Stalin's Daughter (77 page)

When
The Long Shadow
was launched, Richardson invited Svetlana’s cousin Kyra and Leonid’s daughter Olga to come to London. Svetlana refused not only to attend the launch but also to see her relatives. Everyone thought this was extremely petty of her; she was behaving vindictively, just like her father. But ironically, anger over Richardson’s book was not her motive.

When Kyra got back to Moscow, she learned the reason Svetlana had shut her out. Kyra’s family reported that they’d had several irate calls from Svetlana while she was away. There was a new scandal. Before her departure for London, a British journalist had interviewed Kyra and reported that she was “looking for evidence that Stalin had murdered his wife Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva.” Though Kyra was livid at the time—“I never said the things ascribed to me”—and her relatives called her nonstop advising her to publish a rebuttal, she did nothing: “The pie had already been cooked.” Svetlana read the interview in the British press and could not forgive Kyra
for such gossip. “I can only imagine her reaction to accusations that Stalin murdered her mother!” Kyra recalled, but in fact she knew Svetlana’s reaction. The night before Kyra and her niece left London, they found an envelope slipped under the door of their hotel room. There was no note, only Kyra’s photograph clipped from a London newspaper, from which the face had been cut out.
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In 1995, when the Kellys went to their cottage in the Lake District and Svetlana accompanied them, they asked their friend Mary Burkett if they could bring her to tea. Burkett lived in an extraordinary heritage home called Isel Hall just outside Penrith. Svetlana immediately fell in love with Isel Hall, and, by the end of the tea, asked if she could come and look after Mary, who was only two years older. She could be her cook.
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Burkett, as outspoken and prickly as Svetlana, demurred. But one of Svetlana’s most important friendships soon evolved.

Mary Burkett was an unusual woman. In 1962, when she was thirty-eight, she and her friend Genette Malet de Carteret, both amateur archaeologists, decided to drive their Land Rover from the Lake District to Persia in search of the legendary lost castle at Girdkuh. The trip was dangerous. Near Doğubeyazit in Turkey, the two women came under rifle fire when the local police mistook them for smugglers. The whole trip by car and ferry took seven and a half months. When Burkett returned to England, she turned herself into a world expert on the ancient craft of felt making.
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In their future correspondence, Burkett addressed Svetlana as “Dear Nomad.” Though Svetlana did not travel far, she was always discarding her past. “Attachments create sorrow, the oldest Buddhist axiom,” she told Mary.
⁴⁸
Svetlana called Mary “Dear Warrior.” She admired her as a fighter who had shaped her own life.

While Mary undertook her travels to conferences on felt
making or went hunting for new specimens in Switzerland, Poland, Syria, Yemen, or Georgia, Svetlana looked on longingly from afar. She told Mary she had so wanted to visit Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt—and India again. She sent Mary names of contacts and linguistic experts, spoke knowledgeably of Tibetan felt patterns, talked of the yurts of her childhood at Zubalovo, and noted the succession of rugs sent as gifts to the Kremlin that marked the politics shaping her young life: Caucasian rugs when her mother was alive; then Persian rugs during the war; and after 1949, Chinese rugs.

She occasionally took on political topics with Mary. “Machiavellian politicking everywhere,” she wrote in one letter. From what she read and heard on the radio, things were totally out of control in Russia. Her volcanologist daughter was going unpaid, like all the scientists, and not responding to her letters. She was worried that the mixture of national humiliation, anger, inferiority complex, and cocky talk about the rest of the world would lead to some form of aggressive nationalism. The West must remember that Russia was an old culture with great dignity. Pride was an important but dangerous engine. “Being Russian means never saying sorry,” she told Mary. “Even today, Russians are incapable of grief and atonement for Stalin’s crimes…. That failure to face the bad bodes ill for the future. I see all things from the dark side. Please do forgive me for that.”
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Svetlana was working with a new idea—to collect the four books she’d written into one volume, which she would call “Enchanted Pilgrimage.” It would be the summary of her life’s story. When a reporter asked her in 1996 if she was happy, she replied:

What is happiness? I am satisfied, and when you are 70 years old that is not bad. I have had very good times and very bad. I never consider myself as a martyr. Why should I complain? Complaining is the worst thing in the world. It does you no good. I may have a cross to bear but I am not suffering.
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Chapter 35
My Dear, They Haven’t Changed a Bit

Svetlana and Olga celebrate New Year’s Eve together in 1999.

I
n mid-September 1995, Svetlana decided to move to Cornwall, where she and her daughter Olga had spent several vacations in the early 1980s. She was discovering that the support she received from the Carr-Gomm Society was no longer enough to manage a reasonable life in London, but an affiliated charity called Abbeyfield ran several residences in Cornwall. She imagined the small village of Mullion on the east shore of Mount Bay would offer beautiful nature walks and silence. No
crowds. The residence, called Melvin House, was shared among eight elderly women, with a housekeeper. Perched on a cliff, it felt more like a family-style boardinghouse than a charity home and even had a guest bedroom for friends of the residents who visited. Settling into her small room with her ten pots of geraniums, she wrote to Mary Burkett that she felt “very old, very old inside. I mean sometimes I feel all the things I carry within.”
¹
She wondered how Mary could live with all the ghosts roaming through Isel Hall. Her own ghosts never left her.

