Stalin's Daughter (54 page)

Svetlana still had hopes for the cattle farm at Aldebaran. Brandoch was delighting in his new role as cattle breeder. Though the herd of Holstein cattle she’d bought him had died over the winter, she’d sent money for another herd—the second one cost $92,000.
¹⁵
He’d built a new silo, improved the old barn, and purchased a stud bull from Colorado. As she sat with her baby on the porch while her men inspected the farm, she had a moment of bliss. She would write about that moment over fifteen years later:

I couldn’t forget the one happy hour years ago in the summer of 1971 when Wesley and I had a small farm near here. Olga had just been born three months ago and I was tending the baby-buggy while sitting on the wooden porch of a small farm we had. A big Irish wolfhound was peacefully lying at my feet as I rocked in an old, comfortable rocker. It was the evening hour, the golden rays from the low sun were filling everything in sight. A herd of cows was returning home down the road, with cow-bells tinkling. I could see, down the road near the gate, Wesley and his grown son, hands in their pockets slowly walking home while discussing farm affairs. The rocker was rocking, Olga was sleeping, and I thought then, here it is, the greatest, the happiest moment of my life. Stop! Hold this moment forever. I have a family, a home in my new country and from here on, my life will be like this: harmonious, secure, and filled with evening light. I thought then that nothing, no force in the world, could undermine this seemingly well-established life in which everything was harmonious and secure. Never before had I such a complete moment of satisfaction
and peace…. I had everything: a good husband, a healthy child, good friends, beauty, and plenty.
¹⁶

What’s astonishing is that this is all she got of domestic life on her farm: one hour.

As Wes and his father returned to the porch, Brandoch made it very clear that if she had any ideas of moving in, she wasn’t welcome. He said that he needed privacy for himself and his girlfriend, who often visited. Wes concurred, telling her that he didn’t want her “meddling” in the business and that he needed her at the apartment at Taliesin. Svetlana was shocked and hurt. She suddenly understood that Brandoch had never considered himself her son; she was only his banker. There was no warmth; they had never been a family. But she was not ready yet to give up on Wes. Launched on her “path of domesticity,” she had to keep fighting.

She confessed to Annelise Kennan.

I feel I am egotistic, self-centered and absolutely have
no
experience of married life. I spent almost all my life alone, divorced, and with my children. I do not know
how
to be a good wife in the most usual normal way. And this
is
what Wes badly needs…. I know (and you know too) that life in Taliesin as such has its enormous difficulties for an individualist like me. But apart from that, there is something within
myself
that deprives me of a possibility to be a real good wife…. I have to find ways to overcome that and to
learn
to be a good wife. Pretty late—isn’t it? Please, do not laugh at me. Please, do help me. You know, you
are
so perfect in this difficult field of knowledge…. Annelise, I just
cannot
break this family. I
have
to save it, and even more, to make it a pleasant thing to live. Some
trick within myself has to be found and has to work—up to now I never knew
how
to do this. A divorce always seemed to me
the
best way; but I do
not
feel that way anymore…. It still seems to me that not for nothing the Fate has joined us together and blessed us with that sweetest child…. But I do not know
how
to build my home, how to create, please tell me—how?
¹⁷

To see into the heart of a relationship, to understand the impinging of one personality on another, is virtually impossible. Certainly Wesley Peters must have sometimes felt he had invited a tornado into his safe bachelor’s existence, but he had willingly turned Svetlana into one of Taliesin’s collectibles. As his apprentice Aris Georges, who deeply admired both Wesley Peters and Svetlana, admitted ruefully, Wes and Olgivanna together played Svetlana, though he claimed Wes was not without feelings of guilt.
¹⁸

It’s hard to exonerate Wesley Peters, however. His freewheeling use of Svetlana’s money was immoral. In retrospect, at her bitterest and most insightful, Svetlana could see that she had been used. “He married me because of my name; if I were Nina or Mary he would never have looked at me. But the main attraction was money.”
¹⁹
Stalin’s mythical Swiss gold, his long shadow, had enveloped her. It was all very sad. Even sadder was that Svetlana was perfectly tailored to their needs. She carried an idealized template in her head of the man who would offer permanent security and serenity and who would need her. For now, she was still not ready to give up, but Wesley Peters was never the man for the domestic life she imagined.

