Stalin's Daughter (39 page)

Kennan reported to the State Department that he was very impressed by Svetlana’s “intelligence, stability, sincerity.” He was sure her decision to present herself at the US Embassy in Delhi had not been an “irrational caprice.” Her book had literary merit. She was implacably opposed to the Soviet regime. Moreover, he wrote, “She has iron in her soul.”
³¹

She would later say this was the kind of gamble she always took. When she’d left the Soviet Compound in Delhi, she had only the address of the American Embassy.

What I would need to do after, on the next day, I did not know about it and I did not think about it. Not planning
ahead—as always—I only vaguely imagined what my new life would be…. Sometimes at night I dreamed of the streets of Moscow, the rooms of my apartment; I woke up in a cold sweat. This was the nightmare to me.
³²

The nightmare was both what had happened in that city and the thought that she might be forcibly returned to it.

Chapter 18
Attorneys at Work

When Svetlana defected, she left Joseph and Katya behind, and in October 1967, they appeared on West German television with an open plea to her to return.

O
n March 25, Edward Greenbaum traveled to Switzerland with his legal assistant Alan Schwartz. Schwartz knew only that they were going to help a “lady in distress.” It wasn’t until they were in midair that he was advised their client was Stalin’s daughter. The two men stopped in Milan, where Kennan was waiting to brief them, and were then driven to Bern. Their mission was to ensure a book deal for Svetlana, so that she could enter the United States as a private person, reducing the political liability
she represented for the State Department. When they met the Swiss official Antonino Janner, he warned them that not only the press but also the Russians were looking for Svetlana like crazy.
¹

That evening Janner drove them to a remote hotel and, as Alan Schwartz remembered it, “
There she was.
She was a very warm person. She charmed the two of us.” It wasn’t yet certain what the American government was going to do with her. They offered their services as her attorneys.

On March 29, Svetlana signed two powers of attorney to the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst. The first granted her attorneys the right to act on her behalf in all immigration matters; the second assigned them all rights over any current or future books she would write.

When she signed the documents, Svetlana had only one thought in her head: to be cooperative. She knew how things happened. The leaders at the top spoke to each other and suddenly you vanished. When Greenbaum assured her that her book could make money, she said she hoped she might earn enough to have a car and a dog. She joked: It “should be a ‘gypsy’ dog since she was leading a gypsy life.”
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On March 30, Greenbaum and Schwartz returned to New York. Now they needed to get Svetlana a visa to America. Greenbaum arranged a meeting with Attorney General Nick Katzenbach, along with Charles Bohlen from the State Department, who was an expert on the Soviet Union; and a number of CIA officers, including Donald Jameson, CIA branch chief in charge of handling Soviet defectors and other covert operations. By now Jameson, a victim of polio, was confined to a wheelchair; most likely he’d contracted the poliovirus from an East German defector whom he interrogated in 1955. Jamie, as he was called, was charming, deeply read in Russian literature, and personally committed to helping Svetlana.

Alan Schwartz was present at the meeting.

They were all at this table, talking about what happened, and it became clear the American government still didn’t want any part of this, at least on the surface. But we had to get some kind of security, knowing that if she came here, she wouldn’t be thrown out, she would have some documentation allowing her to stay. Without the intervention of Donald Jameson, I don’t know what would have happened to her. The best we could obtain for Svetlana was a six-month tourist visa.
³

Next Greenbaum telephoned Cass Canfield, the president of Harper & Row, with whom he’d recently worked on a lawsuit brought by Jacqueline Kennedy involving a biography Harper & Row was publishing. He asked if he could drop by Canfield’s home on East Thirty-Eighth Street that evening to talk about an urgent matter. When he got to the house, Canfield and Evan Thomas, the executive vice president, were waiting for him. He informed them that he represented Svetlana Alliluyeva, who in 1963 had written a book, which she was eager to publish. He assured them nobody knew she’d written a book. He added a proviso. The Swiss government had asked him to keep the existence of the book secret, and “there were other considerations that made it essential to keep this news confidential.”
⁴

Greenbaum did not explain the “other considerations,” but certainly he was alluding to the State Department’s wish to play this one low-key. In view of the need for secrecy, he said he and Alan Schwartz decided not to open Svetlana’s manuscript to general bidding, which would “disturb her security,” but to offer it only to Harper & Row. Canfield was indeed interested. After negotiations, on April 14, Harper & Row signed the contract, paying $250,000 for US English-language rights.

Greenbaum next called Arthur Sulzberger, then the publisher of the
New York Times
, about serialization rights (he was close to the Sulzberger family). Sulzberger offered $225,000 for six installments. In a cooperative agreement with the
Times
,
Life
bought the rights to serialize the book two days after the
Times
for the sum of $400,000. Still to come would be Book of the Month Club rights ($325,000), and foreign book and serial rights. Greenbaum had accomplished all this by mid-April.
⁵
No one had actually read the manuscript, but everyone was certain a book by Stalin’s daughter was eminently marketable.

Now Greenbaum needed a translator. Kennan proposed several names, and soon Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a thirty-nine-year-old journalist and translator, was approached.
⁶
McMillan had worked as a translator at the US Embassy in Moscow in the mid-1950s and had even met Svetlana briefly in 1956 when she tried to audit a course, The Soviet Novel, that Svetlana was teaching at Moscow University. The course was canceled; Khrushchev had just delivered his Secret Speech. Now McMillan was working on a book about Lee Harvey Oswald, whom she’d interviewed in Moscow in 1959 when she’d worked as a reporter for the North American News Alliance. The CIA had already vetted her.

