Stalin's Daughter (66 page)

Utechin became the enemy. Had Berlin palmed her off on his secretary? Perhaps the woman had not delivered her letters to Berlin or had not offered him a clear portrait of her circumstances.
She wrote in a rage to Berlin: “I fail to understand what went wrong.” She had expected more from a humanitarian of his stature. “May God give you full justice, in accordance with your false promises and your hypocritical assurances. Your Secretary is simply a phony bitch, an intelligence agent (be careful!) and a liar.
I hate the day when
I talked with you in New York in January 1982: you had [
sic
] messed up my life.”
²⁵

Svetlana was clearly out of control, but one could not raise her expectations and dash them without consequence. Berlin had offered friendship; she had a typical Russian understanding of friendship. It was all-consuming and without borders. She expected the world from Berlin. It didn’t seem to occur to her that his support had been based on a casual kindness; he had his own very busy professional life with its own priorities. When feeling hurt, Svetlana would lose all restraint. She had even admitted earlier to Berlin that, once she had begun “to make my own speculations, trying to ‘visualize’ things, … I get carried away and everything becomes messed up completely.”
²⁶

Berlin was shocked at what he called “her bitter, violent, and very wounding letter.”
²⁷
He had done what he had offered to do: he had recommended her to his publisher and written a letter to intervene with the Home Office. She replied more temperately that she never expected to make him a “scapegoat” for all her misfortunes, but she did expect more understanding from someone like him. He ought to have shown more magnanimity and generosity. She was bitterly disappointed.
²⁸

By the summer, she seemed to have regained her equanimity. She’d been reading Jung’s
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
and was fascinated by his theory of the necessary integration of the persona and the self in the evolution of the psyche. She wrote to Berlin to apologize for her “very bad manners and lots of ill temper.” It was too late in life for her to change her
Georgian
temper, as she called it, but she felt ashamed. She had become
“mad in a
more hot way
. I
became mad with too many people
, here in GB, there in US…. This state of mind being unhealthy, I could not cool it off quickly.” But now she could see herself in her “
ridiculous pose
.”
²⁹
Had Svetlana known, however, what was going on behind the scenes, she would have been apoplectic, even frightened. Vera Suvchinskaya Traill, a well-known Russian émigré and writer whose grandfather had been minister of war in Russia’s provisional government before the October Revolution, lived in Cambridge and had taken a proprietary interest in Svetlana and her daughter.

Traill wrote to Sir Isaiah Berlin that March to ask how long he’d known Svetlana. She had met Svetlana only the previous September, “but even in these few months my feeling is that she is getting worse—acute paranoia, obviously inherited from … (three guesses).” Traill was worried for Svetlana’s daughter, “being at the mercy of a mother in such a state.”
³⁰
In Traill’s view, Olga had to be saved. She explained to Berlin:

We all feel helpless, particularly as S. has by now lost every friend she had here. She lives under the delusion (sincere of course—delusions always are) that the world is conspiring against her…. If you need any evidence in support of the paranoia diagnosis, I can send you some samples of the sort of letters she writes—“international intrigues,” “KGB agents,” “triple agents,” etc., etc. In her Dad’s days, people were shot for less.
³¹

Traill had convinced herself of her own high-minded motives but in fact would not have been interested in Olga’s welfare if Svetlana were not Stalin’s daughter. Sublimated within her concern was an unacknowledged vindictiveness. Berlin wrote back to say that Olga’s security was indeed worrying, but he couldn’t help. He had broken with Svetlana. He suggested
that Traill write to Olga’s father, Mr. Peters, who lived in some kind of commune of architects in Tucson, Arizona.

Oblivious of this gossip, Svetlana seemed to have emerged from what she called her “unhealthy state of mind.” She bought a new residence, saying it would be cheaper than paying rent. By June, she was sending friends her new address—55 Bateman Street, Flat 3. The apartment overlooked the Cambridge botanical gardens and was a bit closer to the center of town. It had one large room, which served as living room, dining room, and study, and adjacent bedrooms. She set up her pine desk with her typewriter and her bookshelves with her photographs of a young Joseph and Katya. She had a few of her possessions, including her two lovely Navaho rugs, shipped from America, where they had been stored with friends. She and Olga went to the Scilly Isles for a two-week vacation, spending time on the beach and visiting Tresco Abbey. By now she had almost exhausted her small savings. Everything seemed in a strange kind of suspension.

That summer Lancer International Press in India finally published
The Faraway Music.
Lancer paid very little, but Svetlana was still pleased. She wrote to Rosa Shand, “I HAVE Author’s copies in my hands: you know the feeling when one sees one’s ms finally PRINTED.”
³²

And she had a second reason for joy. She had recently received a letter from Joseph telling her that the Soviet government was willing to give him permission to travel to Finland—he was certain the government would let him out. She merely had to get herself to Finland and they would hold each other. Svetlana told Olga that she would soon be meeting her brother.

