Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
When Louis was freed from the labor camp, his lavish lifestyle—a Volkswagen, foreign suits, meetings at the American Embassy cocktail bar—should have been enough to get him arrested as a spy, but nothing happened. He was soon working abroad for the
London Evening News
and eventually the
Evening Standard
, where, presumably, much of his work was to leak KGB-doctored documents to the English press. But he seemed able to play both sides. He was also involved in the publication of dissident manuscripts forbidden in the Soviet Union. By 1965 he had already accumulated enough wealth to buy a lavish country house in the writers’ colony of Peredelkino outside Moscow.
Victor Louis came up with an ingenious strategy to sabotage Svetlana’s book. Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei, whom Louis later approached with an offer to sell his father’s memoirs in the West, had the story from Louis himself. “Every step Svetlana
took resonated loudly in the corridors of power in the Kremlin.” With the prospect of an October publication looming, “Vitaly Yevgenyevich proposed, on his own responsibility, as a private person, to make some cuts in the book to remove those passages that most alarmed the Kremlin and to bring the book out a few months earlier than the official launch date.”
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When the real book came out, it would be old news. Louis informed the KGB that the proceeds from the sale were to belong exclusively to him because he would bear the inconvenience of the project. The KGB agreed.
The KGB, after getting a copy of the manuscript from Svetlana’s son, Joseph, handed it over to Louis, who promptly sold it for £5,000 to the London publisher Flegon Press. Alec Flegon, a Russian Romanian, had a reputation among London publishers as a pirate who published banned Soviet literature smuggled out of the USSR by tourists, students, and possibly more nefarious sources but never paid royalties to the writers back in the Soviet Union.
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Svetlana’s British publisher, Hutchinson, which had paid £50,000 for the book, sight unseen, and
The Observer
, which had bought serial rights, were furious, but it was tricky to go after Flegon. He claimed to be an innocent third party who had obtained the manuscript legally from his “invariably honest” agent, who had brought the manuscript out of Russia on July 27. Flegon declined to name his “agent” so as not to jeopardize future delivery of dissident literature. Victor Louis had come up with a clever ruse—in the name of protecting writers, he could do the KGB’s bidding and sabotage them.
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Because the Soviet Union was not a member of the International Copyright Agreement, Hutchinson could not claim breach of copyright. Instead, on July 31, the company filed an injunction in the High Court in London for breach of confidence, on the grounds that Svetlana had entrusted the manuscript
to people who had no right to share it with others. The injunction was granted. Harper & Row and Hutchinson immediately rushed a Russian version of the book into print.
Ironically, the KGB’s plot backfired. If Victor Louis hadn’t tried to preempt the publication of
Twenty Letters to a Friend
, the book’s release might have been delayed until the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution was over. Influential Americans like Arthur Schlesinger were pressing for a November date. Schlesinger told his friend Patricia Bohlen that, during his recent visit to Moscow, the Soviets had appealed to him to ask the US government to delay publication.
Bohlen had been outraged. “What business had Arthur, who makes a fuss about Soviet censorship, to try to get our government to interfere with plans of publishers?”
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In fact, though, Evan Thomas had been waffling, suggesting Harper & Row would consider November 13 as a possible date, but when it became clear that Victor Louis was selling a pirated copy, it was imperative to get the book out as soon as possible.
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Victor Louis managed to sell his pirated version of Svetlana’s book, as well as a collection of two hundred photographs, to the German magazine
Stern.
In mid-August,
Stern
published the first of four articles on the “Secret Album of Stalin’s Daughter,” summarizing anecdotes from Svetlana’s book, which it called “a tame bunny,” and printing the private photographs confiscated from her desk in the House on the Embankment. The images were mislabeled and not flattering, including a photo of a slightly overweight Svetlana in what looked like her underwear at a private beach. A caption lied: “On her flight, Svetlana could not take along her photo album. Her children are now publishing it.” No mention was made of Victor Louis.
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In
Stern
’s “conversations” with Joseph in an article titled “Mother Is a Little Bit Screwed Up,” Joseph is quoted as referring to his mother’s “unstable character,” her “fickleness,”
her “wild character,” and her “vacillating mental states.” Joseph then allegedly described a private visit he and Katya made to the Mausoleum on Red Square to view the embalmed Stalin. “I took Katya by the hand and we went up to the coffin on tiptoe…. It was dark and quiet. I can’t remember if I felt anything. It was something like fear and awe as we saw our grandfather lying there lifeless and waxed…. It’s no secret that I’m proud of my grandfather to this day.” Joseph seemed to be following KGB directives. The KGB wanted Svetlana slandered and had already begun the rehabilitation of Stalin’s image.
Stern
commented drily, “The shadow of their grandfather offers a lot of conveniences: 200 rubles of government pension and two government apartments…. Katya has her own horse. Joseph went for a vacation in the Caucasus after four months in the army.”
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Meanwhile, the Italian journalist Enzo Biagi had been working on the Svetlana story. Perhaps because he was known for his Communist sympathies, he was given access to Svetlana’s relatives. (Without official permission, he could never have met them).
In an interview with Joseph Alliluyev, Biagi asked, “If your mother appeared on the doorstep, what would you do?” Joseph responded coldly. “Obviously I wouldn’t shout for joy…. It is she who left us.” Joseph told Biagi, “We will meet again only in one situation: if she comes back…. This is our country.”
Biagi also interviewed a number of Svetlana’s Moscow friends. The journalist Tatiana Tess condemned her.
