Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Olga Redlova, the daughter of the chemist Fyodor Volkenstein, who was the secret interlocutor for Svetlana’s
Twenty Letters to a Friend
, recalled: “My father had the manuscript of this book. I remember that when Svetlana left, Osia [Joseph] called my father and asked if he had anything left of Svetlana’s things. And my father said, ‘Yes, I have. I have a small bag in the hallway, wrapped in newspapers, but I’ve never opened it. I don’t know what’s in it.’ Well, of course it was Svetlana’s manuscript. Joseph came and picked up the manuscript.”
16
When the KGB came to visit Joseph and Katya at the House on the Embankment, the agents confiscated not just the manuscript, but also family photographs from Svetlana’s locked desk.
Svetlana spent her time in Fribourg brooding in the convent garden. Robert Rayle had bought her Boris Pasternak’s
Doctor Zhivago
in Rome—it had finally been published in Russian in Milan. This was the first time she was reading it, for she’d never managed to get a samizdat copy in Moscow. She walked among the thuja trees in the garden and wept: over the book, over her children, over her lost country. And wrote a public letter “To Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” who had died in 1960.
In it she lamented her “beloved, long-suffering baffled Russia,” where she had left her children and friends to the “unbearable Soviet life, a life so unlike anything else that it can never be imagined by Russians abroad, whether friendly or hostile.”
She thought of her friend Andrusha (Andrei Sinyavsky), exiled for seven years in a concentration camp, carrying buckets of water,
his clothes in tatters, like Pasternak’s character Yuri Zhivago. Nothing had changed. “As before, it is given to gendarmes and policemen to be the first critics of a writer’s work…. Now you can be tried for a metaphor, sent to a camp for figures of speech!” The “Party hypocrites and Pharisees! … these miserable compilers of dossiers and denunciations” were still in control.
17
What had she done to her children, who would be subjected to slanders and possibly worse? She begged them: “Let them all condemn me—and you condemn me as well, if that will be easier for you (say whatever you like: it will only be empty words, and they will not hurt me), only do not reject me in your hearts.”
18
Svetlana felt lacerated to the bone. She wondered if she’d really understood that she was losing her children when she’d made her impulsive decision not to return to Russia. “Probably not.”
19
But when she read
Doctor Zhivago
, the reality hit like an electric shock. The tragedy of separation from a child imposed by a regime that knew no constraints was also Zhivago’s and Lara’s story.
In mid-April Alan Schwartz flew back to Switzerland. The contract with the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst was now ready for Svetlana’s signature. He landed in Frankfurt and took the train to Basel, feeling “fairly spooked out, looking around all the time to see who was there.” The Russians, the Indians, the international press, and, by now, other international publishers were looking for Svetlana. Antonino Janner was waiting for Schwartz when he stepped off the train. Janner drove him to meet her. That night over dinner, Svetlana warmed to her young lawyer. She kept telling the thirty-four-year-old Schwartz that he “reminded her of her brother, Yakov, who had died in a German internment camp.”
20
Two Swiss lawyers, William Staehelin and Peter Hafter, joined her legal team, and in a two-day meeting, they reviewed the contracts regarding her manuscript.
Greenbaum had invented for Svetlana a company called
Patientia, in Liechtenstein, where taxes, of course, were low. On April 20, Svetlana signed the rights in her unpublished manuscript to Copex Establishment, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. The contract read in part:
NOW, THEREFORE, in consideration of an amount of US $1,500,000.00 (US Dollars One Million Five Hundred Thousand) MRS. ALLILUEVA hereby assigns to COPEX ESTABLISHMENT all of her right, title and interest throughout the world in and to the above manuscript….
The price of US $1,500,000.00 shall be paid as follows:
• a down payment of US $73,875.00 has been made today;
• the balance of US $1,426,125.00 is paid in notes which have been delivered to MRS. ALLILUEVA today.
21
A million and a half was an astonishing sum back then, but the deals with Harper & Row, the serial rights with the
New York Times
and
Life
, and the foreign sales had been exceedingly lucrative. Svetlana was to be paid in installments. Alan Schwartz recalled: “I think the reason for the notes must have been taxes. Because a note comes due, you’re taxed on the money you get. It might’ve been a way to spread out the payments—instead of paying $750,000 in taxes on $1.5 million.”
22
Even Greenbaum must have been surprised at the amount of money Svetlana’s book was bringing in. Only Churchill’s memoirs had sold for more. Friends sent letters to Edward Greenbaum congratulating him on his coup in representing Stalin’s daughter.
Svetlana would look back and say she had understood nothing. What did she know about money, about contracts, about American law? When she asked the lawyers what Copex was, she was told it was a “legal body.” Fresh out of the USSR, she
couldn’t conceive what a
legal body
might be.
23
She didn’t even know what a bank account was. She sat passively through the two-day meeting trying to follow the discussions, her English barely adequate with regard to her lawyers’ legalese. All she could think was that she must not create problems. She must not be sent back to the Soviet Union. She had to sign everything the lawyers gave her.
When she’d walked through the impoverished streets of Kalakankar just a few weeks back, she’d imagined setting up a hospital in Brajesh Singh’s name. She now told Greenbaum she wanted to use her money to do this. As Alan Schwartz remembered, “We were very skeptical about setting up a foundation in some hospital in India in remembrance of her former lover, but we acceded to her wishes.”
24
Two trusts were established: The Alliluyeva Charitable Trust and the Alliluyeva Trust. Her charitable trust would eventually pay $200,000 to build the Brajesh Singh hospital, with $250,000 set aside in investments to pay for the hospital’s maintenance. The rest of Svetlana’s money went into the Alliluyeva Trust, from which she received $1,500 every month to live on. She felt this was more than enough.
