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Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Rosemary Sullivan
Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-FictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2015A painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators – her father, Josef Stalin.Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy – the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States – leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father’s regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin.With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it’s a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father’s name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.
Copyright (#ulink_bc9483f0-d541-5a46-b63c-aa6411776537)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Harper in 2015
Copyright © Rosemary Sullivan 2015
Rosemary Sullivan asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work.
Cover photograph © The David King Collection
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007491117
Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007491124
Version: 2016-06-29
Dedication (#ulink_833c2bca-b114-519d-bf9f-b4a88ccf18ed)
For my mother,
Leanore Marjorie Guthrie Sullivan
Frontispiece: Eight-year-old Svetlana with her father, Joseph Stalin, on vacation in Soshi.
(Svetlana Aliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Contents
Cover (#uabe5114a-7a95-5080-a35b-230bfb8b26aa)
Title Page (#u74b5a4f1-0171-5418-a698-d9067f7418ce)
Copyright (#ulink_31654517-0986-545a-b404-485589baad0d)
Dedication (#ulink_1217686c-7c1e-50bf-9f57-873beeea6a49)
The Djugashvili and Alliluyev Family Trees (#ulink_97cf49e6-cbb8-5101-b686-1c1ecfd7505d)
Preface (#ulink_9c289442-90f3-53e9-8b2a-0f21ccd00809)
Prologue The Defection (#ulink_6aa64c73-a177-5217-94a6-3ac14baca51d)
PART ONE: The Kremlin Years
Chapter 1 That Place of Sunshine (#ulink_8f259f1d-ceb6-5f70-93f3-049c34ba4632)
Chapter 2 A Motherless Child (#ulink_8f839934-3748-5afc-8cc5-e70ec3844d3f)
Chapter 3 The Hostess and the Peasant (#ulink_10c5c007-2f8d-59b9-aba6-dddc916cd1f5)
Chapter 4 The Terror (#ulink_f08d33ad-506e-5397-a556-f177a324094c)
Chapter 5 The Circle of Secrets and Lies (#ulink_61ec9ee2-fe45-5f00-9317-4b3256ec4441)
Chapter 6 Love Story (#ulink_cec44b1f-5ac3-5f5c-bcc4-c6f0499dc531)
Chapter 7 A Jewish Wedding (#ulink_e22ab5a9-0fc6-5a60-8338-aaa1a3df52ed)
Chapter 8 The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign (#ulink_9bec8070-4c91-54d3-a3fb-ea59b5476ad0)
Chapter 9 Everything Silent, as Before a Storm (#ulink_3d1aed74-72f5-5de2-934a-4fd42d4c3006)
Chapter 10 The Death of the Vozhd (#ulink_3b719821-9178-588d-ad81-ccbfcae6df41)
PART TWO: The Soviet Reality
Chapter 11 The Ghosts Return (#ulink_83a136ad-abe5-5b6a-9967-9aab52c11a21)
Chapter 12 The Generalissimo’s Daughter (#ulink_90b68092-3e6f-58c6-b39e-ee17b27a5f04)
Chapter 13 Post-Thaw (#ulink_084a488a-d6fc-5c38-a9c8-24da377dddbf)
Chapter 14 The Gentle Brahman (#ulink_6f26ea0c-f08d-5201-aa81-441f22aed262)
Chapter 15 On the Banks of the Ganges (#ulink_3673a88c-db20-561d-a232-02cad82182c8)
PART THREE: Flight to America
Chapter 16 Italian Comic Opera (#ulink_6e10a9ba-fab1-5998-b8c5-b03923534a10)
Chapter 17 Diplomatic Fury (#ulink_9ee51e07-9aaf-51e5-8002-1d901abb7cc9)
Chapter 18 Attorneys at Work (#ulink_58875a70-cc5a-5929-832a-5e8a2f84452d)
Chapter 19 The Arrival (#ulink_d03daf8c-bbd2-5bdc-bd1a-9b80bd4ed83b)
Chapter 20 A Mysterious Figure (#ulink_0fc44ce4-42d1-5b34-8a65-b2be84c1996a)
Chapter 21 Letters to a Friend (#ulink_a1fa4a51-326f-5484-90d0-82ca15a44bb4)
