Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Our group met often. We drank alcohol, drank tea, told each other stories. In these moments each person wants to share something. But she usually sat silently; sometimes she smiled and laughed…. She smoked a lot then—she would sit in a chair—she always slouched a bit—and while others talked, she always remained silent. Some difficult processes go on inside a person. She had difficult processes, but they never came out.
Many saw her as a strange person. People like me had to explain to our colleagues: “You understand, she is the daughter of Stalin. She lived in particularly harsh conditions. Always next to her, there was a person from the authorities…. Don’t think of her as being similar to us….”
She was closed-in. She did not like to open up her soul and to throw out everything that was inside of it. And of course, she was the victim of this whole system to a large degree…. She was not like those who were, let’s say, imprisoned and terribly abused by the Soviet authorities…. But the epoch drove right through her because she was Stalin’s daughter; all the pluses and minuses of this system went straight through her.
11
By the end of March 1956, every institute in the country had received a copy of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. When it was read from the podium at the Gorky Institute, many were devastated by its revelations. Svetlana sat quietly in the audience without saying a word, but the extent and cost of her ostracism are clear from a brief encounter. When the soon-to-be-famous writer Andrei Sinyavsky, who also worked as a researcher at the Gorky Institute, approached her after the speech and kindly made the gesture of helping her on with her coat, she burst into tears.
12
Soon she joined Sinyavsky’s research team, compiling documents related to Russian literature of the 1920s and 1930s. The team had access to books banned to the public. She discovered Yevgeny Zamyatin’s dystopian novel
We
, the exuberant literature of the 1920s, and the works of artists arrested and destroyed in the 1930s. This was a narrative of Russian literature more subversive and more candid than the “canonized lies” she’d been forced to study under the spirit of Zhdanovshchina. Dostoyevsky’s novel
Demons
overwhelmed her. She saw it as a prophetic template of her father’s world, in which the revolutionaries, impelled by internal, paranoid conspiracies, climbed the ladder of power over the corpses of their fellows.
13
After his Secret Speech, Khrushchev began to institute a number of political and cultural reforms. In the arts, censorship was relaxed, and some foreign publications were allowed into the country. It was a utopian moment that, borrowing Ehrenburg’s
title, came to be characterized as the Thaw. It suddenly seemed “as if the horrors and rigours of Stalinism were going to have a happy ending…. People were excited and started talking and arguing in a way they hadn’t done in decades…. If you were young and reform minded, … it was something you never forgot.”
14
At the Gorky Institute, Sinyavsky and his friends were obviously a route to a new freedom of thought that Svetlana had not believed was possible.
In this euphoric atmosphere, Svetlana, too, was becoming something of a rebel. A friend at the time, Galina Belaya, recalled that Svetlana used to invite friends to her apartment in the House on the Embankment. In particular, she remembered when they all gathered—Svetlana’s children were there, and she’d had to run off to borrow forks and spoons from the Molotovs—and Andrei Sinyavsky and Anton Menshutin sang their subversive “criminal” songs satirizing the old Soviet “songs of the masses.”
15
Both Galina and Svetlana knew that Sinyavsky was publishing his work abroad under the name Abram Tertz. The KGB now tolerated samizdat (literally, self-publication), more or less, but to smuggle a manuscript to the anti-Soviet West for publication was still strictly forbidden.
In September 1957, Svetlana decided to change her name from Stalina to her mother’s name, Alliluyeva. She said the metallic sound of the name Stalin lacerated her heart. Voroshilov, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, who had been her mother’s friend, showed no surprise and merely said, “You have done right.” Yet the first official who saw her new documents could not believe she had rejected her father’s glorious name: “So they forced you to change your name?” He refused to believe she had initiated the change herself.
16
Even though she had long ago abandoned that edifice, Svetlana was still the princess in the Kremlin and an object of intense scrutiny. In the early days of the Revolution, women, like
men, were often freewheeling in their sexual behavior, but now Svetlana’s hungry, searching, self-directed sexuality made her vulnerable to gossip. Ironically, it was her father who had ushered in this bourgeois puritanism. People gossiped about her two marriages and her “numerous” sexual affairs.
