Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Suddenly Svetlana veered off the paved road and headed toward the raging river. A large log formed a bridge to the other side and Svetlana was determined to cross. She told the others, “Don’t worry … nothing is going to happen to me.” “We found ourselves in an awkward position, a woman perched on stilt-like heels was clearly challenging us to cross the wildly gushing river.” Poskrebyshev stood his ground, but Charkviani followed, then was disgusted to discover that all Svetlana wanted was to pick a cluster of frozen flowers on the other bank. She skipped back across the log in her spike heels, while he crawled along the log, terrified of the river raging below. It clearly amused Svetlana to challenge her father’s comrades.
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Charkviani’s version of Svetlana was that she was stubborn and could stand up to her father. A few evenings later at the dacha, in the presence of guests who included Molotov and Mikoyan, Svetlana told her father she wanted to leave for Moscow. Stalin didn’t want to let her go. Charkviani recalled the conversation. Apparently Stalin replied,
“Why rush? Stay for some ten more days. You are not in a stranger’s house, are you? Could it be so very boring here?”
“Father, I have urgent business to look to, please let me go.”
“Let’s stop discussing this, you will stay here, with me.”
We all thought that was the final decision. Yet for Svetlana, Stalin’s words were not final…. Throughout the whole evening, as the ongoing conversation permitted, she would start repeating her request.
Finally Stalin lost patience:
“All right, if that’s what you want—go. I cannot make you stay by force,” he said to his capricious daughter and she happily went to her room, probably to pack her bags.
When we left the dining room, Mikoyan noted: “She has taken after her father; whatever she puts into her heart, she definitely has to do it.”
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But her rebellions were minor. In the fall of 1949, according to Svetlana, her father arranged for her to marry Yuri Zhdanov, son of the late Supreme Soviet chairman and his former second in command, Andrei Zhdanov, who had died the previous summer. She recalled: “My father … always hoped the two families might one day be linked in marriage,” as though it were a marriage of dynasties.
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Stepan Mikoyan concurred that the marriage was Stalin’s idea. He knew—he had been one of the candidates under consideration until he himself married.
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According to Molotov, among his ministers “Stalin loved [Andrei] Zhdanov best. He valued him above everyone else.”
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Zhdanov was humorous, lighthearted, and not a threat. Stalin had made him head of Ideology in charge of carrying out the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign of repression against artists and intellectuals, which he did so ruthlessly that it acquired his name—Zhdanovshchina, the period of Zhdanov.
Stalin was equally attached to Zhdanov’s son Yuri, who,
from early adolescence, often stayed at Stalin’s dacha in Sochi. Yuri was only twenty-eight and had barely completed his degree in chemistry when Stalin appointed him head of the Science Department of the Central Committee. Yuri would later tell Svetlana he hadn’t wanted the job. “Oh, you know those places. The entrance is free but you pay at the exit,” he’d said.
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But one did not refuse Stalin.
Even so, it was remarkable that Yuri stepped so blithely into this marriage; he had already tasted Stalin’s wrath. The previous year, he’d become embroiled in what came to be called the Lysenko Affair.
T. D. Lysenko was a quack agronomist who ruled the world of Soviet botany. Rejecting modern discoveries about genetics, he claimed to have produced new vegetables through a process of hybridization: his most famous was a tomato-potato. He also claimed to be working on a new disease-resistant strain of wheat to solve the wheat shortages that had ravaged the country since the war. It was absurd science, but Stalin loved it, so no one dared challenge Lysenko.
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On April 10, 1948, Yuri gave a lecture that was “mildly critical” of Lysenko’s theories, though he did not mention Lysenko by name. Yuri; his father, Andrei; and two others, who had approved the lecture, were summoned to a meeting of the Politburo in Stalin’s Kremlin office the next day. Stalin was furious. “This is unheard of. They presented a report by the young Zhdanov without the knowledge of the Central Committee.” Stalin is reported to have said, “We must punish the guilty in exemplary fashion. It is necessary to question the father and not the children.”
