say if I ran into any of my newspaper friends in the lobby of the hotel in Zurich. “If you run into Marvin Kalb in the lobby, what are you going to say? Well, Marvin, isn’t it wonderful, don’t you love skiing here?” I went secretly to Frankfurt and took a train to Zurich.8

  McMillan’s encounter with Svetlana went well. The two women met once at Janner’s home and again at a sort of B & B in Neuchâtel, where neither Svetlana nor McMillan was staying. McMillan had brought a sample chapter of her translation, which she showed Svetlana upstairs in the lobby with a parrot screeching in the background. This amused McMillan—she was pretty sure the parrot didn’t have a direct line to the New York Times. “Svetlana’s comment was that I stuck too close to her original but otherwise she liked it. Her English was excellent, as I already knew from that 1956 meeting.” Within days, McMillan was back in the United States.

  While the flurry continued in New York, for Svetlana the euphoria of escape had passed, and she fell into a brutal depression. She was missing her children. On April 4, she finally received a letter from her son, Joseph, lamenting that they had had no word from her.

  Greetings, dear Mama!

  We were very surprised when, on March 8, we went to the airport and did not find you. . . . When Tass came out with an announcement that you had been granted permission to remain abroad as long as you wished, we more or less stopped worrying, and life returned to its normal routine; that is if one discounts that to this day Katya cannot get back on track; and we, to tell you the truth, just don’t understand anything.

  I even called up the Swiss Embassy, asking them to help us in contacting you. . . . At last we got your card, in which you said you didn’t know how to get in touch with us. Can you explain why we have to write you through a government department? . . . Mama, all your friends are asking after you. It would be good if you wrote and told us what to say to them. Until we see you. We kiss you. Joseph and Katya.9

  Svetlana turned to Antonino Janner in desperation. There must be a way to telephone Joseph. Janner drove her to a small hotel in nearby Murten (Morat), where they rented a room with a phone and called Moscow using a fictitious name. To Svetlana’s shock, her son answered, though Katya was not at home. They spoke for half an hour, and yet it seemed nothing was said. He asked no questions, and she only stammered repeatedly that she was not coming back. She thought it would be dangerous for him to know too much. He replied, “Yes, yes I hear you.”10 Then the phone line was cut. From that point on, whenever she tried to reach her son in Moscow, the operator replied that the line was dead.
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br />   After this painful phone call, Svetlana phoned her friend Lily Golden. When Lily picked up the phone, she heard Svetlana’s voice asking, “Is anybody in your home?” Lily said no, but she was dumbstruck by the absurd question. “Every espionage agency in the world had to be listening to her phone calls, at least the KGB and the CIA.” Svetlana seemed almost hysterical, and as Lily remembered it, “she began to list all the names of the government and the Communist Party, and gave all their crimes and terrible deeds that she had learned about them abroad and about her father. I stood, holding the phone, numb with terror.” Lily shifted the conversation to express her dismay at the toll Svetlana’s departure was taking on her children and asked how she could leave her friends.11 Lily was soon called into the offices of the KGB and interrogated, as each of Svetlana’s friends would be, but she refused the interrogators’ demand to pronounce Svetlana “crazy.”12

  When the truth of Svetlana’s defection hit home, the KGB approached her children, demanding that they denounce their mother. Leonid and Galina Alliluyev believed that Joseph might initially have resisted. “As a result of some pressure on him,” Joseph and his young wife left their apartment in the House on the Embankment and moved to the suburbs, but soon they were back in the center of Moscow, and Joseph was offered the opportunity to work in the faculty of the First Medical Institute, from which he’d graduated.13 The Soviet press now reported that Joseph said his mother was “unstable.” Perhaps he felt: why should he be loyal, when it was she who had deserted them?

  Looking back more than thirty years later, Joseph would tell an interviewer that he had kept Katya in the dark about the whole situation, and he himself was not pressured by the KGB: “Nobody tortured me with hot irons or fire,” though he added that an officer from the KGB did drop by the university once and leave his phone number.14 Stating that he loved both his grandfathers, he said his mother “had ruined herself.”15

  Olga Redlova, the daughter of the chemist Fyodor Volkenstein, who was the secret interlocutor for Svetlana’s Twenty Letters to a Friend, recalled: “My father had the manuscript of this book. I remember that when Svetlana left, Osia [Joseph] called my father and asked if he had anything left of Svetlana’s things. And my father said, ‘Yes, I have. I have a small bag in the hallway, wrapped in newspapers, but I’ve never opened it. I don’t know what’s in it.’ Well, of course it was Svetlana’s manuscript. Joseph came and picked up the manuscript.”16 When the KGB came to visit Joseph and Katya at the House on the Embankment, the agents confiscated not just the manuscript, but also family photographs from Svetlana’s locked desk.

  Svetlana spent her time in Fribourg brooding in the convent garden. Robert Rayle had bought her Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in Rome—it had finally been published in Russian in Milan. This was the first time she was reading it, for she’d never managed to get a samizdat copy in Moscow. She walked among the thuja trees in the garden and wept: over the book, over her children, over her lost country. And wrote a public letter “To Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” who had died in 1960.

  In it she lamented her “beloved, long-suffering baffled Russia,” where she had left her children and friends to the “unbearable Soviet life, a life so unlike anything else that it can never be imagined by Russians abroad, whether friendly or hostile.”