McMillan flew immediately to New York to meet Greenbaum. Svetlana’s manuscript had been delivered to Harper & Row at 10 East Fifty-Third Street, where it was kept under lock and key. She read the manuscript, written in longhand, over the course of a week, but wasn’t allowed to take it out of the building. When she was asked to write a précis needed to sell foreign rights, she had to do so from memory one night in her hotel room. The book moved her deeply. “I just couldn’t believe
my eyes: to think that Stalin’s daughter was capable of writing this. And I never got over the great respect and awe that reading that manuscript imbued in me.”
⁷

Greenbaum thought it imperative for McMillan to meet Svetlana and persuaded Harper & Row to send her to Switzerland. As Greenbaum prepared her for the trip, she found herself in the middle of a comedy.

The General [as friends called Greenbaum] delivered his instructions to me at the Williams Club in New York City, a very crowded restaurant where I ran into a couple of people I knew, and at the Algonquin, where everyone in New York would gather. General Greenbaum was very deaf and he would deliver me my instructions at the top of his voice and, so that he could hear me, I had to answer him at the top of my voice. It was a miracle that the whole thing wasn’t in the newspapers long before it was…. He drilled me on what I was supposed to say if I ran into any of my newspaper friends in the lobby of the hotel in Zurich. “If you run into Marvin Kalb in the lobby, what are you going to say? Well, Marvin, isn’t it wonderful, don’t you love skiing here?” I went secretly to Frankfurt and took a train to Zurich.
⁸

McMillan’s encounter with Svetlana went well. The two women met once at Janner’s home and again at a sort of B & B in Neuchâtel, where neither Svetlana nor McMillan was staying. McMillan had brought a sample chapter of her translation, which she showed Svetlana upstairs in the lobby with a parrot screeching in the background. This amused McMillan—she was pretty sure the parrot didn’t have a direct line to the
New York Times.
“Svetlana’s comment was that I stuck too close to
her original but otherwise she liked it. Her English was excellent, as I already knew from that 1956 meeting.” Within days, McMillan was back in the United States.

While the flurry continued in New York, for Svetlana the euphoria of escape had passed, and she fell into a brutal depression. She was missing her children. On April 4, she finally received a letter from her son, Joseph, lamenting that they had had no word from her.

Greetings, dear Mama!

We were very surprised when, on March 8, we went to the airport and did not find you…. When
Tass
came out with an announcement that you had been granted permission to remain abroad as long as you wished, we more or less stopped worrying, and life returned to its normal routine; that is if one discounts that to this day Katya cannot get back on track; and we, to tell you the truth, just don’t understand anything.

I even called up the Swiss Embassy, asking them to help us in contacting you…. At last we got your card, in which you said you didn’t know how to get in touch with us. Can you explain why we have to write you through a government department? … Mama, all your friends are asking after you. It would be good if you wrote and told us what to say to them. Until we see you. We kiss you. Joseph and Katya.
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Svetlana turned to Antonino Janner in desperation. There must be a way to telephone Joseph. Janner drove her to a small hotel in nearby Murten (Morat), where they rented a room with a phone and called Moscow using a fictitious name. To Svetlana’s shock, her son answered, though Katya was not at home. They spoke for half an hour, and yet it seemed nothing was said. He asked no questions, and she only stammered repeatedly
that she was not coming back. She thought it would be dangerous for him to know too much. He replied, “Yes, yes I hear you.”
¹⁰
Then the phone line was cut. From that point on, whenever she tried to reach her son in Moscow, the operator replied that the line was dead.

After this painful phone call, Svetlana phoned her friend Lily Golden. When Lily picked up the phone, she heard Svetlana’s voice asking, “Is anybody in your home?” Lily said no, but she was dumbstruck by the absurd question. “Every espionage agency in the world had to be listening to her phone calls, at least the KGB and the CIA.” Svetlana seemed almost hysterical, and as Lily remembered it, “she began to list all the names of the government and the Communist Party, and gave all their crimes and terrible deeds that she had learned about them abroad and about her father. I stood, holding the phone, numb with terror.” Lily shifted the conversation to express her dismay at the toll Svetlana’s departure was taking on her children and asked how she could leave her friends.
¹¹
Lily was soon called into the offices of the KGB and interrogated, as each of Svetlana’s friends would be, but she refused the interrogators’ demand to pronounce Svetlana “crazy.”
¹²

When the truth of Svetlana’s defection hit home, the KGB approached her children, demanding that they denounce their mother. Leonid and Galina Alliluyev believed that Joseph might initially have resisted. “As a result of some pressure on him,” Joseph and his young wife left their apartment in the House on the Embankment and moved to the suburbs, but soon they were back in the center of Moscow, and Joseph was offered the opportunity to work in the faculty of the First Medical Institute, from which he’d graduated.
¹³
The Soviet press now reported that Joseph said his mother was “unstable.” Perhaps he felt: why should he be loyal, when it was she who had deserted them?

Looking back more than thirty years later, Joseph would tell an interviewer that he had kept Katya in the dark about the whole situation, and he himself was not pressured by the KGB: “Nobody tortured me with hot irons or fire,” though he added that an officer from the KGB did drop by the university once and leave his phone number.
¹⁴
Stating that he loved both his grandfathers, he said his mother “had ruined herself.”
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