She actually did have a brief love affair with Yuri Tomsky, the son of Mikhail Tomsky, a trade union leader who, when faced with arrest by the NKVD in 1936, had committed suicide. Yuri was raised as an orphan in the Gulag. The gossip regarding them was cruel but showed the degree of contempt she’d inherited as Stalin’s daughter. The writer Boris Runin described the affair in his memoir:
Suddenly, yesterday evening, Svetlana Alliluyeva rolled into Koktebel on her “Pobeda” with Yuri Tomsky. Long ago, young Tomsky was in the same Young Pioneers groups with Svetlana. Obviously—in the Kremlin. And now, after years of serving his time in the camps, he is, apparently, in a marital union with her. Shortly after they married, Svetlana put him in her car and brought him here, to the sea. However, The House of the Arts did not allow them to stay there without a vacation package. They spent the first day on a shore, still empty at that time. They spent it in their car—and what could they do—they had to carry out basic tasks. Svetlana tried to cook something, wash something. And the rumor started going around the House of the Arts which quickly gathered lots of curious onlookers on the shore: a Princess doing chores.
17
Runin was wrong. Svetlana was not married to Tomsky, and the delight taken in her humiliation was mean-spirited: the princess reduced to washing her linen in public while the audience leered.
18
Many believed that Svetlana changed after her father’s death. Her cousin Vladimir remarked, “It took [Svetlana] a while to understand that the majority of people who sought her out did so [not sincerely] but as a means to their own opportunistic ends…. All this fuss and commotion that revolved around her left a negative imprint on her character. Gradually, she understood that she would never experience sincere human feelings and began to search for entertainment and to treat people as if they were toys.”
19
Her cousin Kyra concurred. “Svetlana was regarded as a means of achieving a certain goal … and she knew this. She was barred from the real feelings of people.”
20
However, there were other versions of Svetlana. Thinking about Svetlana’s marriages and love affairs, Stepan Mikoyan would write:
I am sure she was genuinely in love, or believed herself to be in love, with each of them. Every time she got carried away with someone she would say that “this time it is real,” and then be disappointed a few months later. When it happened, she would come to our place nearly every day … and cry it all out on Ella’s shoulder.
21
In the late 1950s, Svetlana met the Jewish poet David Samoilov and fell deeply in love. Only six years older, he was handsome, with an open, remarkably candid face that often bore an ironic smile. He had already garnered a reputation as something of a sage and playboy and would become one of the best poets of the postwar generation, writing some poems about the war but also some expressing an almost mystical sense of nature that must have appealed to Svetlana.
Their first encounter occurred when Stepan Mikoyan’s wife, Ella, gave a birthday party to which she invited Boris Gribanov, her coworker at Children’s Literature Press. Ella and
Stepan lived in a five-room apartment in the House on the Embankment. Gribanov decided to invite his close friend David Samoilov, who was keen to see how the elite of the country lived.
At dinner, Samoilov was surprised to find that his seating companion was Svetlana Alliluyeva. He found her exceedingly attractive, but couldn’t rid himself of the idea that he was actually speaking with Stalin’s daughter.
With Anastas Mikoyan at the head of the table, according to Gribanov, Svetlana and Samoilov were soon engaged in a passionate flirtation:
After only 15 minutes, without paying any attention to Mikoyan himself—for Svetlana it was more than natural; she was used to seeing her father’s comrades as her servants, and for Samoilov the poet, ranks didn’t mean anything at all—in short, after 15 minutes they were kissing passionately. My wife and I left, leaving my friend to his own devices.
22
The image of the couple kissing passionately in public is not in keeping with the rather demure image of Svetlana that most others paint, and Stepan Mikoyan did not recall such an erotic encounter,
23
but whatever happened, Samoilov and Svetlana went home together. The next morning, Boris Gribanov received a phone call at his office. Samoilov was on the other end of the line, “giggling.”