  She thought of her friend Andrusha (Andrei Sinyavsky), exiled for seven years in a concentration camp, carrying buckets of water, his clothes in tatters, like Pasternak’s character Yuri Zhivago. Nothing had changed. “As before, it is given to gendarmes and policemen to be the first critics of a writer’s work. . . . Now you can be tried for a metaphor, sent to a camp for figures of speech!” The “Party hypocrites and Pharisees! . . . these miserable compilers of dossiers and denunciations” were still in control.17 What had she done to her children, who would be subjected to slanders and possibly worse? She begged them: “Let them all condemn me—and you condemn me as well, if that will be easier for you (say whatever you like: it will only be empty words, and they will not hurt me), only do not reject me in your hearts.”18

  Svetlana felt lacerated to the bone. She wondered if she’d really understood that she was losing her children when she’d made her impulsive decision not to return to Russia. “Probably not.”19 But when she read Doctor Zhivago, the reality hit like an electric shock. The tragedy of separation from a child imposed by a regime that knew no constraints was also Zhivago’s and Lara’s story.

  In mid-April Alan Schwartz flew back to Switzerland. The contract with the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst was now ready for Svetlana’s signature. He landed in Frankfurt and took the train to Basel, feeling “fairly spooked out, looking around all the time to see who was there.” The Russians, the Indians, the international press, and, by now, other international publishers were looking for Svetlana. Antonino Janner was waiting for Schwartz when he stepped off the train. Janner drove him to meet her. That night over dinner, Svetlana warmed to her young lawyer. She kept telling the thirty-four-year-old Schwartz that he “reminded her of her brother, Yakov, who had died in a German internment camp.”20

  Two Swiss lawyers, William Staehelin and Peter Hafter, joined her legal team, and in a two-day meeting, they reviewed the contracts regarding her manuscript.

  Greenbaum had invented for Svetlana a company called Patientia, in Liechtenstein, where taxes, of course, were low. On April 20, Svetlana signed the rights in her unpublished manuscript to Copex Establishment, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. The contract read in part:

  NOW, THEREFORE, in consideration of an amount of US $1,500,000.00 (US Dollars One Million Five Hundred Thousand) MRS. ALLILUEVA hereby assigns to COPEX ESTABLISHMENT all of her right, title and interest throughout the world in and to the above manuscript. . . .

  The price of US $1,500,000.00 shall be paid as follows:

  • a down payment of US $73,875.00 has been made today;

  • the balance of US $1,426,125.00 is paid in notes which have been delivered to MRS. ALLILUEVA today.21

  A million and a half was an astonishing sum back then, but the deals with Harper & Row, the serial rights with the New York Times and Life, and the foreign sales had been exceedingly lucrative. Svetlana was to be paid in installments. Alan Schwartz recalled: “I think the reason for the notes must have been taxes. Because a note comes due, you’re taxed on the money you get. It might’ve been a way to spread out the payments—instead of paying $750,000 in taxes on $1.5 million.”22 Even Greenbaum must have been surprised at the amount of money Svetlana’s book was bringing in. Only Churchill’s memoirs had sold for more. Friends sent letters to Edward Greenbaum congratulating him on his coup in representing Stalin’s daughter.

  Svetlana would look back and say she had understood nothing. What did she know about money, about contracts, about American law? When she asked the lawyers what Copex was, she was told it was a “legal body.” Fresh out of the USSR, she couldn’t conceive what a legal body might be.23 She didn’t even know what a bank account was. She sat passively through the two-day meeting trying to follow the discussions, her English barely adequate with regard to her lawyers’ legalese. All she could think was that she must not create problems. She must not be sent back to the Soviet Union. She had to sign everything the lawyers gave her.

  When she’d walked through the impoverished streets of Kalakankar just a few weeks back, she’d imagined setting up a hospital in Brajesh Singh’s name. She now told Greenbaum she wanted to use her money to do this. As Alan Schwartz remembered, “We were very skeptical about setting up a foundation in some hospital in India in remembrance of her former lover, but we acceded to her wishes.”24

  Two trusts were established: The Alliluyeva Charitable Trust and the Alliluyeva Trust. Her charitable trust would eventually pay $200,000 to build the Brajesh Singh hospital, with $250,000 set aside in investments to pay for the hospital’s maintenance. The rest of Svetlana’s money went into the Alliluyeva Trust, from which she received $1,500 every month to live on. She f
elt this was more than enough.25

  Robert Rayle had warned her that her manuscript was all that stood “between her and the poorhouse.” It had turned her into a millionaire.

  This was possibly the worst fate that could have befallen her. She was no longer a principled defector who had rejected Communism; she was a very wealthy woman. “What did she intend to do now that she was rich?” was one of the first questions journalists asked when she eventually reached the United States.

  The propaganda blowback was intense. The commissars were delighted to point out that Svetlana had always been only after the money. Alliluyeva “is a first-class slanderer of the Soviet system and even of her own father. We will only emphasize that dollars will hardly bring success to the woman without a country, who abandoned home, country, and family and pleased herself in the services of anti-Communism.”26

  It was suddenly remembered that in 1941 the Germans had dropped propaganda leaflets on Moscow claiming Stalin was secreting huge sums of money in Swiss banks, ready to flee. No one had believed this at the time, but now his daughter had stopped in Switzerland.27 Even ordinary Soviet citizens were disconcerted.

  The rumors made it to Washington. On June 15, in an article entitled “$300 Million in Gold for Svetlana,” the Washington Observer Newsletter wrote that Svetlana herself had insisted on stopping in Switzerland. “The real reason is that she wanted to pick up the $300 million in gold deposited in a Berne bank!” The article claimed that “old ‘bloody Joe’ Stalin” had stashed it in a secret numbered account during the siege of Moscow, and had named Svetlana as “sole beneficiary.” It was reported as a fact, confirmed by “an American intelligence source,” that “Svetlana submitted documentary evidence proving her true identity. . . . The Swiss bank officials have ruled that she has established a valid claim to the Stalin fortune.”28 For now, Svetlana was unaware of the gossip her newfound wealth was provoking.