Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  The defection of Stalin’s daughter was an event of such consequence that the international press was swarming the Johnson estate. Newsmen parked outside the fence and spied from the shrubbery. Helicopters circled overhead taking pictures. Local police kept the house under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Svetlana liked to take long restless hikes through the nearby woods, but the Paloesik brothers insisted on accompanying her. They grew very fond of Svetlana, particularly when she took a rose off her own suit jacket and gave it to Albert. “She’s so nice. I’m almost beginning to like Russians,” Albert said.18

  Meanwhile, Priscilla and Svetlana worked on the translation of Twenty Letters to a Friend. On one occasion, to give Priscilla a break from the pressure of having the author sitting across from her knitting or reading as she translated, Priscilla’s sister Eunice took Svetlana shopping. The next day, a photograph of Svetlana bending down to try on shoes appeared in the New York Times. It was reported that she bought three pairs of stockings, slacks, a sweater, and the shoes. “The cost of the slacks and sweater was $46.82.”19 The existence of paparazzi and the invasive curiosity of “the public” were astonishing discoveries for a Soviet citizen. There was no public in the USSR.

  But domestic life at the Johnson estate provided a welcome shelter. Soon Svetlana assumed Priscilla’s mother’s seat at the head of the table—Mr. Johnson would be at the other end, with Priscilla relegated to the middle. To Priscilla, Svetlana was like the “chairman of the board, a very able and capacious person.” The name of Aleksei Kosygin would come up and Mr. Johnson would say, “Oh, I suppose he’s a very nice man,” but Svetlana would respond, “Oh, no indeed.” Priscilla remembered: “One by one, whoever’s name came up, she would give a very good sketch of all of them, accurate brief sketches. It was very impressive.”20 She would read the Soviet attacks on her reported in the newspapers and explain what they were really saying.

  Priscilla thought of herself as something of a Kremlinologist but Svetlana’s “touch, her feel as to what they were really getting at was incredibly accurate, much, much better than mine and I think much better than anybody’s would have been.”21

  But soon the Johnson house began to feel like Grand Central Station. Everyone wanted to meet Svetlana. People Priscilla hadn’t seen in years began to drop by. The phone rang ninety-eight times a day. Anyone who walked downstairs at night would stumble over a private detective. It was all too much. When Priscilla’s siblings visited and saw the chaos, they insisted Svetlana would have to leave. There were so many unwanted people in the house that they were afraid their father’s old servants would abandon him. But Priscilla’s father loved having Svetlana as his guest. He had a good sense of humor and would say, “Svetlana likes me because I remind her so much of her father.”

  Priscilla went to see Greenbaum, suggesting that a time for Svetlana to leave needed to be set. “Would you save me from having to take the blame?” she asked. “I guess I realized that whoever, so to speak, kicked her out of our house, she was going to be furious, because I must have understood early that partings and leavings and not being welcomed were going to induce that reaction.”22 She hated to make Svetlana feel unwelcome yet again.23

  Priscilla took a trip to Atlanta, Georgia, to see her husband, who was threatening to divorce her because of her long absences; they had married just the previous December. One night Svetlana phoned, raging. “You urged them to restore the cuts in my book. You’re not supposed to. That’s not your place!” She got angrier and angrier. “You’re getting into editorial matters that aren’t any of your business.” Priscilla was thrown for a loop. “It was like having a very heavy tank or truck run over you.”

  George Kennan had recommended minor cuts to the manuscript. One was a letter to Aleksei Kapler that Svetlana had included. Because Kapler was still alive, it might be dangerous to him to reveal so much.24 Another cut was the comment that Stalin didn’t engage in blood sports because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Kennan must have thought this statement was too offensive.

  Priscilla had a secret motive in wanting to restore the cuts. When the manuscript was in longhand, she’d been asked to estimate its length and had given a wildly erroneous word count. The publisher had oversold serial rights, and she was afraid there’d be little left over for the book. But she was hurt and also puzzled by Svetlana’s uncontained rage in her phone call. Svetlana seemed to find it so easy to disregard all the hospitality she’d received in the Johnson household during her six-week stay. Where did her rage come from? Was it simply that her vanity as a writer was piqued? Her Russian friend Professor Manuylov had told her never to allow anyone to change a word in her book. Whatever the case, after the blowup, apart from business calls, she and Priscilla remained permanently estranged.

