Stalin's Daughter (60 page)

She immediately wrote to George Kennan, sending him both Alexander Kurpel’s screed and Grigori Morozov’s response, and Kennan replied with an affectionate letter. He concluded that Kurpel’s delusional letter was too clumsy to be a direct KGB provocation.

The impression I derive from the document is that the author is a seriously unstable person whose head has been turned, and whose imagination has been over-fired by exposure to the weird atmosphere of deception and counter-deception prevailing today between—or rather, among—the dissidents, the KGB, the foreign journalists, and probably a few unwise lower-ranking diplomats, and who, in addition to that, wants to make himself important by inserting himself into the affairs of important people…. I am delighted that you spotted all this and decided to have nothing to do with him….

I continue to think of you with deep affection and concern…. When you give careful thought to your problems, and do not act impulsively, your insight and your judgments are first-rate—none better….

Affectionate greetings from us both,

George K.
¹⁵

But Svetlana was not sure Kurpel could be so easily dismissed. She knew the KGB better than George Kennan did.

In a book called
Last Interview
, published in 2013, the Russian journalists Ana Petrovna and Mikhail Leshynsky included
an earlier interview with Joseph Alliluyev in which they asked him about his attempt to join his mother in America in the mid-1970s. Joseph explained: “I went through a difficult time; there was a failing in my personal life, things weren’t coming together at work. All of a sudden it occurred to me that the only way out was to go to my mother, to connect with my only dear relative. No such thing, as I now understand, to my luck, ended up being possible.”
¹⁶

It wasn’t his bad luck but rather Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB, who frustrated his longing to join his mother. In an undated memo to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, found by Petrovna and Leshynsky in the Party archive, Andropov wrote:

In a letter that we intercepted, Joseph Alliluev [
sic
] complains about his loneliness after the divorce from his wife, about how he misses his mother, wants to see her. It is established that he has intentions to go abroad. In the past years, Joseph Alliluev developed irritation, lost interest in social life, abuses alcoholic beverages. It seems rational for the Ministry of Health of the USSR to offer him more attention as a young doctor and for the Soviet Ministry of the USSR to exchange his apartment for a better one.
¹⁷

The tone of benevolent concern is hardly convincing. Joseph had been very frightened when he realized the KGB had intercepted his letter to his mother and recorded his contacts with foreigners. He had warned Krimsky, “This all has to stop,” or he’d end up practicing medicine in Siberia. For Andropov to have instigated such an upgrade in his circumstances, he must have made it very clear that he had no intention of defecting. But the tragedy of the secret police’s
interference in family life is caught in his reference to his mother as “my only dear relative,” whose consolation he had needed and been denied for years, especially when his life was dissolving.

Svetlana could take comfort in the fact that she’d not been responsible for destroying her son’s peace. Now she began to reassess her life in America. It had been ten years since she’d arrived, but sometimes it felt like forever. She’d come through a terrible psychological crisis and felt she was back to herself. She’d begun work on a book that would take the form of a notebook—moments from a human life that would be like talking to oneself. The strange blending of her Russian past and her American present would provide its texture.

That spring of 1977, Donald Jameson from the CIA phoned to say that it was now time for her to think about applying for American citizenship. In 1978 she would have completed the ten-year “quarantine” required for applicants who had once been members of the Communist Party. She began the slow process of filing the necessary documents and getting fingerprinted at the local police station in Carlsbad. That fall she wrote to Jamie to say she was ready, but she wanted the conferral of her citizenship to be more than a symbolic gesture. She’d decided she would become an American citizen in Princeton among people who cared for her. One of the kindest letters of support came from George Kennan. In September 1977, he wrote reassuringly:

I think I understand some of your difficulties as well as anyone could; but my own basic faith in you—in your decency and sincerity—and concern for you in your strange
and, to most people, incomprehensible Odyssey has never been shaken. Your friendship and understanding have also meant a great deal to me, and have been a source of strength to me in the more difficult moments. It will always be so.
¹⁸

In January, she headed back across the continent with Olga, their belongings in tow. She would take the Oath of Allegiance in a New Jersey courtroom, among her friends.

Chapter 28
Lana Peters, American Citizen

An iconic shot of “Generalissimo” Stalin, taken c. 1920.

W
hen Svetlana arrived in Princeton in January 1978, she found a perfect house to rent. She’d become adept at finding houses. At 154 Mercer Street, she was close to downtown and across from a large park, Marquand Park, which made the area feel almost like country. The house was a modest semidetached affair with two bedrooms. On the living room
wall, she hung the decorative straw plate that Joan Kennan had sent from Tonga, and on the other walls she tacked up seven-year-old Olga’s colorful drawings. She moved in her battered furniture, her books and archive of letters, and Olga’s toys. She mowed the lawn and planted flowers and vegetables. Life could begin again.

On June 18, Svetlana filed her application for American citizenship. It amused her that it happened to be Father’s Day. She could imagine her father’s reaction. He would have killed her. She thought her mother would have approved.

Around this time, she found a letter in her Palmer Square post office box addressed care of Princeton University with a return address in Sweden. The letter was from Alexander Kurpel. She felt a sudden cold shudder at seeing the name. The man was now in Sweden! How had he managed to get out of the USSR? She thought the KGB must have sent him on some mission. She put the letter, unopened, back in the mail marked Return to Sender and worried. Was it a coincidence that he had just happened to write when she was applying for her citizenship?