Chapter 22 A Cruel Rebuff (#ulink_24256ada-2970-5c2a-8f21-35a92345adf3)
Chapter 23 Only One Year (#ulink_62f74db3-293c-5820-8eac-431758fbe0aa)
Chapter 24 The Taliesin Fiasco (#ulink_1e78cdf6-fdca-52a3-9a23-7dfdc895221c)
Chapter 25 The Montenegrin’s Courtier (#ulink_35e7a4bd-5795-5b7f-a4b7-10a48a73b9db)
Chapter 26 Stalin’s Daughter Cutting the Grass (#ulink_6632c305-868a-5dc0-94e1-ebec64ced6df)
Chapter 27 A KGB Stool Pigeon (#ulink_3f38f6bf-1200-5c80-ad60-45604cba50b7)
Chapter 28 Lana Peters, American Citizen (#ulink_1c08f4de-e53b-5600-a28f-25b607536a14)
Chapter 29 The Modern Jungle of Freedom (#ulink_cbc7cac8-1f16-55cc-9fef-c1309269c4ee)
PART FOUR: Learning to Live in the West
Chapter 30 Chaucer Road (#ulink_2ccefcb3-5f47-5bc9-ae89-1fd5654730af)
Chapter 31 Back in the USSR (#ulink_331a19e2-ee25-5eb6-b6d7-c1a778aef98a)
Chapter 32 Tbilisi Interlude (#ulink_0ca3c0c5-8ecd-55b6-91c4-d24c009d1b44)
Chapter 33 American Reality (#ulink_76c921a9-d339-5ca2-b0d8-e149d6323c8e)
Chapter 34 “Never Wear a Tight Skirt If You Intend to Commit Suicide” (#ulink_a7843cea-9437-5660-8af9-0ffc6b1d26a7)
Chapter 35 My Dear, They Haven’t Changed a Bit (#ulink_b3e02a17-084b-59c0-9e26-28da949651bb)
Chapter 36 Final Return (#ulink_3de2e17f-3c6b-59bc-bfb9-8424577165ba)
Acknowledgments (#ulink_69eb54e4-de39-55f6-9f0b-ce90e14a2f71)
List of Characters (#ulink_592034ee-57d2-554f-b4b3-438a4b88b727)
Sources (#ulink_4cac932c-e1e2-52a5-a02f-b5e8a66eb58c)
Notes (#ulink_d49b0425-87ff-571a-81ae-549394f87058)
Bibliography (#ulink_4d2d86e4-ee79-50bc-be6c-e73a787a588b)
Index (#ulink_3d34da0b-7daf-5638-9850-624a89a91c45)
About the Author (#ulink_4965a6c1-16d7-5fbd-a381-14e633b7938d)
Also by Rosemary Sullivan (#ulink_ab5383fb-e606-5369-b3e9-b0cdaefc6d5e)
About the Publisher (#ulink_ac01f583-f55c-5513-956c-5da7c4c32b14)
The Djugashvili and Alliluyev Family Trees (#ulink_6bc8f4da-e510-58f9-8cbe-c6207947553b)
Preface (#ulink_78b8a6f1-b1e1-54e4-8e26-2c5128f16f17)
What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it? In the USSR, Stalin was mythic. He was the vozhd, the supreme leader who built the Soviet Union into a superpower and won the war against the Nazis. To his millions of Soviet victims, however, he was the man responsible for the Terror and the infamous Gulag. In the West, he was widely demonized as one of the world’s most brutal dictators. Try as she might, Svetlana Alliluyeva could never escape Stalin’s shadow. As she lamented, “Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.”
In the USSR, her life was unimaginably painful. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide when Svetlana was only six and a half. In the purges of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, Stalin did not spare his family. Her beloved Aunt Maria and Uncle Alexander Svanidze, the brother and sister-in-law of Stalin’s first wife, were arrested and executed as enemies of the people; their son Johnik, her childhood playmate, disappeared. Uncle Stanislav Redens, the husband of her mother’s sister Anna, was executed. Uncle Pavel, her mother’s brother, died of a heart attack brought on by shock. When she’d just turned seventeen, her father sentenced her first love, Aleksei Kapler, to the Gulag for ten years. The Nazis killed her half brother Yakov in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. In 1947 and 1948, during the wave of repression known as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, her mother’s sister Anna and Pavel’s widow, Zhenya, were sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement. Zhenya’s daughter Kyra was imprisoned and then exiled.