Back at the Fellowship, Kamal Amin watched the animosity build between Olgivanna and Svetlana, but he assigned much of the blame to Svetlana. “The residue of resentment [between
them was] exaggerated by Svetlana’s brooding nature…. Her soft, sweet demeanor camouflaged forty years of bottled-up anger accumulated during her life in the Soviet Union.”
²⁰
But one might also ask how she had contained her anger for so long.

The last straw, just before the trek back to Arizona, was a summons from Olgivanna to her private quarters for a talk. Olgivanna was making it clear that the warfare between them was entirely Svetlana’s fault.

When Olgivanna asked what she so disliked at Taliesin, Svetlana couldn’t say, “Everything,” so she said she simply wanted peace. She assured Olgivanna that everything would be all right. Suddenly Olgivanna pulled Svetlana to her and looked deeply into her eyes. Svetlana was appalled.

She began to breathe deeply and slowly, still staring. I lost all volition and stood there riveted; fear entered me like a cold wave, but I could not move. After a few moments of strain I broke down in tears, still holding her hands. And then I did something I would never have done of my own accord: I kissed those hands of hers several times. Only then did she release me. She was pleased. “One never forgets such moments,” she said slowly.

Svetlana ran to Wes, still trembling and weeping, and said that Mrs. Wright had attempted to hypnotize her. She would never again go to see that woman. As she recalled the scene, Wes, with a cold indifference, called her hysterical and lectured her.

Mrs. Wright loves you, but you are unable to respond to her in the same way. She is very much upset by that. She loves everybody here like a mother…. You have no understanding of this place whatsoever. It is a privilege to
live at Taliesin, the best way of life imaginable. I thought I gave you this chance by our marriage. If you do not appreciate this, I do not know what our future will be. You cannot stay at our farm because I want my wife to be where I am. You must find some way to adjust.
²¹

The smugness of his response, as Svetlana reported it, probably accurately, is shocking, given that he and Olgivanna had set her up.

Svetlana now saw Taliesin as an uncanny and sinister echo of something she knew all too well. Olgivanna was just like her father. Her brown eyes had “the yellow wildcat sparkle” Stalin’s eyes used to have that said, “Here is the boss.”
²²
She looked deeply into your eyes, digging for what you were trying to hide; her father “had a way of looking like that, too.”
²³
At dinner Olgivanna controlled the table, and everyone was careful to anticipate her response, just as at Stalin’s table. Like Stalin, Olgivanna rewrote history to correct anything that diminished her role, claiming that only after Frank Lloyd Wright met her did his genius flower, though he was then sixty and already world famous. How had Svetlana landed herself at a place in America that echoed her father’s oppressive world with its “cult of personality”?

Svetlana wrote to George Kennan that Taliesin was “ruled, suppressed, dominated, and indoctrinated in the most dictatorial Slavic (Montenegrin) way by the old woman (69) who is a good politician, who has very sharp common sense, and a tremendous desire to RULE.” She had left dictatorship and false ideology in her country and now, in this “most democratic and free country in the world,” she had landed “in a small Montenegrin Kingdom,” with “a court and devoted courtiers, just like in my father’s residence in Kuntsevo.”
²⁴

Svetlana made a decision. She would neither bend to that psychological yoke nor allow her daughter, Olga, to be tethered in this
way. She was appalled at the thought that she would have to leave. For solace, she took to driving along the back roads of Spring Green. This was her baby’s motherland, and she wanted Olga to receive its beauty in her blood. She would gather wildflowers and sit on the banks of the Wisconsin River wondering at her life.

