We all feel helpless, particularly as S. has by now lost every friend she had here. She lives under the delusion (sincere of course—delusions always are) that the world is conspiring against her. . . . If you need any evidence in support of the paranoia diagnosis, I can send you some samples of the sort of letters she writes—“international intrigues,” “KGB agents,” “triple agents,” etc., etc. In her Dad’s days, people were shot for less.31
Traill had convinced herself of her own high-minded motives but in fact would not have been interested in Olga’s welfare if Svetlana were not Stalin’s daughter. Sublimated within her concern was an unacknowledged vindictiveness. Berlin wrote back to say that Olga’s security was indeed worrying, but he couldn’t help. He had broken with Svetlana. He suggested that Traill write to Olga’s father, Mr. Peters, who lived in some kind of commune of architects in Tucson, Arizona.
Oblivious of this gossip, Svetlana seemed to have emerged from what she called her “unhealthy state of mind.” She bought a new residence, saying it would be cheaper than paying rent. By June, she was sending friends her new address—55 Bateman Street, Flat 3. The apartment overlooked the Cambridge botanical gardens and was a bit closer to the center of town. It had one large room, which served as living room, dining room, and study, and adjacent bedrooms. She set up her pine desk with her typewriter and her bookshelves with her photographs of a young Joseph and Katya. She had a few of her possessions, including her two lovely Navaho rugs, shipped from America, where they had been stored with friends. She and Olga went to the Scilly Isles for a two-week vacation, spending time on the beach and visiting Tresco Abbey. By now she had almost exhausted her small savings. Everything seemed in a strange kind of suspension.
That summer Lancer International Press in India finally published The Faraway Music. Lancer paid very little, but Svetlana was still pleased. She wrote to Rosa Shand, “I HAVE Author’s copies in my hands: you know the feeling when one sees one’s ms finally PRINTED.”32
And she had a second reason for joy. She had recently received a letter from Joseph telling her that the Soviet government was willing to give him permission to travel to Finland—he was certain the government would let him out. She merely had to get herself to Finland and they would hold each other. Svetlana told Olga that she would soon be meeting her brother.
Svetlana rushed to speak with her friend Jane Renfrew. She asked, “If my son comes from Moscow, would you see him?” and was delighted when Renfrew replied, “Of course.” But soon she slipped from giddy euphoria to the depths of a darkness she knew all too well. She told Renfrew that Joseph had telephoned and said, “Mother, I haven’t seen you in seventeen years. I’m seriously ill. I really want to see you.”33
The thought occurred to her that she should go to Moscow to see him. She chose to mull over the idea with only one friend, Philippa Hill. She told Philippa that Joseph was in the hospital. He needed her. Philippa had children and grandchildren. She must know how Svetlana felt. All Philippa said was, “Well, I think you have to go, don’t you?” though she worried for Olga, who didn’t speak a word of Russian.34
There had already been hints of Svetlana’s loneliness and disillusionment. She’d written to her friend Jerzy Kosinski in September, “If I ever defect back to Moscow, no one should be surprised. . . . What I confronted in this so-called Free World, was enough to kill . . . the enthusiasm of even a strong man. I am NO strong man, and I have no ‘Nerves of Steel’ [alluding to Stalin]. . . . My son is my only friend. . . . To be with Joseph is my only wish, which I still cannot achieve. He will fail in the Free World as I did, so the only way is to go back.”35
Earlier, in March 1984, she had told a journalist, “Sometimes it’s almost a superhuman effort not to drop everything and run and get a ticket to go and see them. Sometimes I don’t care what the regime is. I just want to see my grandchildren.”36 Yet there was Olga to consider. Svetlana felt it was ironic that she had blood ties in both countries, but couldn’t find a home. Still, she concluded bravely, if unconvincingly, “Home I have inside me. I take it with me like a snail wherever I go.”37
But the truth was, she had reached the end of her endurance. She had very little money, certainly not enough to last more than a few months. She was stranded in a foreign country, but a retreat to the United States offered no change in her prospects. She had not found a paying publisher and seemed to be washed up as a writer. She could no longer afford Olga’s education, and her sense of herself as a mother, based on her own mother’s model, was that she must provide her daughter an excellent education. Most devastating of all was that her son was ill in the hospital and he’d asked her to come. She knew that her defection back to the Soviet Union would be shocking, but she no longer cared whether she provoked another international incident. Her personal reasons trumped those of the state. Perhaps a part of her even wanted to give the finger to those she felt had let her down.
