Stalin's Daughter (34 page)

Suslov predicted that there would be political provocations if she traveled to India. Journalists would hound her at the airport. She was Stalin’s daughter. He demanded that she return to work at her collective; she should take up “a place suitable for [her] famous name.”
²¹
She tried to suggest that if Singh died now, it would be a public blot on the Soviet Union. Suslov replied coolly that Singh was getting good care. If he died, he died.

Singh only laughed when Svetlana reported her interview with Suslov. For Indians, Suslov was an internationalist, a model modern Marxist, though his wife and children had never ventured outside the Soviet Union.

Finally Singh asked Svetlana to get him out of the hospital and take him home. On Sunday, October 30, friends and colleagues from Progress dropped by. When they were finally alone, Brajesh told Svetlana, with a calm resignation that was both disconcerting and moving, “Sveta, I know that I will die today.” He said he had had a dream of a white bullock pulling a cart. In India when you have that dream, it means death is coming.
²²
She did not believe him.

At seven a.m. that Monday, he pointed to his heart and then to his head and said that he could feel something throbbing. And then he died.

Into her mind came the memory of her father’s death, the only other death she had witnessed. She recalled her father’s outrageous struggle, his fear in the face of death, his terrifying last gesture of accusation. Singh’s death was quick and peaceful, his last gesture toward his heart. She thought,
Each man got the death he deserved.

With Singh’s death, Svetlana felt that something had
changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry. She felt Singh’s comforting, benevolent presence, hovering.

She hastily called Singh’s Indian friends. She didn’t want Singh’s body to fall into the hands of the Soviet bureaucracy. The friends came. They read some of the verses of the Bhagavad Gita in Sanskrit. They burned sandalwood. They took Singh’s body to the crematorium.

There, on November 1, 1966, some of her friends from the Institute of World Literature showed up as she took her leave of Singh, whom they had never met. Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say goodbye. Singh had expressed a wish to have his ashes scattered over the Ganges, though he didn’t expect this to happen. As she placed his urn in her bedroom, she made a resolution. She would personally scatter his ashes over the sacred river.

Expecting to be repulsed, she wrote to both Kosygin and Brezhnev. The morning after her letters were delivered, she was summoned to the Kremlin. Astonishingly, Kosygin told her she could go. Singh’s nephew Dinesh Singh, a shrewd politician, had intervened with Indira Gandhi to secure a traditional funeral for his uncle. Svetlana would be allowed to attend as long as the Indians ensured that she would avoid any contact with the foreign press. That night she collected her relevant documents, signed by the head of the General Department of the Central Committee, Konstantin Chernenko.
²³

On November 7, she wrote an elegiac letter (in English) to Singh’s brother and sister-in-law:

My dear Suresh and Prakashwati:

It’s very difficult for me now to try to express my feelings
and my grief. But I know about you so much from my dear Brajesh, who loved you and was attached to you so strongly….

I need … to spend a few quiet days at the bank of the Ganga, to see its quiet waters, to watch its great waves. I’ll have my visa for two weeks only, but even a week spent at Kalakankar will give me the greatest satisfaction and consolation….

My son who is 21 and my daughter who is 17 now have become deeply attached to Brajesh. Everyone who knew him here was charmed with his quiet nature, with his humor, his patience, his good nature—although he was so badly sick for the last six months….

I was so happy with him—notwithstanding the illness, doctors, hospitals, and all that. He’d taught me so many good things…. I’m so grateful to Fate that I could meet Brajesh and for three long years my life was full of him and of his love.

Svetlana
²⁴

Her passport was issued on November 11. She received a polite letter from Singh’s nephew Dinesh Singh with an invitation to stay at his home, but he was also asking her to delay her visit until December 12, when the Indian parliament would be in recess and he would be free. Clearly Dinesh would be responsible for Svetlana.

