Stalin's Daughter (42 page)

You must admit that after what you have done, your advice from afar to take courage, to stick together, not to lose heart and not let go of Katya, was, to say the least, strange…. I consider that by your action you have cut yourself off from us and therefore, please allow us to live as we see fit….

Since we have endured fairly stoically what you have done, I hope from now on we shall be allowed to arrange our own lives ourselves…. Joseph
¹⁶

Svetlana could not stop weeping. She wanted to run away, to hide from all the hospitality and curiosity of people who didn’t understand and seemed to believe that everything was fine now that she was
free.

Basketsful of mail for Svetlana began to arrive, friendly notes of welcome to America, marriage proposals, invitations to join
religious organizations, as well as the occasional variation of “Go back home, Red dog! Our cat is better than you. She takes care of her children.” That one cut particularly deeply.
¹⁷

The defection of Stalin’s daughter was an event of such consequence that the international press was swarming the Johnson estate. Newsmen parked outside the fence and spied from the shrubbery. Helicopters circled overhead taking pictures. Local police kept the house under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Svetlana liked to take long restless hikes through the nearby woods, but the Paloesik brothers insisted on accompanying her. They grew very fond of Svetlana, particularly when she took a rose off her own suit jacket and gave it to Albert. “She’s so nice. I’m almost beginning to like Russians,” Albert said.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Priscilla and Svetlana worked on the translation of
Twenty Letters to a Friend.
On one occasion, to give Priscilla a break from the pressure of having the author sitting across from her knitting or reading as she translated, Priscilla’s sister Eunice took Svetlana shopping. The next day, a photograph of Svetlana bending down to try on shoes appeared in the
New York Times.
It was reported that she bought three pairs of stockings, slacks, a sweater, and the shoes. “The cost of the slacks and sweater was $46.82.”
¹⁹
The existence of paparazzi and the invasive curiosity of “the public” were astonishing discoveries for a Soviet citizen. There was no public in the USSR.

But domestic life at the Johnson estate provided a welcome shelter. Soon Svetlana assumed Priscilla’s mother’s seat at the head of the table—Mr. Johnson would be at the other end, with Priscilla relegated to the middle. To Priscilla, Svetlana was like the “chairman of the board, a very able and capacious person.” The name of Aleksei Kosygin would come up and Mr. Johnson would say, “Oh, I suppose he’s a very nice man,” but Svetlana would respond, “Oh, no indeed.” Priscilla remembered: “One
by one, whoever’s name came up, she would give a very good sketch of all of them, accurate brief sketches. It was very impressive.”
²⁰
She would read the Soviet attacks on her reported in the newspapers and explain what they were really saying.

Priscilla thought of herself as something of a Kremlinologist but Svetlana’s “touch, her feel as to what they were really getting at was incredibly accurate, much, much better than mine and I think much better than anybody’s would have been.”
²¹

But soon the Johnson house began to feel like Grand Central Station. Everyone wanted to meet Svetlana. People Priscilla hadn’t seen in years began to drop by. The phone rang ninety-eight times a day. Anyone who walked downstairs at night would stumble over a private detective. It was all too much. When Priscilla’s siblings visited and saw the chaos, they insisted Svetlana would have to leave. There were so many unwanted people in the house that they were afraid their father’s old servants would abandon him. But Priscilla’s father loved having Svetlana as his guest. He had a good sense of humor and would say, “Svetlana likes me because I remind her so much of her father.”

Priscilla went to see Greenbaum, suggesting that a time for Svetlana to leave needed to be set. “Would you save me from having to take the blame?” she asked. “I guess I realized that whoever, so to speak, kicked her out of our house, she was going to be furious, because I must have understood early that partings and leavings and not being welcomed were going to induce that reaction.”
²²
She hated to make Svetlana feel unwelcome yet again.
²³

Priscilla took a trip to Atlanta, Georgia, to see her husband, who was threatening to divorce her because of her long absences; they had married just the previous December. One night Svetlana phoned, raging. “You urged them to restore the cuts in my book. You’re not supposed to. That’s not your place!”
She got angrier and angrier. “You’re getting into editorial matters that aren’t any of your business.” Priscilla was thrown for a loop. “It was like having a very heavy tank or truck run over you.”

George Kennan had recommended minor cuts to the manuscript. One was a letter to Aleksei Kapler that Svetlana had included. Because Kapler was still alive, it might be dangerous to him to reveal so much.
²⁴
Another cut was the comment that Stalin didn’t engage in blood sports because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. Kennan must have thought this statement was too offensive.

Priscilla had a secret motive in wanting to restore the cuts. When the manuscript was in longhand, she’d been asked to estimate its length and had given a wildly erroneous word count. The publisher had oversold serial rights, and she was afraid there’d be little left over for the book. But she was hurt and also puzzled by Svetlana’s uncontained rage in her phone call. Svetlana seemed to find it so easy to disregard all the hospitality she’d received in the Johnson household during her six-week stay. Where did her rage come from? Was it simply that her vanity as a writer was piqued? Her Russian friend Professor Manuylov had told her never to allow anyone to change a word in her book. Whatever the case, after the blowup, apart from business calls, she and Priscilla remained permanently estranged.

Chapter 20
A Mysterious Figure

With the advance from her book
Twenty Letters to a Friend
, Svetlana bought a Dodge sedan in 1968. She imagined driving across America.

G
eorge Kennan had asked his daughter Joan to host a luncheon for Svetlana in her Princeton home. It was a daunting prospect because it all had to be carried out in secrecy even though other famous guests were invited, like Arthur Schlesinger and Nicholas Nabokov, the son of the novelist. Joan cooked lobster stew without washing off the brine, and the meal was inedible. Only Svetlana emptied her plate, declaring the dish delicious—it reminded her of the Black Sea. Joan found her endearing.