  Chapter 20

  A Mysterious Figure

  With the advance from her book Twenty Letters to a Friend, Svetlana bought a Dodge sedan in 1968. She imagined driving across America.

  (Copyright © Marilyn Silverstone/Magnum Photos)

  George Kennan had asked his daughter Joan to host a luncheon for Svetlana in her Princeton home. It was a daunting prospect because it all had to be carried out in secrecy even though other famous guests were invited, like Arthur Schlesinger and Nicholas Nabokov, the son of the novelist. Joan cooked lobster stew without washing off the brine, and the meal was inedible. Only Svetlana emptied her plate, declaring the dish delicious—it reminded her of the Black Sea. Joan found her endearing.

  It was now decided that Svetlana would spend the summer with Joan and her family. George Kennan and his wife, Annelise, would be in Africa, where he was engaged on a lecture tour. On June 6, the Paloesik brothers drove Svetlana to Kennan’s remote two-hundred-acre farm in East Berlin, Pennsylvania.

  Called the Cherry Orchard after Chekhov’s play, the farm felt like a Russian landowner’s country estate. The farmhouse was filled with mementos the Kennans had brought back from Russia: old engravings, porcelain, Fedoskino lacquered tables. They’d even hung up a framed photograph of the Kremlin Embankment. Built in the nineteenth century, the house had two large columns in the front that created a kind of porch. Joan remembered many evenings when she and Svetlana sat there looking out over the fields, Svetlana talking nostalgically of the Russian steppes. Joan’s two children would already be in bed and her husband was working in the city and came only on weekends.

  After two weeks Svetlana told the Paloesik brothers that she didn’t like being guarded, that in America she had more guards than she’d ever had in the Kremlin. The brothers gave her a ballpoint pen as a parting gift, inscribed: TO SVETLANA. USE WITH HAPPINESS. AL AND GEORGE.

  When Svetlana had received her son’s devastating letter a few weeks back, she’d written to George Kennan in despair. Now his consoling reply from Johannesburg finally came in the mail.

  You should not permit it [the letter] to shake your confidence in yourself. . . . You, in doing what you did in Delhi, followed the deepest needs of your own nature. Had you gone back to the USSR at that time, you would have gone back not only as an enemy of the system but in a sense as an enemy of yourself. All this would have done your son no good either. . . .

  Dear Svetlana, even in the face of this greatest sorrow, be confident that in some way of which probably neither you nor I are now able to conceive, all this courage and faith will be vindicated—and for him as well.1

  On June 23, the long-awaited summit between President Johnson and Premier Kosygin took place in the small town of Glassboro, New Jersey; this was the meeting that demonstrated the thaw between the two countries, in the name of which Foy Kohler and the State Department had initially rejected Svetlana’s request for asylum. The New York Times reported that the talks about the Mideast, Vietnam, and nuclear arms control lasted five hours, to little effect. “Not only were the difficult questions between them not resolved, but there appeared to have been no subsidiary agreements in relation to them.”2

  Two days later, as Sv
etlana and the Kennan family sat in the farm kitchen eating dinner and listening to the radio broadcast, they heard Kosygin’s press conference at the United Nations. The Third Arab-Israeli War (the Six-Day War) had ended just two weeks earlier, and, denouncing Israel, Kosygin was declaring Soviet support for the defeated Arabs. Almost as an afterthought, Kosygin was asked about Svetlana. She heard Kosygin’s familiar voice:

  Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aims or . . . [to] discredit the Soviet country.3

  Joan and her husband, Larry Griggs, laughed, but Svetlana could hear Kosygin’s anger. She could also hear that the translator was modifying his tone. She knew what this meant. The Central Committee, the Party, and the secret police had all conferred. The anti-Svetlana campaign had begun. In fact, though she probably didn’t know it, the KGB already had a code name for her—kukushka, a word that has the double meaning of “cuckoo bird” and “escaped convict.”4 From Kosygin’s seemingly offhand remark, she understood that the new head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was out for revenge.