But then, at the beginning of 1996, she had an unexpected chance to exorcise at least some of her ghosts. In 1995, her cousin Vladimir Alliluyev wrote a memoir,
Chronicle of One Family
, and sent it to Svetlana, requesting that she translate it into English. Vladimir was the son of Nadya’s sister Anna and Stanislav Redens. When she read his book, she was appalled. Vladimir was trumpeting a nostalgic return to Russia’s Stalinist past and the rebirth of Soviet power in the guise “of a family album of Stalin’s relatives! What a dark nightmare!”
²
She dragged out her Russian typewriter and wrote a long review of the book, which she sent to Olga Rifkina, who managed to get it broadcast on Russian radio.
³

That her cousin was trying to whitewash the past was to her unbelievable. She wrote her review in eloquent Russian and then hurriedly translated it into English to send it to British and American friends, hoping it might be published in the West. (It wasn’t.) She wrote as if in a state of shock. Could this really be Volodya?

Volodya, whose father had been arrested and perished in prison (rehabilitated posthumously)? Volodya, whose mother, a totally apolitical woman of weak health (she had TB) had to endure six years of solitary confinement? Is this Volodya who had himself enough of supervision from
NKVD, GPU, MGB and whatever else have been the names of those agencies, as had indeed our whole much-suffering family? Is this the same “Volodey” who was witty in his younger age … and was not afraid to laugh at this whole world of oppression, lies, and mortal danger …?

She summarized Volodya’s claims with disgust: “Let us also forgive Stalin for all the disregard of norms of democracy and laws” because he was supposedly “stern but just, something like Ivan the Terrible,” and was “the great patriot of the motherland and the greatest war commander.” She shuddered at the idea of a resurgence of the cult of her father.

She protested Volodya’s efforts to whitewash the record of her brother Vasili—Vasili who had had the air force general Alexander Novikov thrown into prison simply for questioning him, who “despised the law” in his mistreatment of his first wife and children, and who’d gone on drunken binges. Now he was to be forgiven because “he is ours.”

But the deepest blow to Svetlana was that Volodya said her mother’s suicide was the result of “her sickness.” She answered, “Enough, Volodya. It seems to me that I am in a dark, solitary hall of the Kremlin where, slowly, the accusers of my MOTHER appear with their verdict. SHE WAS, in truth, THE VICTIM of the system.” Volodya had expunged her mother from history as merely “some sick woman.”

Svetlana believed Volodya didn’t write this
apologist
book alone, and in fact some members of the Alliluyev family would later concur that there were odd insertions, possibly as a condition of publication.
⁴
The book included “A Letter of Gratitude from Peasants to Redens,” Volodya’s father. What gratitude, Svetlana wanted to know, when the Chekists like Redens used brutal violence to force collectivization in the villages? The book suggested that the purges of the 1930s and of the war
years, including the exile of entire ethnic groups, had been a “lawful defense of the rear”—and then blamed the KGB’s Yezhov and Yagoda for any excesses, which had been “corrected by the justice of Lavrenty Beria.” “How could Volodya write such things?” she asked. His own parents were victims of “our most dangerous relative of all—uncle Josef.”

Her final damning comment was that Volodya emerged from his pages as a “convinced anti-Semite.” Yulia Meltzer (wife of Yakov), Aleksei Kapler, and old Morozov (Svetlana’s first husband’s father)

were all sent to prison by that same mighty relative of ours [Stalin]. Volodya has not a word of compassion for them. Has he totally forgotten those deeds? And what about all the ugly anti-Semitism of my brother Vasili who called my son a “zhidenok” [little Yid]. Grandfather and Grandmother Alliluyev had no such attitudes. These came later, introduced in the later years by the very same OGPU, VChK, MVD, KGB—by their cruel, middle-class, fascist trends….

Escape into the past is the worst sickness that can ever happen to us…. That wonderful past that suddenly sent out its deadly whiffs, like an opened grave. Why does our Volodya need that?
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She wrote to Philippa Hill that under her cousin’s name, the Communist apparatchiks were trying to restore the “ancient regime.” Millions of Russians were now longing for “the Glorious Past under that wise man, our unique incomparable leader (my father).” “What a lovely Superpower we’ve been…. One cannot blame them. They were duped and duped.”
⁶

The very next month, a disparaging article appeared in the London
Times.
Quoting the words of an Italian priest in the popular weekly
Chi
, the journalist Richard Beeston, stationed
in Moscow, wrote, “Now at the age of 70, Svetlana Alliluyeva has reportedly decided to spend her remaining years as a nun, in her words, ‘to atone for the sins of my father.’ “
⁷
Apparently a Catholic nun in Chicago had revealed Svetlana’s address in Cornwall. Svetlana wrote to Philippa Hill that these reports made her sound like a silly old fool. Why? The timing of the
Times
article was too coincidental. “I must assume this is the KGB’s reply to my kick to them!”
⁸
Though many might call her paranoid, Svetlana could be forgiven for believing that, Victor Louis being dead, the KGB had found someone else to plant embarrassing anecdotes about her in the international press.

Within a week, she was outed in Cornwall. David Jones, a journalist for the
Daily Mail
, tracked her down.

The teashop doorbell tinkles softly, and a squat, heavy-set old woman, with rheumy eyes and broken red veins ribboning her cheeks, peers suspiciously inside. It is a crisp winter morning in a remote West Country seaside village, and the place is deserted. Even so, she pulls down her black beret, raises the collar of her camel overcoat, and requests a table in the most conspiratorial corner…. Svetlana Peters (née Stalin)—her voice a strange mixture of drawing-room English and East European idioms—says, “Tell me please how did you find me here?”

This was the description of a bag lady. Svetlana had lost her possessions, her looks, her identity. Only her dignity and self-will were left. Jones quoted her disclaimer about her supposed retreat to an Italian convent. “I don’t need a priest. I am fine on my own.” She concluded the interview abruptly. “Enough now…. And listen to me—when we walk out of here, you go left and I go right.”
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