As a secretary sat nearby recording their conversation in shorthand, Ligachev dismissed her. “The Motherland will survive without you. The question is: Will you survive without the Motherland?”37 And he added: “Behave,” by which he meant, of course, no more interviews, no books. And of course Svetlana would disobey. Soviet officialdom believed books were bombs. So did she. Alas, few in the West, where she was heading back, believed books had such power.
A ticket was arranged for Svetlana through the US Embassy. She was booked to fly out the day after Olga on Swissair with a stopover in Zurich before proceeding to the United States. Svetlana and Olga spent their last days in Moscow entertained by “the Alliluyev boys.” The international media were already phoning the Hotel Sovietsky. Even Olga’s father, Wes, phoned. Svetlana thought, Better late than never, though she did wonder whether his motive for phoning was to look after Olga’s welfare or to arrange his own public image before the press onslaught that was on its way. In the Washington Post, he was reported to have spent a year working for Olga’s return. He advised Svetlana that Olga must be “circumspect” in what she said. The situation was delicate. Svetlana responded that Olga was still outspoken. Her father told the newspapers he was glad “that [Olga] wasn’t crushed.”38
Olga’s uncles and her mother saw her off at Sheremetyevo Airport. It was a strange moment when she kissed her mother good-bye. She still couldn’t quite believe she was leaving. She had dreamed of this moment almost every night and worried she might wake up and it wouldn’t be real. “I imagine people dream—not that I want to call this experience prison—but I imagine that people do dream of getting out of prison every night.” There was even a moment when she got back to England and thought, This is a really long dream. At the airport, Olga could see that her mother was frightened, though Svetlana tried bravely to hide her fear. “She still wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to leave. Not until she actually got on the plane.”
When she landed at Heathrow airport the next morning, Olga bypassed customs and was led through the diplomatic exit. She emerged to a sea of paparazzi and felt a sudden panic: she hadn’t asked her mother what she was supposed to say! “That was my first whirlwind encounter with the paparazzi . . . cameras in my face. It was just huge. And it was on the news all night, and all the next day. Every news segment.”39
A month shy of her fifteenth birthday, Olga was astonishingly poised and self-assured. It was clear to her that the press wanted her to demonize her experience. There had been sensationalized reports that the Soviets had been outraged when Olga refused to remove the cross she had worn in the USSR in defiance of “state atheist doctrine.”40 Sheer nonsense. When asked what it was like to be back, she told reporters she was looking forward to seeing her friends. Asked if she still considered herself American, she replied, “Of course.” Did she regret her time in the Soviet Union? “No,” she said. “It was really a great experience for anyone,” adding, “The one thing I want to do is get straight back to school and do some studying.”41
Her school friends had gotten wind of her return, but the press crush at the airport was so great, indeed frightening, and she was whisked away by the Russian officials so quickly, that they missed her. The Soviet Union still regarded Olga as a Soviet citizen going to a British boarding school. She spent the night at the Soviet Embassy and the next day was escorted to Saffron Walden. “We outran the paparazzi, as in a movie car chase. Luckily we weren’t killed.” That afternoon the headmaster came to her dorm and said, “Before you get back to your schoolwork, you have to give a press conference.” The school assembly hall was packed with reporters and the curious. Olga remembered that, seeing them, she thought, What a crazy, crazy aspect of my life. “It was never so crazy before and has never been so crazy since.”42
Svetlana was scheduled to fly out of Moscow on April 16. She made no effort to contact Joseph to say good-bye and asked her cousins not to accompany her to the airport. She believed she would never again see the “boys,” now in their fifties and sixties, though they had been so kind to her; but the leave-taking would have been too emotional. Alexander Alliluyev said they acquiesced. “The situation was very tense. I am not a timid person,” but if anything went wrong and the authorities refused to let her on the plane, he knew she had reached her limit. “I felt she could do something crazy.”43