  Damning articles began to appear in Pravda and Izvestia. The worst was a commentary by Sergei Izvekov, Patriarch Pimen I, the Russian Orthodox metropolitan (bishop) of Krutitsy and Kolomna, published in Izvestia on July 1. Pimen was following the Kremlin line:

  Lately our press and the press abroad report that the conscience of many honest people has been revolted by statements made by Svetlana Alliluyeva. This woman, who has had several husbands, who has abandoned her children, who has become a traitor to her people and exposes her father’s nakedness, attempts to speak about religion, about her belief in God.

  The moral image of this woman, who has sold everything for dollars, can only arouse revulsion and anger.5

  Soon the anti-Svetlana campaign went international. A shorter version of Pimen’s commentary appeared in London’s Daily Express and Evening News, and an Italian Communist paper, Paese sera, ran an article that claimed Svetlana suffered frequent nervous crises and attacks of hysteria and had done so all her life.6

  It was an unfortunate coincidence for Svetlana that she happened to defect in 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, celebrated on November 7. Worse still, her publisher, Harper & Row, had decided to bring Twenty Letters to a Friend out in October. The KGB was certain the Americans were out to humiliate the Soviet Union on the eve of the USSR’s most important celebration ever.

  A KGB operative named Victor Louis was chosen to handle Svetlana. He’d already tried to contact her at the Johnson residence in April. When Priscilla McMillan had answered his call, she’d been disgusted. She’d known Louis in her days in Moscow. “I never hated knowing anybody as much as I hated knowing Victor Louis.”7

  Vitaly Yevgenyevich Lui (Victor Louis) was a mysterious figure. In his exposé of Soviet spies, the American journalist John Barron identified Louis as the most celebrated KGB disinformation agent.8 As a nineteen-year-old student, Louis had been arrested in Moscow. He claimed it was because of his association with foreigners, but it was more likely that he was a common black marketer. He spent nine years in the Gulag, where fellow prisoners, like the dissident writer Arkady Belinkov, who would soon become Svetlana’s friend, claimed to have clear evidence that Louis worked as an informer for the camp directors.9

  When Louis was freed from the labor camp, his lavish lifestyle—a Volkswagen, foreign suits, meetings at the American Embassy cocktail bar—should have been enough to get him arrested as a spy, but nothing happened. He was soon working abroad for the London Evening News and eventually the Evening Standard, where, presumably, much of his work was to leak KGB-doctored documents to the English press. But he seemed able to play both sides. He was also involved in the publication of dissident manuscripts forbidden in the Soviet Union. By 1965 he had already accumulated enough wealth to buy a lavish country house in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino outside Moscow.

  Victor Louis came up with an ingenious strategy to sabotage Svetlana’s book. Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei, whom Louis later approached with an offer to sell his father’s memoirs in the West, had the story from Louis himself. “Every step Svetlana took resonated loudly in the corridors of power in the Kremlin.” With the prospect of an October publication looming, “Vitaly Yevgenyevich proposed, on his own responsibility, as a private person, to make some cuts in the book to remove those passages that most alarmed the Kremlin and to bring the book out a few months earlier than the official launch date.”10 When the real book came out, it would be old news. Louis informed the KGB that the proceeds from the sale were to belong exclusively to him because he would bear the inconvenience of the project. The KGB agreed.

  The KGB, after getting a copy of the manuscript from Svetlana’s son, Joseph, handed it over to Louis, who promptly sold it for £5,000 to the London publisher Flegon Press. Alec Flegon, a Russian Romanian, had a reputation among London publishers as a pirate who published banned Soviet literature smuggled out of the USSR by tourists, students, and possibly more nefarious sources but never paid royalties to the writers back in the Soviet Union.11

  Svetlana’s British publisher, Hutchinson, which had paid £50,000 for the book, sight unseen, and The Observer, which had bought serial rights, were furious, but it was tricky to go after Flegon. He claimed to be an innocent third party who had obtained the manuscript legally from his “invariably honest” agent, who had brought the manuscript out of Russia on July 27. Flegon declined to name his “agent” so as not to jeopardize future delivery of dissident literature. Victor Louis had come up with a clever ruse—in the name of protecting writers, he could do the KGB’s bidding and sabotage them.12