On September 11, 1984, Svetlana took the train from Cambridge to London to track down the Soviet Embassy—the address was unlisted for security reasons. In her handbag, she carried a letter to the Soviet ambassador requesting permission to return to the USSR. When she identified herself and finally made it through the security checks, a man in the familiar brown suit of a Soviet official greeted her noncommittally and accepted her letter, telling her it would be sent to Moscow. “We do not decide anything here, you understand.” She should come back in a week.38
A week later, the chargé d’affaires greeted her enthusiastically and invited her for tea. He said she could return immediately. Plans were already set. They must avoid Heathrow Airport, where she might be recognized; Gatwick would be better. The embassy would fly her and her daughter to Greece, where they could stay for a few days at the Soviet Embassy, and then the plane would take them to Moscow. Nothing ever happened this quickly in the Soviet Union. Svetlana demurred. She said she couldn’t leave so soon. Her daughter was still in school and she hadn’t yet told her. They must wait for Olga’s midterm break. The chargé d’affaires reluctantly agreed that she could depart at the end of October.
On the train back to Cambridge, Svetlana sat in a daze, watching the trees and houses of the Essex countryside float past the window, and wondered how Olga would react. She knew, once again, that she had started a process that seemed impossible to stop. Did it occur to her that there were eerie echoes of her precipitate flight seventeen years back?
At first she told Olga they were taking a trip to Greece, but as Olga watched her mother sorting through their belongings and destroying her papers and correspondence, she knew something was afoot. The night before they were due to leave, Svetlana finally told her daughter they were flying to the USSR to visit her brother and sister.
Olga was furious. Why hadn’t her mother told her? How long would they be staying? She hadn’t even been allowed to say good-bye to her friends. They had a bitter fight, and for the first time Svetlana relented. “OK,” she said. “We’re not going.”39 And then she woke Olga at three a.m., just before the airport taxi was due to arrive.
As she locked the door to her new flat behind her, the fridge still half-full of food, and she and Olga climbed into the airport taxi with only the luggage they could carry, Svetlana tried to avoid facing the fact that she had handled this badly. She should have better prepared her daughter, but what choice did she have? It was impossible for Olga to tell her friends. If the news leaked out that Stalin’s daughter was returning to the USSR, it would be blasted in headlines all over the international press. The British or the Americans might have tried to stop her.
All Olga could think was, This is it. Mom’s going to love Joseph now.40
Svetlana had invited Rosamond Richardson for lunch the next day. Richardson trudged over to Bateman Street with her two young sons and knocked on the door. There was no reply. She checked her agenda to confirm that she had the right date, the right time. It was very bizarre. Svetlana was simply gone.
Svetlana had left inst
ructions with a real estate agent to sell her new Bateman Street flat. It fell to Philippa Hill to empty it. As she sorted things into boxes, Philippa decided to mail Svetlana’s beloved Navaho rugs to the Soviet Union, but they, along with almost everything else, simply disappeared.
Chapter 31
Back in the USSR
Upon her return to Moscow in 1984, Svetlana held a press conference at the offices of the Soviet Women’s National Committee.
(AP Photo)
It was late October 1984 when Svetlana and Olga left behind autumn in England and slipped utterly unnoticed into the hot, dusty Athens airport and took a taxi to the Soviet Embassy. There a young diplomat, Yuri Andropov, son of the recently deceased Soviet leader, and his fashionable wife welcomed them. At first Svetlana was comforted by the presence of what seemed to her a youthful generation of new Soviet officials, until she was invited to tea with the usual grim, gray bureaucrats, who elicited flashbacks of her meeting in India seventeen years ago with Ambassador Benediktov. Only the high-spirited Olga relieved the artificiality of the situation. Olga was busy in Athens.