The morning of her departure, Svetlana surrendered her Soviet passport and her pension book to a representative from the Soviet Foreign Office waiting for her in the hotel lobby. He told her kindly that Olga had arrived in London safely. “Such a pleasant, smart girl,” he said. A representative of the Georgian Mission drove her to the airport, where the cheerful young woman from the American Embassy escorted her directly to the Swissair plane on the tarmac because she had no exit visa in her new US passport. She was carrying Maka. When Olga insisted she take Maka, Svetlana was appalled. “Oh my God, I’m that woman. I’m traveling with a small dog!” But it turned out the Pekinese puppy was a comfort. Olga was amused to think of her mother on the plane with her little lapdog barking at everything. “Mom was the feisty lady with the feisty little dog!”44
The plane touched down briefly in Switzerland, so that Svetlana was now following the same route she had taken nineteen years before. But this was a very different journey. The US Embassy in Moscow had arranged her return as an American citizen, and she had chosen to go back to Wisconsin. There were no paparazzi to greet her at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Her old friends Robert and Derry Graves drove her to Spring Green. Graves, who ran a restaurant, ski resort, and golf course next to Taliesin, had found her a small wooden farmhouse to rent. She told reporters who contacted her that she didn’t want to talk about her personal life. “I will call you if I want to deny statements made about me. Otherwise, the public does not need to know where I am.”45 And she slipped again into anonymity.
Svetlana refused to harbor regrets, but she began to examine her last eighteen months in the USSR. Why had she gone? Why had her son been given permission to communicate with her that December 1982 after more than fifteen years of silence? His calls and letters were so loving; he was to meet her in Finland. Next he was in the hospital and calling for her to come. Had it all been orchestrated? After their first meeting, he’d been cold, and they hardly met again. Was it all a KGB plot to get her back?
All families are closed narratives, difficult to read from the outside. Depending on their view of Joseph, Svetlana’s relatives had various opinions as to why she’d come back.
Her cousin Alexander Alliluyev didn’t believe for a moment in a grand KGB plot. Joseph was a warm, very intelligent man whom he loved very much. Svetlana herself had made the impulsive decision to go to the Soviet Embassy in London in the fall of 1984 and request permission to return. And once she was under way there was no turning back.46
By contrast, Leonid Alliluyev and his wife, Galina, were not very fond of Joseph. Galina in particular found him a cold, cynical man, something of a snob; she remembered his many slights to her. But they too didn’t believe he’d participated in any plot. In their opinion, the Soviets were as surprised as anybody when Svetlana showed up at the embassy, but of course, once she was back in Moscow, the government would have wanted to use her for propaganda purposes.47
But her nephew Alexander Burdonsky thought otherwise. He believed Svetlana’s return had indeed been orchestrated. The plot had started quite far back when Kosygin was alive. It had been his idea. “To return her back, something in connection to Afghanistan. A distraction, perhaps, from the disastrous course of the war. I knew someone close to one of Andropov’s relatives. That person told me this idea existed. As a form of a small political trick—Stalin has returned.”48 Svetlana would be Stalin resurrected at a time when the political foundations of the Soviet Union were shaky and it was necessary to rehabilitate the dictator’s image to reestablish order and to bolster the credibility of the Communist Party.
Svetlana continued to assert that she had
been lured back. Yes, she’d made an impulsive, disastrous decision when she’d visited the Soviet Embassy in London surreptitiously, but she’d done so because she believed her son needed her. All those letters. But he hadn’t loved her at all. Once again, she’d been written into a script, lured into her role, and she’d fallen for the trick.
In an interview in 2005, Joseph himself dismissed the idea that he’d manipulated his mother. When they talked on the phone, he said, “I found myself in a tight spot. I could not simply tell her not to come. To just sit there and not rock the boat. If I’d told her that, I don’t even know what would have happened. I did not, however, persuade her either. Just a couple of times I expressed the idea that people live somehow with their families and not across the ocean. Maybe this was taken as luring.”49
One of the most outrageous theories came from Svetlana’s old friend Andrei Sinyavsky and his wife Maria Rozanova, then living in exile in Paris. Sinyavsky told a journalist with London’s Daily Mail, Nicholas Powell, that a Soviet agent named Oleg Bitov, working for the KGB, had engineered Svetlana’s return. Rozanova maintained, “Extremely reliable sources in Germany talk about an affair between Bitov and Svetlana well before the couple re-defected.” He had defected to Italy in September 1983, had sought asylum in Britain, and then, in mid-August 1984, had disappeared. The next time he was heard from, he was in Moscow.