On one of her drives, she stopped to visit the cemetery beside the local Unitarian church and searched for the grave of the first Svetlana. There it was, Svetlana Peters, her own name on the gravestone, and with it the name of the dead child, Daniel. She had seen photos of the child, and he looked like her Olga, who resembled her father. Perhaps truly paranoid now, she began to be afraid of driving with Olga, afraid of a car accident. She knew she was falling under the spell of an idée fixe, but she couldn’t stop herself. Perhaps she was meant to repeat the life of the first Svetlana down to the last detail.

This time, when the Taliesin caravan headed to Arizona, instead of taking their lovely drive across the country, she, Wes, and Olga flew. When Wes returned to work in Iran, she was on her own. There was now open warfare between her and Olgivanna. Kamal Amin remembered one particularly brutal dinner. He, Olgivanna, her daughter Iovanna, and Svetlana sat at the exclusive table. Svetlana began to complain, slightly hysterically, about Wes’s work schedule. “He works too hard all the time; he’s going to die.” Olgivanna replied through clenched teeth in a tone of steel: “So are you.”
²⁵

Svetlana had had enough. When Wes’s friends Don and Virginia Lovness visited, Virginia claimed that Svetlana asked them to take her and Olga away with them. Apparently she told Virginia, “Someone tried to burn Taliesin before and they didn’t do a good job. But I’m going to burn it down and I’ll do a good job.”
²⁶
Believing Svetlana might really set fire to Taliesin, Virginia warned Olgivanna, who hired a private guard to protect the estate. Svetlana withdrew into her room
with Olga. When Wes returned, he was delegated to bring their food.

According to Kamal Amin, “Olgivanna had the unusual ability to design and implement conflict, then cleverly retire into a solitary posture, assuming the role of victim…. In the process she gathered around her the small circle of yes people who in turn tried to widen the circle by disseminating the party line.”
²⁷
The party line was that Svetlana was the recipient of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation’s beneficent largesse. Olgivanna had facilitated her marriage to a wonderful man. Taliesin was a place where she could nourish her creative abilities, which she had failed to do. Svetlana was “stubborn and ungrateful.”

That Christmas, Olgivanna staged a final gesture of reconciliation, clearly to secure her own exoneration. She went to Svetlana in bare feet and presented her with diamond earrings. Svetlana threw them out into the desert, saying, “You cannot buy my friendship!” When Olgivanna’s daughter Iovanna heard this, she screamed, “I’ll kill her! I’ll kill her.”
²⁸
They had come to the end, and Wes finally agreed that they could move out of Taliesin.

But now Svetlana began to worry about money. The Aldebaran farm was proving a sinkhole. Since the initial outlay, she had spent an additional $500,000 in repairs and land purchases, a total of about two thirds of her initial $1.5 million advance. The tax accountant complained that he could find no proper bookkeeping. Tax returns had not been filed for the last two years.
²⁹

When Svetlana wrote to George Kennan to ask for his advice, he immediately turned to his daughter Joan. Her husband, Walter Pozen, worked in the Washington office of the prestigious law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. For months, Joan had been receiving strange, unexpected presents in the mail
from Svetlana and Wes: Native American turquoise jewelry, expensive perfumes, and, once, four exquisite evening dresses in a single mailing.
³⁰
The presents disturbed her, and she worried about Svetlana.

Pozen began to look into Svetlana’s finances. The lawyer who represented the Valley National Bank indicated that the bank was extremely anxious about Svetlana’s account and the endless loans that were being made against it. Pozen began to feel that “something awful” was going on. He sent one of his partners, an estate lawyer, to Spring Green, first to Taliesin and then to the bank. Both were shocked. “How could she have done this? She just assumed debts, assumed all the debts, assumed all of Wes Peters’ personal debts, and there was much, much more.”

To Pozen the whole farm fiasco felt like a fraud. When he confronted Svetlana, she said, “Oh, Walter, we’re going to do this with this cow and that with that cow Charlie.” And he thought,
My God, she’s completely unaware she has nothing
.
³¹
Pozen concluded that her husband and stepson had almost wiped her out.