Mom did whatever it was she was doing. I was chaperoned around, being shown the Acropolis. And I was gift shopping. I had been told I had all of these relatives—a brother, a sister, nieces, and nephews. So I had a whole bunch of people to buy presents for. And I had read that Russians really liked Adidas and couldn’t get them, so I was buying everyone Adidas.1
It didn’t matter to a thirteen-year-old that she didn’t know the shoe sizes of all these strangers. When Svetlana joined the shopping expedition, she bought an embroidered dress for Katya’s daughter, Anya, and some amusing trinkets for Joseph and his wife. In the three days they had before the Aeroflot flight to Moscow, Olga fell in love with Athens. She laughed when she later read a report in a newspaper that she had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the hotel balcony.2
On October 25, Svetlana and Olga left the heat of Athens behind and headed into a Moscow winter. As the descending plane circled over the vast empty landscape of Russia further effaced by a blanket of snow, Svetlana was shocked to discover she felt nothing. She was the exile returned; she should have been crying.3
She’d asked Joseph not to come to the airport—it would have been too emotional to meet in public. The Soviet officials waiting at the VIP entrance seemed tense. A young woman approached with a bouquet of flowers: “Welcome home!” As they drove into Moscow, Svetlana barely recognized the city: the route was lined with block after block of monotonous high-rise tenement apartments.
They were escorted to the Hotel Sovietsky, one of the most expensive hotels in Moscow, overlooking the Leningrad Prospect. They climbed its elegant steps and entered its white marble lobby through the revolving doors, and there stood Joseph.
Some part of Svetlana’s psyche still carried the image of the young man of twenty-one whom she had left at Sheremetyevo Airport in 1966: slim, good-looking, with humor in his eyes. The thirty-nine-year-old man staring at her seemed tired and more embarrassed than happy to see her. Joseph was looking at a fifty-eight-year-old woman who was his mother but whom he hadn’t seen in eighteen years.
Svetlana always constructed a fantasy of how things would be. She and Olga were returning to a family who loved and would embrace them. Uncles, aunts, and cousins would surround Olga and lavish her with affection. There would be no recriminations, no regrets. The frozen moment dissolved, and Joseph’s father, Grigori Morozov, who’d always remained close to his son, stepped forward, followed by Joseph’s wife and fourteen-year-old son, Ilya. Joseph moved to embrace his mother and then, taking his wife by the hand, said, “Mama, this is Lyuda.”
The whole encounter was awkward. Joseph ignored Olga. Perhaps he was preoccupied, concerned that his mother like his new wife. Svetlana didn’t. She took an immediate dislike to Lyuda, who seemed so much older than her son, but she told herself not to meddle. The young boy, Ilya, stood by awkwardly. Only Grigori’s presence made the reunion less clumsy. He chatted affectionately with Olga in broken English and guided them to the elevator. Otherwise they might have remained frozen to the white marble floor.
The government had assigned Svetlana a luxurious two-bedroom suite. Even here the reunion did not go well, as they stumbled over each other in Russian and English. Lyuda filled a vase with water to hold the flowers the Committee of Soviet Women had given Svetlana. Svetlana thought, At least she’s practical. Olga stared at these strangers. Grigori said they would meet downstairs in the restaurant, where he’d reserved a table. He reminded Svetlana that the restaurant was once famous for its chorus of Gypsy singers. It always came up in novels. Didn’t she remember? She did not. In the bathroom, Olga turned on her mother in anger. This was her brother, who supposedly loved her? He had looked her up and down and said nothing. He hadn’t even hugged her.4
In the restaurant, Joseph and Svetlana held hands, but it was impossible to speak. The music was too loud. Grigori stuck kindly to Olga, trying to keep her entertained. Ilya remained tongue-tied and tense. Lyuda watched coolly. The familiar feast of vodka, caviar, herring, and pickles lay on the table.
Olga remembered the evening as totally unnerving.