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Two months later, Andrei Zhdanov, a heavy drinker, suffered a heart attack and was sent to a sanatorium in Valdai to recover. He died at the end of August of a massive coronary thrombosis.
Yuri Zhdanov soon published a letter of apology in
Pravda
,
addressed to Comrade I. V. Stalin, admitting his “mistakes,” which were caused by “inexperience and immaturity.”
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His apology was disingenuous, of course, but the terrified young man put his life ahead of his science. To Svetlana, he said privately, “Now genetics are finished!”
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Clearly Stalin had forgiven him. According to Sergo Beria, who loved to gossip, Stalin played matchmaker. “I like [Yuri],” Stalin told Svetlana. “He has a future and he loves you. Marry him.”
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Svetlana claimed she was tired of resisting her father—he was old now—and she simply gave in. Stalin even added a second floor to his Kuntsevo dacha, apparently expecting the young couple to live with him. When both resisted the idea, he converted the extension into a cinema room. Stalin did not attend their elaborate wedding, but the government arranged their honeymoon on the Black Sea. It went badly. She loved the sea; he got seasick. He loved the mountains; she suffered from altitude sickness.
Relatives and friends felt Yuri made a pleasant impression. Stepan Mikoyan remembered him as “calm and intelligent, but fun at the same time.” He was a good amateur pianist.
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Yuri immediately adopted Svetlana’s son, Joseph, and mother and son took up residence in the Zhdanov family’s spacious apartment in the Kremlin.
A witness to Svetlana’s life at the time was the actress Kyra Nikolaevna Golovko.
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Kyra had first seen Svetlana as a teenager sitting with her father in his official box at the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT) around 1943. Kyra had just returned to Moscow from evacuation in Saratov and was starring in Alexander Ostrovsky’s
Hot Heart.
The actors had been warned that “He” was in the audience. When Kyra caught a glimpse of Stalin’s black mustache out of the corner of her eye, her knees almost gave way. To her relief, Stalin loved the play, and
“watched it, as he did
The Days of the Turbins
—ten or fifteen times and maybe even more.”
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Kyra met Svetlana and Zhdanov in the summer of 1949 when she and her husband Arsenii, who was chief of staff of the navy of the USSR, were vacationing at the same health spa. The couple soon moved into the House on the Embankment. They hadn’t wanted to move to “the Detention Center” from their comfortable three-bedroom apartment, but the suggestion had come from Stalin. As Kyra put it, “[Stalin] asked himself in passing whether or not we wanted to move. He rarely simply asked straight out about these types of things.”
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But it could be fatal not to pick up on his innuendo. The couple were given the five-room apartment of a navy admiral who had been arrested for passing military secrets to the British and Americans.
Kyra was worried about being so visible. Artistic friends were being repressed. Her husband’s former lover, a ballerina at the Bolshoi, had been arrested for having links with foreign intelligence, and Arsenii was fearful that the woman might denounce him. Pervaded by jealousy and betrayal, the theater world was full of “whisperers” as they were called—the informants. If Kyra was selective about whom at the MKhAT she introduced to her spouse, Arsenii was equally selective about his military associates.
At the House on the Embankment, the couple held small parties for family and close friends. The first night that Yuri and Svetlana showed up, Yuri immediately went to the piano and played, inviting Kyra to join him in a duet. The house parties were lively, with singing, dancing, listening to records, and arguing. But Kyra noticed that Svetlana sat in the corner, “somehow pulling away from the whole company,” talking quietly and never dancing. She dressed somewhat strictly in well-tailored dresses of expensive materials, often adorned with
a small diamond or garnet brooch. Kyra noted that she was slender, with a beautiful athletic figure. She wore low heels and stooped slightly, probably because her husband was shorter. As they became friends, Kyra and Svetlana laughed quietly about those evenings at the MKhAT with Stalin in attendance.