“Borya, we fucked him!”
[Gribanov asked,] “And what do I have to do with it?”
I was appalled.
“No, no, don’t argue. I did it in both our names!”
24
But soon, what started as a “prank,” to use Gribanov’s word, turned into a love affair. Samoilov had not counted on being
drawn in by Svetlana’s intelligence and obvious sincerity. And she must have found his mind thrilling: a lyric poet, a member of the left-wing avant-garde, and like her, more devoted to the muse than to politics.
25
Svetlana still aroused fear in others, however. Gribanov remembered the occasion when he, Samoilov, and Svetlana visited his friend Tak Melamid. It happened to be March 5, the anniversary of Stalin’s death. During the denunciations of Stalin that were inevitably part of the conversation, Svetlana remained quiet. As they were leaving for the elevator, Melamid’s wife asked Gribanov who was the “lovely woman” they had brought and almost had a heart attack on hearing the name Svetlana Alliluyeva.
The next morning, she phoned Gribanov, saying hysterically that they should have been warned. She and her husband had spent a sleepless night trying to remember everything they had said. Gribanov tried to calm her, assuring her that Svetlana was a very cultured woman and was not moved by anything being said about her father, but the habit of fear was so ingrained that the Melamids would not be appeased.
26
The lovers would meet at Svetlana’s Moscow apartment or at her small dacha in Zhukovka. Boris Gribanov was an occasional witness. He usually joined them at a restaurant at the Moscow Race Course on days without races, or they lunched at the restaurant Severny (Northern) in the Maryina Roshcha district. On May 9, the two men liked to gather with their war-veteran buddies at a restaurant called Berlin to celebrate Victory Day. The celebrations would end with Samoilov saying, “Borya, I think it would be appropriate to conclude a day that began so beautifully at the Generalissimo’s daughter’s.”
27
Samoilov and Gribanov took to stopping by Svetlana’s apartment with a bottle of cognac for long quiet conversations. Gribanov noted that there wasn’t a single portrait of Stalin on the walls (by now she must have put the small silver-framed
photo of her father away). There was only a huge photograph of her mother. Though both men were curious, neither of them wanted to exploit Svetlana as a source of information about her father, and he was not often discussed.
There was one problem in Svetlana’s relationship with Samoilov, however—she wanted him to marry her. She would go to the publishing house where Boris Gribanov worked, pull him out of his office, and drive him into the country, always for the same conversation:
“Borya,” she said. “He must marry me.”
“Svetik [as he affectionately called her], … it will never happen.”
“But why?” she asked indignantly.
“Because he’s a poet, and you—a princess,” I answered unequivocally.
28
Gribanov would write in retrospect: “Svetlana was a very emotional, amorous person, ready to give in fully to each new love affair, ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of the man she loved. But at the same time she had an obsession: an obsession that that man, whom she loved, should marry her. This greatly complicated the relationship.”
29
Svetlana’s compulsive need to rush into marriage arose in each of her love affairs. It was as if, regardless of what experience had taught her, she believed marriage would provide a bulwark against otherwise inevitable loss. At core she was an emotional orphan with a tragic fragility that always threatened to sink her. How could it be otherwise? Things would crack when she pulled others into her emotional maelstrom.
In his book
Daily Notes
, published years later, Samoilov wrote about Svetlana. He describes the ending of the relationship in an entry dated November 17, 1960:
Today, Svetl. unexpectedly came over and … threw a glove at me. In the morning on the phone, yet again, I tried to avoid a conversation with her. It is as difficult to talk as it is to get over a sickness or to write an epic poem. She, as always, committed an act of a princess—she appeared in front of me and threw a glove, a volume of [the poet Konstantin] Sluchevsky, and an old cross of Saint George on the table—pitiful souvenirs of my infatuation.