This whole, long, huge table full of people drinking and eating and talking Russian, and there’s only this one guy [Grigori] who’s sitting here and talking to me. And he’s talking to me like I’m six. And I’m thirteen. But he was one of the few that spoke English. Really terrible English. That first night was awful, and I thought, Oh my gosh, Mom’s going to be reunited with Joseph. This is it. I’m done.5
Svetlana had expected an outpouring of love from her son and seemed incapable of anticipating that his reaction might be complex. She believed she had been faithful all these years in her love for her children. But how was he to know this? All Joseph knew was what Kremlin propaganda had reported. She was anti-Soviet, unstable, a wealthy American who brought them Greek trinkets as homecoming gifts. It would take time to dispel this version. Wrapped in her own longing and now distress, Svetlana lost sight of Olga sitting among these strangers and would look back ruefully: “It is amazing how, when the heart has already made a decision, reason only supplies every possible reassurance in detail.”6
The next day a friend of Joseph’s from the Institute of Foreign Relations brought champagne and flowers and prepared Svetlana for the arrival that afternoon of two officials from the Foreign Office who were going to help her “to begin readjustment to the Soviet life.” When she tried to ask about Russian schools for Olga, he made it clear that all such questions should be directed to the two officials. Svetlana was being reminded that decisions were made “up there on the top,” as they said in Moscow.7 The first order of business would be to reinstate Svetlana’s Soviet citizenship and confiscate her and Olga’s American passports.
The international paparazzi were already lurking outside the hotel. When Svetlana and Olga emerged, one reporter asked Olga, “Are you Olga Peters?” Svetlana grabbed her daughter’s arm and pulled her back into the hotel. It was the first time Olga began to understand who her mother really was.8
On November 1, the Supreme Soviet reclaimed Citizen Alliluyeva by special decree. On November 2, a brief announcement appeared in Izvestia and on the evening news:
The Soviet authorities considered and complied with a request made by S. I. Alliluyeva, who has returned to Moscow, for restoring her to the citizenship of the USSR as well as for granting Soviet citizenship to Alliluyeva’s daughter Olga.9
The Communist Party was keen to make a propaganda fuss over returnees. Ironically, the same week that Svetlana arrived, another Soviet exile returned, posthumously. The remains of the legendary singer Feodor Chaliapin, who had died in Paris in 1938, were flown to Moscow and reburied with ceremony in the legendary Novodevichy Cemetery, where Stalin’s memorial statue to Svetlana’s mother, Nadya, still stood in splendid isolation.10
“Entrance is free. But you pay dearly at the exit,” as Svetlana’s second husband, Yuri Zh
danov, used to say.11 She knew there would be a price to pay for permission to return, and she paid it at a seventy-minute press conference on November 16, held at the offices of the Soviet Women’s National Committee before a restricted audience of foreign and Soviet journalists. Accompanied by Foreign Ministry officials and a translator, Svetlana read a prepared statement in Russian, and occasionally corrected the translator, who read it in English. She seemed composed and spoke without emotion, beginning with a brief saga of her life in the West. After her defection to the United States in 1967, she claimed she had found herself in the hands of “lawyers, businessmen, politicos and publishers who turned the name of my father, my own name and life into a sensational commodity. . . . I became a favorite pet of the CIA and those who even went to the length of telling me what I should write and what I should not.”12 Later Svetlana would claim that her Soviet interpreter had mistranslated her. She had said, “They treated me well, for I was everybody’s pet” and had never mentioned the CIA. This was probably disingenuous; the statement reflected what she had often said to friends. However, it is probably true that, because she had little choice, she simply acceded to the ministry’s demands. “I wanted to talk and answer questions. They wanted certain things to be there. They made me write texts in Russian, which they all approved. I felt very awkward. I wanted to say simply, ‘I came to join my children.’”13
At the press conference, she described her second book, Only One Year, as a “collective production” by those she “ironically thanked” in her author’s note. When this comment was reported in the West, the historian Robert Tucker insisted that Only One Year was entirely her own work and explained, “It appeared that she was trying to dissociate herself from the book,” which was “even more anti-Soviet” than her Twenty Letters to a Friend.14
She told the reporters that she and her daughter had been greeted like the prodigal son in biblical times, and she was grateful. The bulk of her address was about her personal reasons for her return: her longing to see her children, her deeply held religious beliefs, and her concern for Olga’s education. In fact, she had run out of money to keep Olga at her boarding school, and she imagined that in the USSR, where education was free, she could find the equivalent of her old Model School No. 25, which had provided her with a brilliant education and had been more of a home than her own home in those brutal times. She concluded by saying that this would be her last press conference. That night, clips from the press conference were featured prominently on Russian TV news broadcasts, but these clips were only from the officially prepared parts of her statement. Her comments about her personal motives for her return and her religious beliefs were edited out.
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