She wrote to George Kennan. “I would not be surprised that Soviets already know about it [her citizenship application] and will use Alex Kurpel and his possible writings abroad to present me in some unpleasant way—the mission that was ten years ago given to Victor Louis…. Anyway, they love to put pressure on me.” She asked Kennan, who was then lecturing in Sweden, to keep a lookout for anything about Kurpel in the Swedish newspapers, and worried that the man would try to come to Princeton to meet her. She protested: “What a game I have to play, my God, and why!?”
¹

Understandably, she was concerned about her examination under oath, which was the next stage in her naturalization. It
was to take place on September 29. Kennan wrote a reference on her behalf to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

I have no hesitation in saying that I find Mrs. Peters in every way fitted, and indeed outstandingly fitted, for American citizenship…. She has never wavered, since her arrival here, in her desire and resolve to become a citizen as soon as the normal procedures permitted. During all this time, she has lived quietly and with dignity here, has avoided publicity and controversy, and has done all in her power to assure that her presence here should not prove a burden or an embarrassment to the United States government.
²

Was this really what she had been doing—trying to avoid being a burden or an embarrassment to the US government? Why should she be an embarrassment? But in any case, she was grateful for Kennan’s support.

When she asked Millie Harford, her old friend from Stuart School, to drive her to Newark and serve as one of her references, Millie replied that she was afraid to drive, that she was a terrible driver. But Svetlana could be very persuasive. They headed up the highway to Newark and were soon lost on the complex turnpikes leading into the city. Svetlana suddenly said, “Millie, we’re going over the bridge. That’s New York!” Millie made a turn on the on-ramp and headed back, the cars honking, as Svetlana rolled down the window and leaned out, shouting, “Excuse us! We’re peasants from the country.” Millie thought this was wonderful. “There must have been angels driving the car.”
³
Somehow they made it to Newark without a police escort.

Svetlana needed witnesses to stand up for her during the examination under oath required of all immigrants. Probably
with Donald Jameson’s help, she managed to locate Corporal Danny Wall, the marine guard who, on that long-ago evening in New Delhi, had admitted her into the American Embassy. She was indeed closing the circle. With a smiling Wall on one side and Millie on the other, she passed her examination without a hitch.

On November 20, Svetlana returned to Newark to take the Oath of Allegiance. When Mrs. Lana Peters was called to the front of the room to sign her documents, she noted the intense gaze on the faces of the ninety fellow applicants watching her. She was thrilled. They scrutinized her with the same intensity they trained on every other new citizen, and saw only someone named Mrs. Peters. Not Stalin’s daughter.

When the ceremony was over, Svetlana gave Millie her citizenship manual—it was marked up and underlined on every page, so carefully had she studied it. Millie remembered Svetlana beaming after the ceremony, though she did complain that when she had taken the Oath of Allegiance, she was bothered by her solemn promise to “bear arms to protect the Republic.” She said, “I could never shoot anyone, in any circumstance.”
⁴
Millie gave a little party for Svetlana in Princeton that afternoon, with George and Annelise Kennan among the guests. There were no announcements in the US press, and the Soviets made no public statements.

If Svetlana thought that in returning, she might find the Princeton she’d known even a few years back, she was wrong. She was no longer the draw she had once been at Princeton dinner parties. She was now a single mother in straitened circumstances and in need of a babysitter.

She was unwelcome in the Russian exile community. When she and Millie Harford drove to Rockland County to visit Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra, Millie remembered Alexandra’s tart rebuke: “She said Svetlana hadn’t done enough with her
life.”
⁵
The American director of Radio Liberty, George Bailey, who knew Svetlana, remembered those words as harsher. When Svetlana declined to join her “in her struggle against communism,” Tolstoya had called her a
svoloch
, a scoundrel. It didn’t matter to Tolstoya that Svetlana felt activism on her part might harm her children in Moscow.
⁶

Svetlana began to feel there was a growing anti-Soviet sentiment pervading Prince ton, the legacy of Cold War propaganda. At school she noticed that Olga was seldom invited to her friends’ homes. She told Joan Kennan she was worried for Olga. Would Olga, too, be forced to live in “the constant shadow of her grandfather’s name”? Svetlana was indignant that people never identified Olga with her American grandfather. “I just don’t know how she’ll live her life,” she said.
⁷

For now, Olga lived in a world of adults—of the “uncles,” like Jamie, who came to visit, or the remaining good friends who sat at the dinner table. “My best buddies in those days were people in their forties and fifties and sixties,” Olga recalled. “The only Russian words I knew were the swear words Mom still used when she was angry at something. When she had her Russian friends over, and all the conversation was in Russian, I would be sitting there going insane, trying to intervene with these awful swear words.”
⁸

Svetlana began to brood over public perceptions of her. Looking back, she now thought that her arrival in the United States had been “vulgar.” She felt she had been presented not as a principled defector who rejected the repressive Soviet government, but rather as a woman selling a book. She believed everyone thought she was still a millionaire. She had promised to give three quarters of her money to charity, and she hadn’t done that.

During her first summer back in Princeton, Bob Rayle and his wife, Ramona, invited her to join them on their vacation in
the Outer Banks of North Carolina. As soon as they met, she and Bob reminisced, as they always did, about that long-ago March day in 1967 when Rayle had been called to the embassy in New Delhi with news of a defector. They replayed the whole thing: his first meeting with the “Russian lady,” her explanation that she was Stalin’s daughter, and George Huey’s response: “You mean
the
Stalin?” They especially loved to redo the Keystone Kops episode when she was never “legally” in Italy. She told Bob she hadn’t really understood why she couldn’t go to the United States. There were simply “various reasons.” Expecting the Soviets to be furious and knowing they would be maligning her, she had focused all her effort on being as pleasant as possible.
⁹