The CIA believed the KGB had abducted him back to the USSR. To a Russian, it made more sense that he was part of a KGB plot, and the Sinyavskys were claiming that the point of the plot was to lure Svetlana Alliluyeva back to the USSR. Sinyavsky pointed out that as soon as Andropov came to power, Svetlana’s son, Joseph, was allowed to phone her. And then Bitov made her his “mistress,” luring her with romance. Asked if she was surprised when Svetlana redefected, Sinyavsky’s wife was quoted as saying, “Princesses are always capricious. In every fairy tale.”50
The connection between Bitov and Svetlana was entirely mythical. Years later it would be revealed that Bitov had defected but then, missing his family, had willingly returned to the Soviet Union.51 He and Svetlana never met.
On the eve of perestroika (restructuring), with the ailing Gromyko still in power, it was easy to believe in conspiracies. George Kennan also seemed to credit the idea that there had been a KGB plot to lure Svetlana back to the USSR. In September 1987, Kennan wrote a letter to Frank C. Carlucci, assistant to the president for national security affairs, about Svetlana’s current status, in which he made the offhand comment, “A few years ago, as you will recall, she returned to the Soviet Union, having been lured back there by her son, a doctor in Moscow, who, upon her arrival, at once washed his hands of her.”52 Perhaps he had picked this up from Svetlana herself or perhaps it came from his friend the journalist Patricia Blake, who continued to insist publicly that the invitation to return “was a KGB ploy, a long-term conspiracy to get her back to Russia.”53 Perhaps it was gossip, but Kennan made this remark to a very high-ranking White House official. Had he learned something from those conversations with Fritz Ermarth in 1984 when Svetlana had first returned to the Soviet Union? Ermarth was the CIA head of intelligence for the USSR and Eastern Europe and certainly had channels into the KGB. It is impossible to know.
What is clear is that nothing was ever clear in Soviet circles. But for Svetlana to actually believe, whether correctly or not, that her own son was capable of such duplicity was another excruciating betrayal.
It took her close friend Utya Djaparidze to get inside Svetlana’s psyche. Djaparidze was still fearful for Svetlana. As a public figure, Svetlana was not seen as the woman she was, “a brave, utterly generous & honest woman.” Instead she was “what any shabby, malicious fool of a journalist chooses to make of her.” She was a shuttlecock in the Cold War game, forced by her famous name to play a political role. What people expected of her was “wholesale condemnation—in the East, of the West; in the West, of the East. It’s a terrible situation.”54 Most terrible because it corrupted the one place a refugee and exile could call home: the world of family and private memory.
Chapter 33
American Reality
Svetlana and Olga together outside the Pleasant Ridge hunting lodge in Wisconsin, 1994.
(Courtesy of Rosa Shand)
Svetlana settled into the farmhouse retreat that Robert and Derry Graves had found for her in Spring Green. Though everything around her spoke of Wesley Peters, who now ruled at nearby Taliesin—Olgivanna Wright had died the previous year—she found her isolation comforting. After the chaos of the previous months, it was a solace to sit alone on her porch stoop, watching the spring landscape awaken and the wild cherry trees blanket the hillsides. She waited eagerly for the end of her daughter’s school term, when Olga would be coming home for her summer holidays. Of course Svetlana was wary of how Americans would respond to her now that she was back. Expecting to be an object of recriminations, she wrote tentative letters to friends like Annelise and Joan Kennan, and Bob and Ramona Rayle, hoping she would be understood.
