Stalin's Daughter (57 page)

As soon as Olga was old enough for preschool, Svetlana set about searching for a private institution. She had a Russian émigré’s suspicion of state-controlled public schools—she thought parents who recommended them were deluded by some notion of “benevolent” socialism. She wanted “no State schools; no State
anything
.”
¹⁵

Millie Harford was the founding director of the Stuart Country Day School of the Sacred Heart. Harford recalled how she first met Svetlana. She’d recently accompanied her academician husband on a visit to the USSR, during which she’d visited Russian schools. Interviewed in the
Princeton Packet
, the local daily, on her return, she’d said it was a fascinating experience; schools in the USSR had interesting curricula, hardly different from those in the United States.

Out of the blue, Svetlana called Millie Harford and chewed her out for her newspaper diplomacy—“ diplomatic” was a word Svetlana detested. Millie had never met Svetlana, but she agreed that she had not been truthful. She’d actually found the Soviet schools restrictive; the children seemed to be discouraged from self-expression and taught to conform. Svetlana said, “I want to meet you.”

“We met. She was disarming. I liked her immediately.”
¹⁶

Three-year-old Olga was soon enrolled in a class for preschoolers at the Stuart School. Fees were high—$1,500 a year. Though Princeton was divided between new and old money, many of the students at Stuart were culled from the international set. The husband of one of the teachers had grown up in Communist Poland and remembered all the books with propaganda photographs of Svetlana, the “Little Sparrow,” seated on her father’s knee, as an example for Polish children, of the
beloved youngster. He found it ironic that his child should be playing with Stalin’s granddaughter.
¹⁷

Svetlana and Millie Harford became close friends. Harford often invited her to dinner with discreet guests, but one dinner in particular was seared in her mind. The gathering that night was intimate.

Svetlana told that story, which is so well known, of how in the evening when her father and his companions were drinking and she was already asleep or reading, he would drag her down by her pigtails and say: sing and dance for us. And that was very painful, very painful. I think what made her speak was that my husband asked our son, who was a Beatles fan and had just learned to play guitar, to play for us. And Chris refused. And Jim said, “Come on, Chris.” And he said, “No, I don’t want to do it.” And that’s when Svetlana got up and said, “Let him be. Let him go. Because when I was his age, my father would pull me out when I was very quiet and by myself and have me come out to his parties. Male parties, men parties. And put me on the table, and said, ‘Dance.’ “ And she showed us how she danced. She went into the coat closet and got a hat and a cane and she did the dance. She actually went to the floor and kicked.
¹⁸

As she danced, the guests looked on, appalled at the heartbreak of it.

Svetlana was aiming for a normal “American” life. She invited guests to her home: the Hayakawas came, and her old friend Ruth Biggs. She had the neighbors to dinner. People she met through Olga’s school dropped by. That summer of 1974, she put a small in-ground swimming pool in her backyard, paid for on a monthly installment plan. She wrote to Rosa Shand that they’d had a lovely relaxed summer at their own “little private beach.”
“We’ve had guests all the time—couples, singles, families—with children, and whatnot. All this quite unexpected and unusual for us—but
very
pleasant anyway.”
¹⁹
But the next July, terrible rains hit Princeton and the pool collapsed under the weight of the floods, leaving a trench of mud in the yard as if after a bombing. It was “sad” but “OK,” Svetlana reported. “Some people had much worse damages and losses on the same very day.”
²⁰
She had a Russian’s stoicism. One never counted on anything’s lasting.

Moreover, she was never entirely free from fear. The letters from strangers had decreased. Now there were perhaps only ten a day. Some saddened her. One man had wanted to know why her father treated his people the way he did, but even she, his daughter, didn’t know. However, other letters caused deep anxiety. She wrote to tell Jamie (her CIA minder) that right after their regular telephone call, on November 6, she’d received a “terrible hate letter” from a woman who presented herself as a professor at the University of Rome. “I do not mind to be cursed, but she cursed Olga too. This is—I think—something beyond politics; an animal feeling.”
²¹
The thought that Olga might be harmed was unnerving. She told Jamie she’d felt safer in Arizona; it was so isolated. Why had she ever moved back to Princeton?

Wesley Peters holds his daughter, Olga, in 1974, by which time he and Svetlana were divorced.

She had other worries about little Olushka. Everyone at the school found Olga a darling child, lively, independent, with large black eyes that drew one in, but Olga did not speak. Svetlana was referred to a speech therapist, who asked her to fill out a questionnaire. When the doctor read it, his face blanched. Svetlana summarized: “Olga’s parents were old. My mother had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. My brother died an alcoholic.” She seems not to have mentioned who Olga’s grandfather was. Perhaps she didn’t need to. She was told by the nervous doctor to bring the child back. They would check her ears; maybe she couldn’t hear. Svetlana felt sick. “I returned home in tears, fearing that no doubt now they would try to find all sorts of inherited defects in my daughter.”
²²
But by the time Olga turned four, Svetlana was thrilled to be able to tell Annelise Kennan that Olga “keeps
talking
all the time! I never saw such a talkative child! The last thing she’s brought from her summer school was: ‘Mummy I think I have a baby in my tummy. When one eats a lot you know, one gets a baby in one’s tummy.’ She was so sure about it, I did not know what to say!”
²³

Svetlana didn’t believe that the KGB had given up on her. In June 1974, she received a letter from her son, Joseph. She never spoke of its contents but clearly did not trust that it came from him. She told Annelise Kennan she’d sent the letter to a graphologist, along with a sample of Joseph’s authentic handwriting. The graphologist reported that the letter and the sample were not written by the same person.
²⁴
In Svetlana’s mind, who else but the KGB would forge a letter from her son? But why?