It was now decided that Svetlana would spend the summer with Joan and her family. George Kennan and his wife, Annelise, would be in Africa, where he was engaged on a lecture tour. On June 6, the Paloesik brothers drove Svetlana to Kennan’s remote two-hundred-acre farm in East Berlin, Pennsylvania.

Called the Cherry Orchard after Chekhov’s play, the farm felt like a Russian landowner’s country estate. The farmhouse was filled with mementos the Kennans had brought back from Russia: old engravings, porcelain, Fedoskino lacquered tables. They’d even hung up a framed photograph of the Kremlin Embankment. Built in the nineteenth century, the house had two large columns in the front that created a kind of porch. Joan remembered many evenings when she and Svetlana sat there looking out over the fields, Svetlana talking nostalgically of the Russian steppes. Joan’s two children would already be in bed and her husband was working in the city and came only on weekends.

After two weeks Svetlana told the Paloesik brothers that she didn’t like being guarded, that in America she had more guards than she’d ever had in the Kremlin. The brothers gave her a ballpoint pen as a parting gift, inscribed: To
SVETLANA. USE WITH HAPPINESS. AL AND GEORGE.

When Svetlana had received her son’s devastating letter a few weeks back, she’d written to George Kennan in despair. Now his consoling reply from Johannesburg finally came in the mail.

You should not permit it [the letter] to shake your confidence in yourself…. You, in doing what you did in Delhi, followed the deepest needs of your own nature. Had you gone back to the USSR at that time, you would have gone back not only as an enemy of the system but in a sense as an enemy of yourself. All this would have done your son no good either….

Dear Svetlana, even in the face of this greatest sorrow, be confident that in some way of which probably neither you nor I are now able to conceive, all this courage and faith will be vindicated—and for him as well.
¹

On June 23, the long-awaited summit between President Johnson and Premier Kosygin took place in the small town of Glassboro, New Jersey; this was the meeting that demonstrated the thaw between the two countries, in the name of which Foy Kohler and the State Department had initially rejected Svetlana’s request for asylum. The
New York Times
reported that the talks about the Mideast, Vietnam, and nuclear arms control lasted five hours, to little effect. “Not only were the difficult questions between them not resolved, but there appeared to have been no subsidiary agreements in relation to them.”
²
Two days later, as Svetlana and the Kennan family sat in the farm kitchen eating dinner and listening to the radio broadcast, they heard Kosygin’s press conference at the United Nations. The Third Arab-Israeli War (the Six-Day War) had ended just two weeks earlier, and, denouncing Israel, Kosygin was declaring Soviet support for the defeated Arabs. Almost as an afterthought, Kosygin was asked about Svetlana. She heard Kosygin’s familiar voice:

Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aims or … [to] discredit the Soviet country.
³

Joan and her husband, Larry Griggs, laughed, but Svetlana could hear Kosygin’s anger. She could also hear that the translator was modifying his tone. She knew what this meant. The Central Committee, the Party, and the secret police had all conferred. The anti-Svetlana campaign had begun. In fact,
though she probably didn’t know it, the KGB already had a code name for her—
kukushka
, a word that has the double meaning of “cuckoo bird” and “escaped convict.”
⁴
From Kosygin’s seemingly offhand remark, she understood that the new head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, was out for revenge.

Damning articles began to appear in
Pravda
and
Izvestia.
The worst was a commentary by Sergei Izvekov, Patriarch Pimen I, the Russian Orthodox metropolitan (bishop) of Krutitsy and Kolomna, published in
Izvestia
on July 1. Pimen was following the Kremlin line:

Lately our press and the press abroad report that the conscience of many honest people has been revolted by statements made by Svetlana Alliluyeva. This woman, who has had several husbands, who has abandoned her children, who has become a traitor to her people and exposes her father’s nakedness, attempts to speak about religion, about her belief in God.

The moral image of this woman, who has sold everything for dollars, can only arouse revulsion and anger.
⁵

Soon the anti-Svetlana campaign went international. A shorter version of Pimen’s commentary appeared in London’s
Daily Express
and
Evening News
, and an Italian Communist paper,
Paese sera
, ran an article that claimed Svetlana suffered frequent nervous crises and attacks of hysteria and had done so all her life.
⁶

It was an unfortunate coincidence for Svetlana that she happened to defect in 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Russian Revolution of 1917, celebrated on November 7. Worse still, her publisher, Harper & Row, had decided to bring
Twenty Letters to a Friend
out in October. The KGB was certain the Americans were out to humiliate the Soviet Union on the eve of the USSR’s most important celebration ever.

A KGB operative named Victor Louis was chosen to handle Svetlana. He’d already tried to contact her at the Johnson residence in April. When Priscilla McMillan had answered his call, she’d been disgusted. She’d known Louis in her days in Moscow. “I never hated knowing anybody as much as I hated knowing Victor Louis.”
⁷

Vitaly Yevgenyevich Lui (Victor Louis) was a mysterious figure. In his exposé of Soviet spies, the American journalist John Barron identified Louis as the most celebrated KGB disinformation agent.
⁸
As a nineteen-year-old student, Louis had been arrested in Moscow. He claimed it was because of his association with foreigners, but it was more likely that he was a common black marketer. He spent nine years in the Gulag, where fellow prisoners, like the dissident writer Arkady Belinkov, who would soon become Svetlana’s friend, claimed to have clear evidence that Louis worked as an informer for the camp directors.
⁹