Svetlana rushed to speak with her friend Jane Renfrew. She asked, “If my son comes from Moscow, would you see him?” and was delighted when Renfrew replied, “Of course.” But soon she slipped from giddy euphoria to the depths of a darkness
she knew all too well. She told Renfrew that Joseph had telephoned and said, “Mother, I haven’t seen you in seventeen years. I’m seriously ill. I really want to see you.”
³³

The thought occurred to her that she should go to Moscow to see him. She chose to mull over the idea with only one friend, Philippa Hill. She told Philippa that Joseph was in the hospital. He needed her. Philippa had children and grandchildren. She must know how Svetlana felt. All Philippa said was, “Well, I think you have to go, don’t you?” though she worried for Olga, who didn’t speak a word of Russian.
³⁴

There had already been hints of Svetlana’s loneliness and disillusionment. She’d written to her friend Jerzy Kosinski in September, “If I ever defect back to Moscow, no one should be surprised…. What I confronted in this so-called Free World, was enough to kill … the enthusiasm of even a strong man. I am NO strong man, and I have no ‘Nerves of Steel’ [alluding to Stalin]…. My son is my only friend…. To be with Joseph is my only wish, which I still cannot achieve. He will fail in the Free World as I did, so the only way is to go back.”
³⁵

Earlier, in March 1984, she had told a journalist, “Sometimes it’s almost a superhuman effort not to drop everything and run and get a ticket to go and see them. Sometimes I don’t care what the regime is. I just want to see my grandchildren.”
³⁶
Yet there was Olga to consider. Svetlana felt it was ironic that she had blood ties in both countries, but couldn’t find a home. Still, she concluded bravely, if unconvincingly, “Home I have inside me. I take it with me like a snail wherever I go.”
³⁷

But the truth was, she had reached the end of her endurance. She had very little money, certainly not enough to last more than a few months. She was stranded in a foreign country, but a retreat to the United States offered no change in her prospects. She had not found a paying publisher and seemed to be washed
up as a writer. She could no longer afford Olga’s education, and her sense of herself as a mother, based on her own mother’s model, was that she must provide her daughter an excellent education. Most devastating of all was that her son was ill in the hospital and he’d asked her to come. She knew that her defection back to the Soviet Union would be shocking, but she no longer cared whether she provoked another international incident. Her personal reasons trumped those of the state. Perhaps a part of her even wanted to give the finger to those she felt had let her down.

On September 11, 1984, Svetlana took the train from Cambridge to London to track down the Soviet Embassy—the address was unlisted for security reasons. In her handbag, she carried a letter to the Soviet ambassador requesting permission to return to the USSR. When she identified herself and finally made it through the security checks, a man in the familiar brown suit of a Soviet official greeted her noncommittally and accepted her letter, telling her it would be sent to Moscow. “We do not decide anything here, you understand.” She should come back in a week.
³⁸

A week later, the chargé d’affaires greeted her enthusiastically and invited her for tea. He said she could return immediately. Plans were already set. They must avoid Heathrow Airport, where she might be recognized; Gatwick would be better. The embassy would fly her and her daughter to Greece, where they could stay for a few days at the Soviet Embassy, and then the plane would take them to Moscow. Nothing ever happened this quickly in the Soviet Union. Svetlana demurred. She said she couldn’t leave so soon. Her daughter was still in school and she hadn’t yet told her. They must wait for Olga’s midterm break. The chargé d’affaires reluctantly agreed that she could depart at the end of October.

On the train back to Cambridge, Svetlana sat in a daze, watching the trees and houses of the Essex countryside float past the window, and wondered how Olga would react. She knew, once again, that she had started a process that seemed impossible to stop. Did it occur to her that there were eerie echoes of her precipitate flight seventeen years back?

At first she told Olga they were taking a trip to Greece, but as Olga watched her mother sorting through their belongings and destroying her papers and correspondence, she knew something was afoot. The night before they were due to leave, Svetlana finally told her daughter they were flying to the USSR to visit her brother and sister.

Olga was furious. Why hadn’t her mother told her? How long would they be staying? She hadn’t even been allowed to say good-bye to her friends. They had a bitter fight, and for the first time Svetlana relented. “OK,” she said. “We’re not going.”
³⁹
And then she woke Olga at three a.m., just before the airport taxi was due to arrive.

As she locked the door to her new flat behind her, the fridge still half-full of food, and she and Olga climbed into the airport taxi with only the luggage they could carry, Svetlana tried to avoid facing the fact that she had handled this badly. She should have better prepared her daughter, but what choice did she have? It was impossible for Olga to tell her friends. If the news leaked out that Stalin’s daughter was returning to the USSR, it would be blasted in headlines all over the international press. The British or the Americans might have tried to stop her.

All Olga could think was,
This is it. Mom’s going to love Joseph now.
⁴⁰

Svetlana had invited Rosamond Richardson for lunch the
next day. Richardson trudged over to Bateman Street with her two young sons and knocked on the door. There was no reply. She checked her agenda to confirm that she had the right date, the right time. It was very bizarre. Svetlana was simply gone.

Svetlana had left instructions with a real estate agent to sell her new Bateman Street flat. It fell to Philippa Hill to empty it. As she sorted things into boxes, Philippa decided to mail Svetlana’s beloved Navaho rugs to the Soviet Union, but they, along with almost everything else, simply disappeared.

Chapter 31
Back in the USSR

Upon her return to Moscow in 1984, Svetlana held a press conference at the offices of the Soviet Women’s National Committee.

I
t was late October 1984 when Svetlana and Olga left behind autumn in England and slipped utterly unnoticed into the hot, dusty Athens airport and took a taxi to the Soviet Embassy. There a young diplomat, Yuri Andropov, son of the recently deceased Soviet leader, and his fashionable wife welcomed them. At first Svetlana was comforted by the presence of what seemed to her a youthful generation of new Soviet officials, until she was invited to tea with the usual grim, gray bureaucrats, who
elicited flashbacks of her meeting in India seventeen years ago with Ambassador Benediktov. Only the high-spirited Olga relieved the artificiality of the situation. Olga was busy in Athens.