Stalin's Daughter (32 page)

Finally, though she has put it off from grief, in the middle of the book she tells her friend about her mother’s suicide. She paints a portrait of the adolescent Nadya by including her mother’s letters to a friend, written when Nadya was living through the turbulent years of 1916 to 1918 and being pulled slowly into the “full fervor of revolutionary idealism.” By 1918 Nadya’s letters hint that she has fallen in love with Stalin. Svetlana explains
that Nadya “had only begun to grow when the Revolution broke out, whereas he [Stalin] was already a man nearly forty, an age of hardened scepticism and cold calculation and all the other qualities important in a politician.”
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It is from her nanny’s account that she writes about the night of her mother’s suicide.

Then come “letters” recounting the fate of her family after 1932. People appear and disappear as they did in life, until there is almost no one left. She reserves a special letter for Aleksei Kapler, whose fate made clear the cruelty of which her father was capable. Unburdening herself, she talks of her marriages and children. Looking back, she sees her life as one of “cruel bereavements” and “disappointments and losses.”

And yet her last letter is devoted to her nanny Alexandra Andreevna, who, with her gaiety and kindness, is offered as an embodiment of all that is good and unchanging in Russia, a person without whom she would have “lost her mind.” She paints Alexandra Andreevna as a kind of Tolstoyan epic figure who watches the revolutionaries with stoicism, knowing they too will pass. Svetlana seems to suggest that it was her nanny who gave her a sense of morality and a conscience.

Svetlana ends her book thus:

We are all responsible for everything that happened. Let the judging be done by those who come later, by men and women who didn’t know the times and the people we knew. Let it be left to new people to whom these years in Russia will be as remote and inexplicable, as terrible and strange as the reign of Ivan the Terrible. But I do not think they’ll call our era a “progressive” one, or that they’ll say it was all for the “good of Russia.” … They’ll read through this page in their country’s history with a feeling of pain, contrition and bewilderment, and they’ll be led by this feeling to live their lives differently.
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The book is personal, saturated with a kind of wistful lyricism, and ambiguous in its judgments of those involved. Svetlana is at once nostalgic, romantic in her idealizations of certain people, especially her mother, and sometimes biased in her testimony, yet remarkable in her clarity of memory. This is not the book one might expect from a daughter of Stalin. It revealed no state secrets. It had no political points to make, beyond the condemnation of Stalin’s regime and the repudiation of a system in which the goals of the so-called collective good, exacted through ideological conformity, made the individual meaningless. In some ways, the book is a love letter to enduring Russia, with its ancient heritage and astonishingly varied geography. Svetlana assured her friend that no one who loved Russia ever left, but it would be only four years before she did exactly that.
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Chapter 14
The Gentle Brahman

An undated photo of Svetlana and Brajesh Singh, a rajah’s son and a former Communist official whom she met in 1963 in Kuntsevo Hospital.

I
n October 1963, Svetlana entered Kuntsevo Hospital for a tonsillectomy. Hospitals had changed slightly under the Khrushchev Thaw. There were still government sanatoriums for members of the Party elite and their relatives and for famous actors and athletes in high-society Moscow, but now more foreigners were admitted. Each year Communist Party organizations
abroad received invitations from Moscow to send patients for care. Their presence was not surprising, perhaps, but now they were often placed in the same wards as Soviet patients and even allowed to mingle without interpreters or watchers. But Soviet patients were still discouraged from too close intimacy with the foreigners.

Svetlana noticed a small, stooped, gray-haired man roaming the halls. He was Indian and that interested her. She was reading a biography of Gandhi and wanted to ask this stranger about the Mahatma, but she was too shy to initiate a conversation with a foreigner. However, when they bumped into each other in the hospital corridor, they sat on a couch and talked avidly for an hour. They spoke in English. He asked what organization she belonged to, and when she said, “None,” he seemed pleased. Brajesh Singh was no longer the fervent Communist idealist he had been in his youth.

He was the son of the rajah of Kalakankar in Uttar Pradesh. He had studied English under tutors at a college in Lucknow and then spent much of his life abroad. In London in 1932, he had become a Communist. This seemed to him the best way to fight for Indian independence. According to friends, he was a kind of Puck, with a mischievous sense of humor that he brought to “the game of politics.”
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Svetlana was relieved that Singh had no idea who she was. When he began asking about life in the USSR after Stalin, she replied that, though there had been superficial reforms, fundamental aspects of Soviet society remained unchanged.

When she finally decided to tell Singh she was Stalin’s daughter, his only response was a British-inflected “Oh!” She claimed he never once questioned her about her father.
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Over the days of their hospital stay, they wandered the halls in their bathrobes or ate together in the hospital dining room, much to the consternation of their Soviet fellow patients, who
didn’t approve of Singh and resented Khrushchev’s incursions on their privileges with his “liberal” reforms. English-speaking patients were encouraged to eavesdrop on Svetlana and Singh’s conversations, but the two went silent when anyone approached.
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For the Soviets, Singh was too ebullient. As they passed the dour officials in the hallway, laughing, Svetlana feared for him.

Svetlana discovered that Singh was chronically ill. He suffered from bronchitis and emphysema, and his lungs were collapsing. Soon both were sent to recuperate at a sanatorium called the House of Rest in Sochi on the Black Sea. They spent their time walking on the boardwalk under the disapproving eyes of their fellow patients. More than one resident pulled her aside to say, “Your father was a great man. You wait, the time will come when he will be remembered!”
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Then they would tell her to stick to her own kind. Some even expressed shock that she had dropped her father’s name, though afterward they might ask to be photographed with her. Svetlana was certain the patients and staff were sending reports to Moscow about her bad behavior.

