Stalin's Daughter

by Rosemary Sullivan

  Svetlana’s residence at 280 Ladbroke Grove, then owned by the Carr-Gomm Charitable Society, looks much the same in 2015 as it did when she lived there in the early 1990s.

  (Courtesy of the author)

  And of course, the press tracked her down. An article appeared in the American magazine People. “Lana Peters, a solemn woman in a bulky jacket, keeps very much to herself on the bustling streets of London as she quietly browses in antique shops and the library. Who would suspect that she was once known as Svetlana, the only daughter of the infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin?”30 A photograph of a scowling Svetlana accompanied the piece. The house on Ladbroke Grove was described as “a group home for single people—many suffering from severe emotional problems.” The article contained the usual dark commentary about her father, her mother’s suicide, multiple divorces, lost children. There was nothing new in it, because her fellow residents had refused to talk to the reporter. Svetlana picked up and moved to a new residence on Nursery Lane around the corner.

  But Svetlana’s circle of friends was widening. Through Nina, she met the Mexican diplomat Raoul Ortiz. In his early sixties, he was elegant, a gifted writer, and a passionate reader of Proust. They would go to the cinema together, to embassy parties, to concerts, and to the occasional restaurant. Ortiz felt there were many Svetlanas. “She returned to a person whatever their expectations of her were. I was an exotic character. She loved photographs of trees in spring, spouting new flowers. Meeting me and establishing a friendship brought her a new spring.”31 They never once talked about politics in the Soviet Union. In fact, what made him unique was that he was outside the circle of those obsessed by the USSR.

  But then Ortiz was posted to Paris. As he was preparing to leave, Svetlana suggested how wonderful it would be if she moved to Paris and they continued their friendship there. “Not that she would dream of shacking up together. But she was lonely, and I had a very free life and was afraid of sentimental attachments.” He recognized that she saw him as a gateway to another life: “It is a mistake to think that Svetlana was running from something; rather she was always running towards something, a version of life that would be different, that would meet her expectations of what a contented life could be.”32 He didn’t encourage her to move to Paris.

  Svetlana met Laurence and Linda Kelly at a cocktail party at the Thomas home. When his father had served as British ambassador to the USSR in the late 1940s, Laurence Kelly spent six months at the British Embassy learning Russian. He knew firsthand the culture of paranoia that her father had instilled during the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign and the Doctors’ Plot. When Kelly was introduced to Svetlana as the author of a biography of the famous nineteenth-century poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov, she froze, and then explained that Lermontov was one of her favorite poets. Soon Kelly was showing her his specialized library on Lermontov. Together they delighted in the poem Lermontov wrote when exiled by the tsar to the Caucasus: “Farewell, Smelly Russia.” Kelly was then working on research into Georgian history for his book Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran and promised to send Svetlana anything of interest he came across.

  Svetlana would occasionally tell Kelly unexpected and entertaining anecdotes about her father, one of which was about Stalin “losing his cool” with his parrot.

  The English tobacco company Dunhill, a maker of pipes, had given Stalin a particularly fine pipe. In his flat in the Kremlin, his tame parrot used to imitate the awful noises of throat clearing and spit that pipe smokers make when they light up. One day Stalin was having a tough time signing many lists with Molotov and he came home in a terrible temper. The parrot began his routine. Stalin took out his Dunhill pipe and killed the parrot on the spot.33

  Kelly found Svetlana immensely entertaining. “Poor Lana was a last stranded fish in a society that could not understand her.”

  The Kellys took to inviting Svetlana to stay at their cottage in Cumbria in the Lake District. The bucolic landscape with its undulating green hills, flocks of grazing sheep, and farm carts lumbering down the narrow roads spilling their hay was seductive; it seemed nothing had changed since the nineteenth century. One afternoon, the Kellys suggested a visit to Pamela Egremont, mistress of nearby Cockermouth Castle. She turned out to be an exquisitely beautiful woman in her sixties who had traveled all over Southeast Asia and China. Soon Svetlana was visiting her at her elegant London residence. Pamela Egremont’s fondest memory of Svetlana was of her sitting on the living-room sofa talking about Stalin. She spoke of how her father had prevented her from studying literature at Moscow University because she would get involved with dreadful people like poets. “He looked very, very cross,” she said.