25
Robert Rayle had warned her that her manuscript was all that stood “between her and the poorhouse.” It had turned her into a millionaire.
This was possibly the worst fate that could have befallen her. She was no longer a principled defector who had rejected Communism; she was a very wealthy woman. “What did she intend to do now that she was rich?” was one of the first questions journalists asked when she eventually reached the United States.
The propaganda blowback was intense. The commissars were delighted to point out that Svetlana had always been
only after the money.
Alliluyeva “is a first-class slanderer of the Soviet system and even of her own father. We will only emphasize that
dollars will hardly bring success to the woman without a country, who abandoned home, country, and family and pleased herself in the services of anti-Communism.”
26
It was suddenly remembered that in 1941 the Germans had dropped propaganda leaflets on Moscow claiming Stalin was secreting huge sums of money in Swiss banks, ready to flee. No one had believed this at the time, but now his daughter had stopped in
Switzerland
.
27
Even ordinary Soviet citizens were disconcerted.
The rumors made it to Washington. On June 15, in an article entitled “$300 Million in Gold for Svetlana,” the
Washington Observer Newsletter
wrote that Svetlana herself had insisted on stopping in Switzerland. “The real reason is that she wanted to pick up the $300 million in gold deposited in a Berne bank!” The article claimed that “old ‘bloody Joe’ Stalin” had stashed it in a secret numbered account during the siege of Moscow, and had named Svetlana as “sole beneficiary.” It was reported as a fact, confirmed by “an American intelligence source,” that “Svetlana submitted documentary evidence proving her true identity…. The Swiss bank officials have ruled that she has established a valid claim to the Stalin fortune.”
28
For now, Svetlana was unaware of the gossip her newfound wealth was provoking.
The Swiss were pressuring the Americans to take Svetlana off their hands. Although they found her to be undemanding and were fond of her, her security was a burden to their small Foreign Office. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised President Lyndon Johnson that he now believed Svetlana should be permitted to enter, but strictly as a private visitor.
29
The State Department informed the media that she was traveling to the United States on a six-month tourist visa at the invitation of her American legal firm, Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst, in order to consult her publishers about her book. Even the Soviet journalists
at the Foreign Correspondence Center in Moscow said this was a “diplomatic master stroke.”
30
The State Department had kept its hands clean.
Very early on the morning of April 21, Alan Schwartz was picked up at his hotel. Svetlana was already in the car. They were scheduled to take a Swissair flight to New York under assumed names. Schwartz recalled: “The airport was surrounded by security guards in uniforms with guns. Svetlana was determined to make sure she got out of there in one piece, and I was too.” On the flight, Schwartz warned her, “They’re going to ask you to say something when you get there. Do you want me to say something for you?” She replied, “ ‘No, no, I want to speak for myself.”
31
But Greenbaum had already hired a public relations firm to handle Svetlana, and Kennan had drafted the statement she was to make on disembarking:
I have come to this country because I am faced with the problem of making a new life outside Russia and would like to make some acquaintance with the United States, but also because it is here that I intend to publish material I have written, and I would like to be in close contact with my publishers. I do not know how long I shall remain here…. I am tired, now, from the journey, and I would like to have a few days of privacy before I meet with the press again.
32
Kennan’s job was to keep Svetlana from saying anything that might compromise American relations with the Soviet Union. But Kennan did not yet know Svetlana. She didn’t intend to use his carefully crafted diplomatic speech. She wanted to be very clear about why she left the Soviet Union. It was not simply to publish a book, but rather to protest her treatment and
the treatment of Russian artists and intellectuals at the hands of the current Soviet government.
In placating the Soviets, had the American government distorted her poignant rejection of life under Communism?
The British Foreign Office thought so. Because the BBC was planning to broadcast the Russian text of Svetlana’s “To Boris Leonidovich Pasternak,” the Foreign Office scrambled to determine its “policy about the Svetlana story.” Many were puzzled about why the Americans were “taking so restrained a line.” On May 1, nine days after her arrival, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs, sent a secret memo to twenty-three heads of mission at the Foreign Office:
Miss Stalin’s Defection:
The defection of Miss Stalin seems to me to be something of quite a different order from the normal world of defection in which one scores plusses and minuses, and tries to exploit the plusses and, by a deep professional yawn, to submerge the minuses.
If any person said to you in 1950 that in seventeen years Miss Stalin would defect to the West, you would rightly have considered that person certifiable. She has now done it, with impressive smoothness and conviction. She has made it clear … that the reason for her defection … is because she can no longer accept a society in which you are told that there is only one point of view from which politics, and indeed life itself, must be judged…. This may not be a new doctrine, but its relaunching by the daughter of Stalin, in the fiftieth anniversary of the Communist Revolution in Russia, is immensely important, indeed so important that quite a lot of people haven’t noticed it.
33
Svetlana could have told the State Department that its efforts to placate the Kremlin were pointless. Nothing the Americans could say would ever convince the Soviets that the CIA had not “prepared, arranged, and financed” Svetlana’s defection.
34
At the deepest level, Soviet officials needed to believe she’d been kidnapped. They could not accept the idea that she had acted freely, and so their first response would be to try to kidnap her back. In an interview held later that August at the home of Harper & Row’s executive vice president, she explained this belief to journalists puzzled by the Kremlin’s fury:
They cannot believe that an individual, a person, a human being, can make decisions on his own. They still cannot believe that I left Russia just by my own decision, that it wasn’t a plot, it wasn’t organized, there wasn’t help. They cannot believe it. They only believe in actions which are ruled by some organization—the collective, yes—and they are always very angry to see that although they have tried to make people in Russia for fifty years think the same way, have the same opinion … the same political point of view, … when they see that the whole work done for fifty years was in vain and people still have something of their own, they are very angry.
35