One day Svetlana asked Kyra how she had trained her voice. Kyra replied that she had a wonderful teacher, a former aristocrat named Sofia Raczynskaya. Svetlana was excited. She complained that she had, by nature, a very quiet speaking voice, and now, as a graduate student, she had to give lectures at the university. Besides, Yuri had a wonderful voice. “He’s very sociable and loves to sing, while I, as you can see … Yuri’s at the piano, and I sit alone.” Kyra promised to ask her teacher to give Svetlana voice lessons.
When Kyra approached her the next day, Raczynskaya almost had a heart attack. She slumped and her hands shook as she said, “Kyra! What are you doing to me?” Kyra helped her to sit. She explained how nice Svetlana was. After much coaxing, Raczynskaya agreed. “Well, Kyra, for your sake.”
A few days later, Raczynskaya sat waiting for her new pupil to arrive. She lived in a communal apartment on Vorovskogo Street in one very large room filled with antique cabinets, a piano, stacks of books, and boxes of memorabilia. Two hours before the lesson, there was a knock on the door. Three men in civilian dress entered. They searched her room, turning everything upside down. Nothing was said. Before the men left, everything was put back exactly in its right place.
Svetlana, unaware of what had just happened, arrived twenty minutes later carrying flowers, a box of candy, and two bags of food. Raczynskaya had refused to accept payment for the lessons, but even so, she felt a little embarrassed at this largesse. Raczynskaya soon learned not to speak to friends about Svetlana.
When she told one acquaintance about her new pupil, he disappeared from her life for years.
Svetlana didn’t have much of a voice, but Raczynskaya believed all people had the potential to be vocalists; one just had to open them up. The lessons continued. Each time, three plainclothes policemen arrived two hours before Svetlana to “shake up” the room. Each time it was a different three men, but each time they acted identically. Unnerved by this mechanical mimicry, Raczynskaya took to phoning Kyra to report on the trinity of suits. Feeling guilty, Kyra said she would ask Svetlana to stop her lessons. Raczynskaya replied, “No, no! If Svetlana needs this, we will continue.” As Kyra put it, “Sofia Andreyevna, in spite of her age, was a gambling woman.”
This was the way much of the Soviet intelligentsia, especially in Moscow, lived. Spies, informants, secret police were legion. It was never possible to understand what was going on behind the scenes; one only felt the impact. It was like living on a bed of quicksand and pretending that the ground was solid.
It was willful blindness that Svetlana, who placed the highest value on art and literature, should have followed her father’s directive and ended up in the Zhdanov household. As the enforcer of Zhdanovshchina, Yuri’s father had been the official most hated by artists and intellectuals. He’d suppressed the music of Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and Shostakovich as “alien to the Soviet people and its artistic taste” and had banned the work of many writers, including the poet Anna Akhmatova. Of Akhmatova he infamously said, “She is a half-nun, halfharlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer.”
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The Tretyakov Gallery, where Svetlana had once gone with her beloved Aleksei Kapler, mounted a show that winter of 1949 in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday (actually his seventy-first). Every canvas was a grotesque portrait of Stalin: the kindly grandfather, the war hero, the legendary knight.
When she saw the exhibition, Svetlana was devastated. Art was being prostituted to gratify her father. But here she was in the Zhdanov family where Zhdanovshchina had originated. What did she expect?
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The whole marital exercise proved a disaster, another mistake. Even after Zhdanov’s death the previous year, the Zhdanov family kept up the rhetoric of
partiinost
(party-mindedness). The apartment was filled with war booty—vases, rugs, works of art—carted back from Germany after the war. “The most orthodox Party spirit reigned in the house I lived in, but … it was all hypocritical, a caricature purely for show.”
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Svetlana found that she detested her mother-in-law, who, she felt, had her son tied to her apron strings. Yuri called her “the wise old owl.”
Svetlana was soon pregnant again. Through the entire first winter of her marriage, she was very ill. She entered the hospital that spring of 1950 and remained there one and a half months. It turned out that Svetlana and her husband had incompatible blood types, which caused her to develop toxicosis affecting her kidneys. She almost died. Her baby daughter was delivered in May, two months premature, and after the delivery Svetlana spent another month in the hospital.
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