  As Svetlana was telling me this, she stood up and stamped to the end of the room and stamped back again and suddenly her whole face looked almost like her father’s (I’d seen pictures of him). She turned herself sort of into him, and then she plumped back on the sofa and said, “Don’t talk to me again about my father.”34

  The people who most disgusted her, Svetlana told Pamela Egremont, were all the lackeys around her father in the Kremlin, always giving her little presents and trying to please her to get on her father’s good side. “She saw through them. I thought she was an admirable woman, considering what she had gone through and all the parts she had to play.” Only once did she experience Svetlana’s vitriol. She had just read a new biography of Beria, and asked for Svetlana’s opinion. Svetlana flared up. “Don’t ever speak to me of that man. He killed eight of my relatives.” While many American friends thought Svetlana was unstable, Pamela Egremont thought “she was amazingly normal, solid as a rock.”

  After her return from the USSR, Svetlana had resumed her friendship with Rosamond Richardson. Richardson was already well known for her books on gardening and cooking; she had a particular gift for writing about foods in their natural context. On one visit to Saffron Walden, as they were having tea, Svetlana suddenly turned to Rosamond and said, “We should do a book together.”35 Richardson remembered that it was as if the idea had flown in through the window. Svetlana was proposing a book based on Richardson’s interviews with her. In her mind, she would at last be able to talk about the Alliluyevs and the succession of strong women in her family. She wanted it understood how the Revolution had destroyed them.36 Only anger and black humor had saved her grandmother. In her last years, Nadya’s mother, Olga, had lived alone in the Kremlin. Once she explained to Svetlana how she survived. “You know, I make lots of tea for myself. I put it on the table and I say, ‘Bitte schön’ [Have some] and then ‘Danke schön’ [Thank you], and then I drink.”37 Her grandmother couldn’t do anything to stop Stalin, but her stoical self-discipline and black humor kept her going.

  Listening to Svetlana’s stories, Richardson commiserated. “How much you have suffered!” To which Svetlana replied that she had not suffered. It was the people returning from the camps who had suffered.38 She often thought of her friend Irina Gogua, who had been very close to Nadya. Gogua had been arrested in the mid-1930s and spent seventeen years in prison and exile. She never spoke in detail of those years, but she did explain how she survived. Svetlana repeated Gogua’s words as if they were scorched into her memory. “I built myself a theory. I had to accept what happened to me. It was totally unjust. I had done nothing, but I had to accept. Otherwise, I saw people who couldn’t accept, who were bashing their heads on walls and protesting, and they were pretty soon dead, because they couldn’t.” And Svetlana added, “Oh yes, people get wise there. When it comes to the worst thing, you get wise.”39

  The project with Richardson soon solidified into a book about the Alliluyev family. Svetlana made several excited phone calls to Moscow to family members who rarely spoke publicly. She said to them, “Open the door to Rosamond. She’s an authentic person.”40 With Svetlana’s blessing, Richardson flew to Moscow with her translator and spent a week interviewing Svetlana’s cousins and extended family. The family members spoke candidly to her, and their voices emerge a
s a tragic narrative of imprisonments, deaths, and disappearances under Stalin.

  The trouble began when Richardson returned to London. Svetlana had expected to listen to and transcribe the tapes, but Richardson didn’t offer them to her. She knew that Svetlana could be “tricky,” as she put it, and some members of the family were not entirely flattering about her. Also, the family’s conversations were about “what it was like to live under Stalin’s shadow and clearly some nasty things were going to come out of the woodwork. I knew how fragile Lana was, emotionally, and I just didn’t want to upset her about stuff she didn’t need to see.”41

  Later Richardson would concede that she’d been wrong. Svetlana could take it all.