She wanted
real
news from Moscow. In the closed universe of the Soviet Union, where mail was censored and official eyes kept watch, the safest route to her children was brutally labyrinthine. Her neighbor on Wilson Road, Roman Smoluchowski, attended a conference of astrophysicists in Moscow
that July. He came back with news that Katya, twenty-four, had graduated in geophysics from Moscow University and was now teaching. She was still unmarried and was living with her grandmother, Yuri Zhdanov’s mother, whom Svetlana had so hated that she’d told her father all those years back that she was leaving her marriage because of her domineering mother-in-law. But Svetlana consoled herself that at least her totally impractical Katya was not living alone. Joseph had a very good job at one of the best clinics in Moscow. She was not surprised to learn he was divorced. She had tried to warn him that he’d been too young to marry.
²⁵
She discovered for the first time that she was a grandmother. Joseph had a four-year-old son.

That month, November 1974, was particularly hard for Svetlana. She wrote to Rosa Shand that she’d fallen into a desperate gloom, believing God had abandoned her. “Everything abandoned me—even the words of prayer.” For her, November was the black month of death, the month of her mother’s suicide. Reading the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, she’d found the words for what she’d been through. She told Rosa it was a “crisis of faith,” “a temptation of the Spirit. If you’ve never been through that, I wish you never have it.”
²⁶
When the desolation of her terrible aloneness confronted her, Svetlana could only try to hold on.

Believing it would endanger them, Svetlana had always been very careful not to try to contact her children in Moscow directly. But then on August 5, 1975, George Kennan received an astonishing letter from an unidentified American journalist in Moscow, delivered by diplomatic pouch through the State Department. It read: “Dear Mr. Kennan: I am writing on behalf of Joseph G. Alliluyev who has asked that I get in touch with his mother regarding his desire to visit the US.” The journalist said that Joseph was asking his mother to obtain a three-month tourist visa for him. This was a very strange request. In the mid-1970s,
virtually no citizens of the Soviet Union were permitted to travel, unsupervised, outside the Eastern bloc, and any and all contacts with foreigners inside the USSR were still considered treasonous.

Signing his letter only “A Friend,” the writer explained that, through an acquaintance, he’d met Joseph, who was now a teaching physician at the First Moscow Institute, divorced, with a five-year-old son. Apparently Joseph told the writer that he’d denounced his mother in 1967 because he was bitter and felt betrayed, but also because “considerable pressure was brought to bear on him to denounce her.” Now, however, Joseph recanted, saying, “I absolutely understand her. It took nine years.” Joseph wanted his intentions kept secret. No one, not even his father or his half sister, Katya Zhdanov, knew of his desire to visit his mother. Joseph never spoke openly of defection, though there were hints that he might not want to return to his country.
²⁷
Inside the envelope were several photographs, including one of Joseph holding his passport. The anonymous journalist said he was jeopardizing his own job by acting as an intermediary, but wanted the exclusive scoop if Joseph did indeed follow through with his plans.
²⁸

Kennan immediately took the letter and photographs over to Svetlana’s house. It looked suspicious. Who was this journalist? Why the diplomatic pouch? Why was the letter addressed to Kennan and not to her? Kennan advised Svetlana that it might be a trap meant to damage relations between the United States and the USSR.

It is not hard to imagine Svetlana’s state of mind at this news. If the journalist was credible, her beloved son Joseph was asking to join her in America; he’d forgiven her for abandoning him. She also understood that his contacting her in such a clandestine manner through the American Embassy was exceedingly dangerous for him. What would happen if his plans
were discovered? And if he really wanted to join her in the United States and didn’t receive an invitation from her, would he ever forgive her?

But there was a second possibility. The whole thing might be a new KGB plot, as Kennan certainly suspected, which meant that her son was being used against her once again—the photographs were clearly authentic. But what was the point? So that the KGB could say that the vile daughter of Stalin, a tool of the American imperialists, was luring her son to become a traitor to his country, but he’d valiantly exposed her?

It was impossible to penetrate. Anguished, she agreed with Kennan. She could not respond. Kennan went to his colleague Mark Garrison, director of the Office of Soviet Union Affairs in the State Department, who had passed him the letter, and asked him to send a message to the journalist that “Joseph’s mother still loved him deeply,” but that “if he wanted to come to America, he should send a letter by ordinary mail.”
²⁹

The anonymous journalist soon sent a second letter to Kennan. This time he identified himself as George Krimsky. He worked for the Associated Press and often dealt with the dissident community. He explained what had happened. A young man named Alexander Kurpel had approached him in Moscow that spring asking for a lift. As they chatted in the car, Kurpel told Krimsky that he was a close friend of Joseph Alliluyev, to whom he would like to introduce him. Krimsky went to Joseph’s apartment, where Joseph invited him for a walk in the local park so that they could talk more freely. Joseph asked Krimsky to pass a message to his mother “about a possible visit.”
³⁰
It had obviously been Krimsky’s idea to send the letter to George Kennan.

This second letter clarified little, and Svetlana was distraught. Perhaps this Alexander Kurpel, who had first approached Krimsky, was working as an agent provocateur for the
KGB when he’d offered to get Krimsky in touch with Joseph in the first place. Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB, was certainly ingenious at the tactics of Cold War intrigue. Was Kennan right? Kennan was sure the KGB was out to embarrass the Carter administration by demonstrating that the CIA was still plotting against the USSR through Svetlana. It was an easy conclusion for him, but, tragically, she was still the pawn in the middle, her motherly heart wrung by the politics of the Cold War.