At the age of fifty-three (Svetlana was thirty-seven), Singh was lonely. In Vienna during the war, he had met a Jewish girl and, to help her escape the Nazis, they had married and fled to India, where they lived for sixteen years. She then moved to England with their young son. Singh joined her, but after his failure to find work in England, they divorced, and he returned to India alone.

He and Svetlana became deeply attached. Although (or perhaps because) he was sixteen years older, she sensed that she had found a lover, a guide, and a friend. His world was far richer spiritually than hers; he seemed to have an inner peace and equilibrium. It was her capacity to think for herself that moved him. He called her Sveta, or Light; it was one of the few Russian words he knew. By the terms of his visa, after his discharge from the
hospital, Singh was scheduled to return to India, but now he and Svetlana made new plans. He would return to Moscow and find work as a translator of Russian texts into Hindi. Impulsive as always, Svetlana invited Singh to live with her.

The Indian ambassador to Moscow, Triloki Nath Kaul, had been a friend of Singh’s since his youth. It wouldn’t be hard to get a Soviet work visa. It appalled Singh that Svetlana had spent her whole life within the confines of the USSR. He would come back, and they would travel to India; he would show her Europe. It was a lovely fantasy, and this was the time of new hope, the time of the Thaw.

Singh left for India in December. Svetlana waited, but something was wrong. A visa for Singh should have come easily. He had recommendations from Kaul and from the secretary general of the Indian Communist Party, Shripad Amrit Dange. Though Svetlana and Singh wrote to each other constantly, they soon found that their letters did not arrive.

Svetlana suspected that reports had reached Moscow that she had consorted with a foreigner at the House of Rest in Sochi, but in fact she was mistaken. Through Ambassador Kaul, Singh discovered that a young Indian named Chandra Shekhar, secretary of a group of Indian Communists in Moscow, was reporting that Singh was unreliable. Shekhar worked in radio and supplied the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party and its Foreign Division with information about India. When he visited Svetlana and Singh before Singh’s departure for India, he had laughingly said that Singh was not a Communist but a rajah.
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It was still normal for issues of ideological purity to derail a person’s career, and the best way to advance in the system was to betray another.

Svetlana went to see Deputy Chairman Mikoyan. Mikoyan told her he had spoken with Khrushchev, who had been sympathetic. Mikoyan said that everything would be fine and she
should bring Singh for a visit. He would be happy to meet him.

The delays were excruciating for Svetlana, but in March 1965, sixteen months after his departure, Singh finally got his visa to return to Moscow. Svetlana and her son, Joseph, went to meet him at Sheremetyevo Airport on April 7. The man who stepped off the plane was ill and had aged visibly. Svetlana did not hesitate. Though Singh had been assigned a state apartment, she insisted he come home with them. Joseph and Katya welcomed him. Joseph would later say:

Singh was a nice sort of person, cultured, kind…. It was very enjoyable to be with him…. He was calm and patient and also knew how to look upon things with a certain sense of humour…. He came to live with us, and to Katya and I he was our mother’s husband, and we treated him with respect. I think she was happy.
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Svetlana was, indeed and at last, very happy. An Indian friend of Singh’s, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia, a member of the Indian parliament and head of the Socialist Party, recalled his visit with Singh. Although Singh was suffering from a painfully swollen leg and his asthma was very bad, the two men went to Lohia’s hotel. They had been friends for thirty-seven years. Lohia asked Singh about Svetlana.

He spoke of her with great affection and respect, and I, for one, could understand that she could care deeply for him. Brajesh had a quiet charm and poise, a willingness to listen to one, which grew out of his innate sympathy. He had humor, too, and a certain something I can’t quite define in his eyes, which women would undoubtedly find attractive….

Suddenly, it seemed, it was midnight. I wanted to go to Red Square and look around, but Brajesh said that Svetlana
would be very worried by now. We took a taxi to his home. As we turned into his street, we saw Svetlana standing in the road, obviously looking for Brajesh and deeply worried. She was standing nearest my side of the taxi, and I leaped out. Although we hadn’t been introduced, I began at once to josh her out of being so upset.

“Are you so much in love with this man?” I asked.

Svetlana said gravely: “Things happen, you know—auto accidents and things like that!”

I could guess at what she really meant but was not saying.

When Lohia spent several hours the next day with the couple, he was deeply impressed by her sincerity. He told a journalist in an interview:

I compare her to a flower, not to a rose, for roses are not so tender, but to jasmine or orchids, which have a subtle scent that doesn’t intrude or pounce on you.

I thought her also a woman of many sorrows and that a life of sorrows had transmuted her into a quietly charming woman. In all those hours we spent together, I did not hear her speak loudly or boisterously even once. The only time I heard an edge to her voice was later, in India, when she said in a harsh, rasping tone: “I hate politics! I hate politics!
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Even Svetlana’s cousin Vladimir concurred:

Only a true feeling toward this very sick man can explain why a young, interesting, intelligent, passionate woman calmed her fervent spirit and movingly cared about him, a completely helpless man, until his death in 1966. There was something otherworldly about this relationship. It was love based on grace.
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Now Svetlana had a new plan. She was determined that she and Singh must marry. Of course, there is a question as to why Svetlana was so eager to marry him, she who had so precipitately married three times before, but in this case, in addition to her usual longing for permanence, she had a very pragmatic reason. Singh needed the status of a Soviet citizen, which marriage would give him, to be safe from expulsion. At first, she had wanted to be married to him so that they could fulfill their fantasy of traveling in Europe. But now the idea of marriage became urgent. Singh was very ill. Svetlana thought that if they went to India, to a climate he was used to, she could save his life. He refused to return without her, and she needed to be his wife to travel with him.