For the month and a half she waited, Svetlana rarely left her apartment. She was guarding Singh’s urn, as if she feared it might be abducted if the government changed its mind. Joseph announced that he and his girlfriend were going to get married. At the end of November, they held a short civil ceremony. Though Svetlana and Grigori Morozov, Joseph’s father, had been divorced twenty years and he had remarried, he and Svetlana
stood together at the ceremony, holding hands. The event was joyous. Svetlana believed Singh was present, his “cheerful soul … warming us.”
²⁵

On December 19, 1966, Svetlana waited in her apartment with her son, Joseph; his wife, Elena; and her daughter, Katya, to find out if her 1:00 a.m. flight out of Sheremetyevo Airport would actually be leaving for India. The weather was terrible. Snow fell, covering the city. A blizzard was building. The phone was busy all night. She kept calling the dispatcher for updates on the flight, and friends kept calling to ask if it was really true that she had gotten permission to travel outside the USSR. It was an extraordinary privilege—to be traveling to India.

Finally her handler, a Mrs. Kassirova, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, showed up. There was a kerfuffle before Svetlana’s departure. Joseph’s wife, Elena, had grabbed Svetlana’s overnight bag to hand it to her. She’d shouted, “Don’t touch that!”
²⁶
Elena didn’t know that it contained the porcelain urn carrying Brajesh’s ashes. Joseph was angry at his mother’s sharpness, Elena looked offended, and Svetlana was distraught. She hadn’t had time to give more than a peck on the cheek to Katya. She had mismanaged her farewell.

She left for the airport around ten p.m. with her son, her friend Lily Golden, and Mrs. Kassirova. In the car, all was silence. At the airport, Svetlana was rushed to the segregated section for “passengers leaving for foreign parts.” She barely had time to hug Joseph, who was brooding. She glanced beyond the glass partition to see the sad face of her son. It was the last glimpse she would have of him for eighteen years. For his part, Joseph remarked, “I did not dream what epilogue that journey would have.”
²⁷

And then she was on the plane with Mrs. Kassirova. Singh had always promised that she would see his village, Kalakankar. This was the version that fate assigned her, his urn occupying
the seat beside her on the flight to India. The irony was not lost on her that, because she was Stalin’s daughter—“state property,” as she bitterly called herself—she had been refused permission to accompany Singh to India while he was alive but had been granted a visa to carry his ashes back to his country after he was dead.

Chapter 15
On the Banks of the Ganges

On March 6, 1967, Svetlana walked into this building—the United States Embassy in Delhi—and announced her intention to defect.

W
hen Svetlana descended from the plane in Delhi on December 20 in the company of her minder, Mrs. Kassirova, she found Second Secretary Surov and two other officials from the Soviet Embassy waiting to greet her. They whisked her underground so hurriedly that the Indian press never got wind of her visit. Her passport, visa, and plane ticket were confiscated. Though she had expected to stay at the home
of Brajesh’s nephew Dinesh Singh, she was driven to a guesthouse on the grounds of the Soviet Embassy in downtown Delhi and told this was where she was meant to stay. The room she was assigned was bare except for a bed and table. It had been sanitized—the telephone had been removed. She would have to make all phone calls at the embassy building next door, where there would be a staff to monitor her conversations.
¹

Ambassador I. A. Benediktov was currently out of town, but she was taken to meet the chargé d’affaires, Nikolai Smirnov. Breakfast was set in the embassy dining room; on the table sat a large bottle of cognac. A round of toasts was drunk to the much-loved Mr. Brajesh Singh. Svetlana was then told that plans had been altered. The situation in Delhi was unstable. The elections were looming in February, and the opposition, particularly the pro-American Swatantra Party, was mounting attacks on Mrs. Gandhi’s Socialist government. It would be unwise for Svetlana to go to Kalakankar. A solemn and dignified ceremony would be held at the embassy, and Mr. Singh’s ashes would be taken back to his village by his nephew.