  Instead Richardson gave her several of the chapters. Svetlana wrote to her cousin Kyra in Moscow that she was not impressed. Kyra recalled: “She said that Rosamond was too much into politics. But I think that everything they did to us, Alliluyevs, was politics. If it was not politics, what was it?”42 But Svetlana was angry—Rosamond was writing another book about her father, not the Alliluyev family memoir she was hoping for. When it was published in 1993, Stalin’s picture graced the front and back covers of the book. Sadly, it could not have been otherwise. It was Stalin, and the brutality that he and Beria (as the family insisted) had committed against the Alliluyevs, that sat at the core of family memories. Richardson received a very nasty letter from Svetlana. “I remember thinking if she’d been Stalin, I’d have been dead. I really felt the power of Stalin in that letter. The portcullis came down.”43 Richardson never heard from Svetlana again.

  And Svetlana washed her hands of the book, though not without writing a letter to the London Review of Books in which she insisted that she and Richardson were supposed to be writing a book together about her mother’s side of the Stalin family, until Richardson had cut her out. She added a nasty barb: “As an author of cookbooks, Ms. Richardson does not seem to be especially well qualified to write about Russian history.”44 She was right. The book’s strength was not its historical account but its penetrating interviews.

  When The Long Shadow was launched, Richardson invited Svetlana’s cousin Kyra and Leonid’s daughter Olga to come to London. Svetlana refused not only to attend the launch but also to see her relatives. Everyone thought this was extremely petty of her; she was behaving vindictively, just like her father. But ironically, anger over Richardson’s book was not her motive.

  When Kyra got back to Moscow, she learned the reason Svetlana had shut her out. Kyra’s family reported that they’d had several irate calls from Svetlana while she was away. There was a new scandal. Before her departure for London, a British journalist had interviewed Kyra and reported that she was “looking for evidence that Stalin had murdered his wife Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva.” Though Kyra was livid at the time—“I never said the things ascribed to me”—and her relatives called her nonstop advising her to publish a rebuttal, she did nothing: “The pie had already been cooked.” Svetlana read the interview in the British press and could not forgive Kyra for such gossip. “I can only imagine her reaction to accusations that Stalin murdered her mother!” Kyra recalled, but in fact she knew Svetlana’s reaction. The night before Kyra and her niece left London, they found an envelope slipped under the door of their hotel room. There was no note, only Kyra’s photograph clipped from a London newspaper, from which the face had been cut out.45

  In 1995, when the Kellys went to their cottage in the Lake District and Svetlana accompanied them, they asked their friend Mary Burkett if they could bring her to tea. Burkett lived in an extraordinary heritage home called Isel Hall just outside Penrith. Svetlana immediately fell in love with Isel Hall, and, by the end of the tea, asked if she could come and look after Mary, who was only two years older. She could be her cook.46 Burkett, as outspoken and prickly as Svetlana, demurred. But one of Svetlana’s most important friendships soon evolved.

  Mary Burkett was an unusual woman. In 1962, when she was thirty-eight, she and her friend Genette Malet de Carteret, both amateur archaeologists, decided to drive their Land Rover from the Lake District to Persia in search of the legendary lost castle at Girdkuh. The trip was dangerous. Near Doğubeyazit in Turkey, the two women came under rifle fire when the local police mistook them for smugglers. The whole trip by car and ferry took seven and a half months. When Burkett returned to England, she turned herself into a world expert on the ancient craft of felt making.47

  In their future correspondence, Burkett addressed Svetlana as “Dear Nomad.” Though Svetlana did not travel far, she was always discarding her past. “Attachments create sorrow, the oldest Buddhist axiom,” she told Mary.48 Svetlana called Mary “Dear Warrior.” She admired her as a fighter who had shaped her own life.

  While Mary undertook her travels to conferences on felt making or went hunting for new specimens in Switzerland, Poland, Syria, Yemen, or Georgia, Svetlana looked on longingly from afar. She told Mary she had so wanted to visit Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt—and India again. She sent Mary names of contacts and linguistic experts, spoke knowledgeably of Tibetan felt patterns, talked of the yurts of her childhood at Zubalovo, and noted the succession of rugs sent as gifts to the Kremlin that marked the politics shaping her young life: Caucasian rugs when her mother was alive; then Persian rugs during the war; and after 1949, Chinese rugs.