  Because the Soviet Union was not a member of the International Copyright Agreement, Hutchinson could not claim breach of copyright. Instead, on July 31, the company filed an injunction in the High Court in London for breach of confidence, on the grounds that Svetlana had entrusted the manuscript to people who had no right to share it with others. The injunction was granted. Harper & Row and Hutchinson immediately rushed a Russian version of the book into print.

  Ironically, the KGB’s plot backfired. If Victor Louis hadn’t tried to preempt the publication of Twenty Letters to a Friend, the book’s release might have been delayed until the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution was over. Influential Americans like Arthur Schlesinger were pressing for a November date. Schlesinger told his friend Patricia Bohlen that, during his recent visit to Moscow, the Soviets had appealed to him to ask the US government to delay publication.

  Bohlen had been outraged. “What business had Arthur, who makes a fuss about Soviet censorship, to try to get our government to interfere with plans of publishers?”13 In fact, though, Evan Thomas had been waffling, suggesting Harper & Row would consider November 13 as a possible date, but when it became clear that Victor Louis was selling a pirated copy, it was imperative to get the book out as soon as possible.14

  Victor Louis managed to sell his pirated version of Svetlana’s book, as well as a collection of two hundred photographs, to the German magazine Stern. In mid-August, Stern published the first of four articles on the “Secret Album of Stalin’s Daughter,” summarizing anecdotes from Svetlana’s book, which it called “a tame bunny,” and printing the private photographs confiscated from her desk in the House on the Embankment. The images were mislabeled and not flattering, including a photo of a slightly overweight Svetlana in what looked like her underwear at a private beach. A caption lied: “On her flight, Svetlana could not take along her photo album. Her children are now publishing it.” No mention was made of Victor Louis.15

  In Stern’s “conversations” with Joseph in an article titled “Mother Is a Little Bit Screwed Up,” Joseph is quoted as referring to his mother’s “unstable character,” her “fickleness,” her “wild character,” and her “vacillating mental states.” Joseph then allegedly described a private visit he and Katya made to the Mauso
leum on Red Square to view the embalmed Stalin. “I took Katya by the hand and we went up to the coffin on tiptoe. . . . It was dark and quiet. I can’t remember if I felt anything. It was something like fear and awe as we saw our grandfather lying there lifeless and waxed. . . . It’s no secret that I’m proud of my grandfather to this day.” Joseph seemed to be following KGB directives. The KGB wanted Svetlana slandered and had already begun the rehabilitation of Stalin’s image. Stern commented drily, “The shadow of their grandfather offers a lot of conveniences: 200 rubles of government pension and two government apartments. . . . Katya has her own horse. Joseph went for a vacation in the Caucasus after four months in the army.”16

  Meanwhile, the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi had been working on the Svetlana story. Perhaps because he was known for his Communist sympathies, he was given access to Svetlana’s relatives. (Without official permission, he could never have met them).

  In an interview with Joseph Alliluyev, Biagi asked, “If your mother appeared on the doorstep, what would you do?” Joseph responded coldly. “Obviously I wouldn’t shout for joy. . . . It is she who left us.” Joseph told Biagi, “We will meet again only in one situation: if she comes back. . . . This is our country.”

  Biagi also interviewed a number of Svetlana’s Moscow friends. The journalist Tatiana Tess condemned her.

  Everything has been left for her just as it was in her father’s lifetime: apartment, dacha, the large one as well, and she chose Zhukovka, because it was easier to keep up; she did not have to pay for anything, and could use the State’s car at any time; she could go into any kind of rest home. . . . We were very close friends; I loved her very much. . . . Her children were very dear, they loved her and she could be proud of them. . . . She had an erratic personality; she has the childish complexes of a princess. Nothing is impossible or forbidden for her, because she has been used to having her own way since she was a little girl. . . . One shouldn’t abandon one’s children.17