Smirnov said that Mrs. Kassirova would take Svetlana shopping and sightseeing; she knew all the stores in Delhi. Certainly Svetlana could visit the Taj Mahal. She would stay in the Soviet compound. Smirnov mentioned that Dinesh and T. M. Kaul were friendly to the Soviet government, of course, but it would be quieter and more peaceful at the guesthouse. They didn’t trust Kaul. He had outraged Moscow by violating the rules for foreign diplomats that restricted their travel to a twenty-five-mile perimeter outside Moscow, and had even taken foreign visitors to Pasternak’s grave in Peredelkino.
²
There was a return flight to Moscow on January 4. This would give her a comfortable two weeks.

After the overnight flight, Svetlana was exhausted, but she gathered her wits for the bargaining. She agreed to stay at the
guesthouse while she was in Delhi, but only
she
could take her husband’s ashes to Kalakankar. She was a guest of Dinesh Singh and Suresh Singh, longtime friends of the Nehru and Gandhi families. After a long session with Chargé d’Affaires Smirnov the next day, it was agreed that she could go to Kalakankar as long as she kept her visit a secret, avoided all contact with the press, and traveled in the company of Mrs. Kassirova. She would return to Moscow January 4.

Soon Svetlana extended her liberties. She walked in the streets around the Soviet Embassy alone, encountering locals with an insouciance she had never thought herself capable of. On one walk she noted the US Embassy, with its wide, imposing steps and Christmas trees, only a few hundred yards from the Soviet Embassy. She imagined the festivities inside and kept walking.

Expressly avoiding Mrs. Kassirova, Svetlana spent three days touring Delhi with Ambassador Kaul’s daughter Preeti. The chaos of rickshaws and cyclists careening through the boulevards, street vendors selling garlands of flowers, brilliantly colored saris in cluttered shopwindows, and endless beggars importuning as they passed was like nothing she had seen before. She discovered that she was a good traveler with a keen eye and soon had a sense of the social strata in Delhi. The layering of eras and cultures, of classes—the colony of beggars outside the first-class Hotel Oberoy, the luxury vehicles, the billboards blaring the names of English films, like
Doctor Zhivago
, left her marveling. For someone who had been locked inside a single culture for forty years, this sample of another culture was intoxicating.

She visited the Kaul household and the ambassador mentioned to her that he had her manuscript. His daughter had read him the first few pages. She thanked him but did not retrieve it. Perhaps she had no plans for it, but more likely she knew her room at the Soviet compound would be searched.

On December 25, she took the flight to Lucknow, but not without some frustrations. When Dinesh, who was to accompany her, didn’t show up, she insisted that Surov drive her to Dinesh’s house. They were intercepted by Smirnov’s limousine on the highway. He wanted her to return to the guesthouse, but she resisted. The Soviet officials were in a difficult position. They had to follow Moscow’s orders but also not offend the Indians. When she reached the Singh household, Dinesh said he couldn’t travel to Lucknow, but she could go with his daughter Reva. Dinesh seemed very friendly, so Svetlana took a risk. Only a few days into her visit, she asked him to tell Mrs. Gandhi that she wanted to extend her stay in India. It was an impulse. He offered to take her to Mrs. Gandhi that day, but she said she was not prepared for an interview and asked if he could put in a good word. He assured her he would and then added that Mrs. Gandhi would be traveling to Kalakankar soon to give a speech as part of her campaign for reelection.

At Lucknow airport, Svetlana and Reva, shadowed by Mrs. Kassirova, were met by the family car and driven the three hours to remote Kalakankar, an ancient village on the edge of the Ganges. They arrived at the Raj Bhavan, the Palace of the Rajah, a huge white building at the end of a long driveway. It looked like a large steamer, docked and ready to sail. A guard stood in the yard with a raised spear beside the locked gates. The palace belonged to Dinesh Singh, who had inherited the role of rajah from his father, which meant that Brajesh and his brother Suresh had in effect become the poor relations. Dinesh held public office as the local parliamentarian and headed a family foundation, while his uncles lived in comparative poverty. Even so, they were still part of the local ruling family.