  She occasionally took on political topics with Mary. “Machiavellian politicking everywhere,” she wrote in one letter. From what she read and heard on the radio, things were totally out of control in Russia. Her volcanologist daughter was going unpaid, like all the scientists, and not responding to her letters. She was worried that the mixture of national humiliation, anger, inferiority complex, and cocky talk about the rest of the world would lead to some form of aggressive nationalism. The West must remember that Russia was an old culture with great dignity. Pride was an important but dangerous engine. “Being Russian means never saying sorry,” she told Mary. “Even today, Russians are incapable of grief and atonement for Stalin’s crimes. . . . That failure to face the bad bodes ill for the future. I see all things from the dark side. Please do forgive me for that.”49

  Svetlana was working with a new idea—to collect the four books she’d written into one volume, which she would call “Enchanted Pilgrimage.” It would be the summary of her life’s story. When a reporter asked her in 1996 if she was happy, she replied:

  What is happiness? I am satisfied, and when you are 70 years old that is not bad. I have had very good times and very bad. I never consider myself as a martyr. Why should I complain? Complaining is the worst thing in the world. It does you no good. I may have a cross to bear but I am not suffering.50

  Chapter 35

  My Dear, They Haven’t Changed a Bit

  Svetlana and Olga celebrate New Year’s Eve together in 1999.

  (Meryle Secrest Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Courtesy of Rebecca Sadler)

  In mid-September 1995, Svetlana decided to move to Cornwall, where she and her daughter Olga had spent several vacations in the early 1980s. She was discovering that the support she received from the Carr-Gomm Society was no longer enough to manage a reasonable life in London, but an affiliated charity called Abbeyfield ran several residences in Cornwall. She imagined the small village of Mullion on the east shore of Mount Bay would offer beautiful nature walks and silence. No crowds. The residence, called Melvin House, was shared among eight elderly women, with a housekeeper. Perched on a cliff, it felt more like a family-style boardinghouse than a charity home and even had a guest bedroom for friends of the residents who visited. Settling into her small room with her ten pots of geraniums, she wrote to Mary Burkett that she felt “very old, very old inside. I mean sometimes I feel all the things I carry within.”1 She wondered how Mary could live with all the ghosts roaming through Isel Hall. Her own ghosts never left her.

  But then, at the beginning of 1996, she had an unexpected chance to exorcise at least some of her ghost
s. In 1995, her cousin Vladimir Alliluyev wrote a memoir, Chronicle of One Family, and sent it to Svetlana, requesting that she translate it into English. Vladimir was the son of Nadya’s sister Anna and Stanislav Redens. When she read his book, she was appalled. Vladimir was trumpeting a nostalgic return to Russia’s Stalinist past and the rebirth of Soviet power in the guise “of a family album of Stalin’s relatives! What a dark nightmare!”2 She dragged out her Russian typewriter and wrote a long review of the book, which she sent to Olga Rifkina, who managed to get it broadcast on Russian radio.3

  That her cousin was trying to whitewash the past was to her unbelievable. She wrote her review in eloquent Russian and then hurriedly translated it into English to send it to British and American friends, hoping it might be published in the West. (It wasn’t.) She wrote as if in a state of shock. Could this really be Volodya?

  Volodya, whose father had been arrested and perished in prison (rehabilitated posthumously)? Volodya, whose mother, a totally apolitical woman of weak health (she had TB) had to endure six years of solitary confinement? Is this Volodya who had himself enough of supervision from NKVD, GPU, MGB and whatever else have been the names of those agencies, as had indeed our whole much-suffering family? Is this the same “Volodey” who was witty in his younger age . . . and was not afraid to laugh at this whole world of oppression, lies, and mortal danger . . . ?

  She summarized Volodya’s claims with disgust: “Let us also forgive Stalin for all the disregard of norms of democracy and laws” because he was supposedly “stern but just, something like Ivan the Terrible,” and was “the great patriot of the motherland and the greatest war commander.” She shuddered at the idea of a resurgence of the cult of her father.