Raymond Anderson, a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin in nearby Madison, interviewed her in May 1986 for the New York Times. He asked the usual questions about why she had returned to the Soviet Union, and she responded bluntly that her son had been instructed to contact her. “It was really a dirty game, and quite possibly one played by the KGB.” When Anderson asked her about life there, she was pleased, because she was rarely asked for her opinion about current politics. She replied that life there was hard. The country was in an economic deadlock, and even food and clothing were scarce. Mikhail Gorbachev might be sincere in his reforms, but he wasn’t going deeply enough—the old dogma was still alive—and she doubted that his marshals and generals were in agreement with him. “Only time will show whether he and the others like him will overcome the monsters of bureaucracy, the army, and an outdated ideology.”1 Of course she was right in the long term. Resisting Gorbachev’s efforts at perestroika, the Communist Party staged a military coup against him in August 1991. Though the coup lasted only two days, Gorbachev was forced to resign.
Svetlana insisted this would be her last interview. When Olga got home in July, she found a part-time job in a local Asian crafts shop. One morning a reporter came to the shop asking for Lana Peters. Olga and the shop owner hemmed and hawed and said yes, they knew her but no, she wasn’t there. Suddenly from upstairs a figure descended with a kerchief tied around her head, carrying a mop and pail. As the washerwoman scurried through the shoppers, diligently mopping the floor, the journalist took no notice. Olga and the owner could hardly keep a straight face. It was Svetlana, offering her daughter an amusing lesson in how to avoid reporters.2
In the late summer of 1986, Svetlana bought a hunting lodge on a five-acre property deeper in the woods. It was about twelve miles outside Spring Green in an area known as Pleasant Ridge in Dodgeville Township. An architect had designed the lodge as a retreat with sliding glass doors opening out to the woods, isolated enough that deer came to the back door at sunset. It was a beautiful little house, the taxes were minimal, and Svetlana loved the idea that nobody could find her. Her finances were now very precarious. She had left money in an English bank for Olga, and the Hayakawas were helping so that Olga could return to the United States for vacations, but needing to earn money, Svetlana was busy reestablishing contacts with agents and publishers in an attempt to get The Faraway Music picked up in the United States. She also set out on a campaign to rehabilitate her reputation.
In February 1987, ten months after her return from the USSR, she sent out two form letters. The first one was addressed generally to “old friends and former Patrons.” She complained about her portrayal in the US press as one who “hated America” (she was referring specifically to Patricia Blake’s Time magazine article). “I NEVER said so. . . . Would you say a few words that . . . ON the 20th anniversary of my adopting this country as mine, . . . I do love this country BECAUSE I do LOVE my American daughter.”3
In the second form letter, addressed simply to “Friends” and sent to about thirty people, she said she was trying to make her living as a writer, but “my books are in some kind of a vicious circle.” She couldn’t get her first two books reissued and no one wanted her third. She had only enough money for one more month and was asking for help in keeping her house in the woods. “It is hard for me to beg, but I must continue to write. This is my worst time I have ever met.”4
Most of her friends were annoyed and even offended by her begging letter. In America you never asked people for money. You were meant to pull up your socks and make it on your own. But in writing her letter, Svetlana was acting on a basic Russian or Soviet assumption. Within one’s circle of friends, if one was in need, it was typical to borrow money. The Russian word for borrow was “take,” implying that the question of repayment was insignificant.5 It was not embarrassing to ask for help.
Svetlana tried to see if she could revoke her Alliluyeva Charitable Trust, which still held $275,000 of her money. She’d spent $200,000 building the Brajesh Singh Hospital and had sustained it for twenty years. Financial reports had been sparse. Perhaps now that she was destitute, it was time for others to take over the project. But the Mercer County Superior Court determined that while she was legally permitted to reassign the beneficiaries, she could not claim any of the money for herself, because the trust was irrevocable in her lifetime. She redirected donations to the Medical Center at Princeton and the Stuart Country Day School.6
She looked for other sources of income. That May, she accepted an invitation to lecture on Gorbachev to history students at Mundelein College in Chicago. She summarized her assessment of Gorbachev in a letter to Philippa Hill.
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