After her father’s death in 1953, the tragedies continued. Her elder brother, Vasili, was arrested and eventually died of alcoholism in 1962. Her literary friends in the mid-1960s were sent to forced-labor camps. When she finally found peace in a loving relationship with a man named Brajesh Singh, she was officially refused the right to marry him before he died, though she was given official permission to carry his ashes back to India.
In the middle of her life, at the age of forty-one, Svetlana Alliluyeva decided, impulsively, to defect. On the evening of March 6, 1967, she walked into the American Embassy in New Delhi requesting asylum. This was both an escape from her past and a search for the freedom denied to her in the Soviet Union, where she claimed that she was treated like government property. The American State Department initially refused her entry into the United States on the grounds that her defection would destabilize relations with the Soviets. She waited in Switzerland as diplomats searched for a country to take her.
When she was finally allowed into the United States on a tourist visa, Americans greeted her as the most famous defector ever to leave the USSR. She was soon the millionaire defector—Twenty Letters to a Friend, the memoir she had written in 1963 and carried out of the Soviet Union, was bought for an advance payment of $1.5 million. But she did not understand the concept of money; she gave away much of it and soon lost the rest to the manipulations of Olgivanna Wright, the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, who lured her into marriage with Wesley Peters, the head architect of Wright’s Taliesin Foundation. At the age of forty-five, Alliluyeva gave birth to Olga Peters. Her daughter was a consolation. She had abandoned her twenty-one-year-old son, Joseph, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Katya, when she fled the Soviet Union. KGB intrigues prevented her from contacting them for the next fifteen years.
Her laconic humor helped. She could say, “I don’t any longer have the pleasant illusion that I can be free of the label ‘Stalin’s daughter.’ . . . You can’t regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”
She spent most of her forty-four years in the West as a nomad, moving over thirty times, even briefly defecting back to the Soviet Union.
She was called unstable. The historian Robert Tucker remarked that “despite everything, she was, in some sense, like her father.”
And yet it’s astonishing how little she resembled her father. She did not believe in violence. She had a risk taker’s resilience, a commitment to life, and an unexpected optimism, even though her life spanned the brutalities of the twentieth century in the most heartrending of ways, giving her a knowledge of the dark side of human experience, which few people are ever forced to confront. Caught between two worlds in the Cold War power struggles between East and West, she was served well by neither side. She had to slowly learn how the West functioned. The process of her education is fascinating and often sad.
Alliluyeva had as much trouble explaining her father as anyone else did. Her attitude toward Stalin was paradoxical. She unequivocally rejected his crimes, yet he was the father who, in her childhood memory, was loving—until he wasn’t. She sought, with only partial success, to understand what motivated his brutal policies. “I don’t believe he ever suffered any pangs of conscience; I don’t think he ever experienced them. But he was not happy, either, having reached the ultimate in his desires by killing many, crushing others, and being admired by some.”
However, she warned that to dismiss him as simply monstrous would be a grave error. The question is what happens to a human being in his private life and within a particular political system that dictates such a history. She always insisted that her father never acted alone. He had thousands of accomplices.
Svetlana Alliluyeva imagined that in the West she could construct a private life as a writer and find someone with whom she could share it. Despite valiant efforts, she believed she had failed, though others are not so sure. It’s astonishing that she survived at all.
Prologue (#ulink_d6e22214-ba7c-5323-9a90-803af66aaf08)
The Defection (#ulink_d6e22214-ba7c-5323-9a90-803af66aaf08)
At 7:00 p.m. on March 6, 1967, a taxi drew up to the open gates of the American Embassy on Shantipath Avenue in New Delhi. Watched carefully by the Indian police guard, it proceeded slowly up the circular drive. The passenger in the backseat looked out at the large circular reflecting pool, serene in the fading light. A few ducks and geese still floated among the jets of water rising from its surface. The embassy’s exterior walls were constructed of pierced concrete blocks, which gave the building a light, airy look. The woman noted how different this was from the stolid institutional Soviet Embassy she had just left. So this was America.
Svetlana Alliluyeva climbed the wide steps and stared at the American eagle embedded in the glass doors. All the important decisions of her life had been taken precipitately. Once she crossed this threshold, she knew that her old life would be irrevocably lost to her. She had no doubt that the wrath of the Kremlin would soon fall on her head. She felt defiant. She felt terrified. She’d made the most important decision of her life; she’d escaped, but into what she had no idea. She did not hesitate. Clutching her small suitcase in one hand, she rang the bell.