Everything has been left for her just as it was in her father’s lifetime: apartment, dacha, the large one as well, and she chose Zhukovka, because it was easier to keep up; she did not have to pay for anything, and could use the State’s car at any time; she could go into any kind of rest home…. We were very close friends; I loved her very
much…. Her children were very dear, they loved her and she could be proud of them…. She had an erratic personality; she has the childish complexes of a princess. Nothing is impossible or forbidden for her, because she has been used to having her own way since she was a little girl…. One shouldn’t abandon one’s children.
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Biagi spoke to Svetlana’s old lover, Aleksei Kapler, who said he was shocked at her defection. “When I heard of her departure I couldn’t believe it. I have my own ideas about Russian women; I have known many…. I believe something terrible, something abnormal must have happened to Svetlana, perhaps an illness of some kind.” Her act was unforgivable. Kapler paraphrased Turgenev: “Russia can do without us, but no one can live without Russia.”
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When Biagi asked the writer Ilya Ehrenburg about Joseph’s comments on his mother, Ehrenburg replied cryptically: “He would do better to venerate his father [Morozov] who is Jewish, and has his own troubles.”
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He was implicitly supporting Svetlana’s repudiation of the current government by himself critiquing its policies of anti-Semitism, though only those used to reading Soviet citizens’ coded language would understand this. For Ehrenburg to say more would have been dangerous.
By July, Biagi had turned his research into a short book,
Svetlana: The Inside Story.
It was immediately released in Italian and hurriedly translated into English. For Svetlana, the effect of reading it, as well as the slanderous clippings from European newspapers sent to her anonymously, was shattering. While she knew that her friends and her son were under the scrutiny of the KGB and had to denounce her defection, it was excruciating to have her private life smeared. “Why did they have to go after my children?” she asked. But of course she knew why.
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One day at the end of the summer when there was no one else at the Kennan farm but the children and their babysitter, Svetlana called them all out to the veranda. She asked Joan’s son Christopher, who was seventeen, to bring her the lighter fluid for the barbecue. She told the children they were witnesses to a solemn ceremony: “I am burning my Soviet passport in answer to lies and calumny.” They all watched wide-eyed as the passport flared brightly. When it was over, Svetlana “carried out the handful of ashes and blew on them. The wind carried them off.”
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There was one consolation, however, that restored a modicum of her dignity. That June the
Atlantic
had published her article “To Boris Leonidovich Pasternak.” She’d worked with Pasternak’s British translator, Max Hayward, to whom Priscilla McMillan had introduced her before their falling-out. In his brief preface to the article, Hayward had offered lavish praise: “Svetlana Alliluyeva’s reflections illuminate the sense of Pasternak’s work as no other comment has ever done.”
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She had drawn parallels between Zhivago’s terrible fate and the devastation in her own lost family and country. As Hayward was the translator of
Doctor Zhivago
into English, his words carried weight. He was invited to visit the Kennan family at Cherry Orchard farm at the beginning of the summer.
Joan Kennan had been surprised when Svetlana chose to settle herself on the third floor of the farmhouse, which got unbearably hot in the summer months. There were other, more comfortable rooms below, but Svetlana had picked this space because it was where Kennan had his study. One wall was covered with bookshelves painted white, as her bookshelves had been in Moscow, and the shelves were full of Russian books, newspapers, and journals. The huge plain wooden table flooded by sunshine, which served Kennan as a desk, now served as hers. But the third floor also had the convenience of a door
that closed off the upper reaches of the house. Joan Kennan remarked that Svetlana and Max would go up to the third floor and close the door. “There was a romantic interest, certainly on Svetlana’s part, and I think she was pretty starry eyed for a while because I think she thought they would be going off into the sunset together.”
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Max Hayward was an interesting figure. Two years older than Svetlana, he’d begun his career in the world of diplomacy, working in the late 1940s at the British Embassy in Moscow, once serving as the British ambassador’s translator on a visit to Stalin in the Kremlin. He was currently a professor of Soviet literary politics at Saint Antony’s College, Oxford.
Saint Antony’s was the “spy college,”
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rumored to have connections with the London branch of the Congress of Cultural Freedom, one of the CIA’s most effective Cold War covert operations, which supported journals and set up international congresses to reach intellectuals behind the Iron Curtain. That very May 1967, it was finally confirmed that the CIA, through the CCF, had been secretly funding the prestigious British magazine
Encounter
for more than ten years.
When Svetlana’s article on Pasternak came out that June and the KGB realized that Max Hayward was working with her, he was called a CIA spy in the Soviet press. There was no evidence for this, but Max Hayward was certainly one of the foreign academics who were personae non gratae in the Soviet Union. In the frenzied 1960s world of intelligence intrigue, it made sense that Hayward was thought to be safe to manage Svetlana. He was well known to George Kennan and Arthur Sulzberger from summers spent together on the Greek island of Spetses. But Hayward was more of a gadfly than anything else. Looking back, he liked to boast of the wealthy Americans whom he’d “managed to con” into generously supporting his lifestyle.
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Svetlana was delighted by Max. They spent their time in her third-floor room speaking in Russian about Russia, about “everything under the sun.” No one understood her problems and worries better than Max Hayward. He was at the farm so often that Joan Kennan ended up doing his laundry.
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Before long, Svetlana was in love with Max. He was flattering and he clearly admired her, but he soon discovered he was in over his head. As Priscilla McMillan, who knew him well, explained:
Max was a person whose idea of heaven was to come to New York and stay at the Chelsea, where [Bob] Dylan, [Judy] Collins, Leonard Cohen had stayed, and drink a lot. There was one time he left to go to supervise the Maltese translation of
Doctor Zhivago.
We were all laughing. Or when it came to translating [Solzhenitsyn’s]
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, I and my friends locked him up in a room in the Russian Center here and took him his meals so he couldn’t get out and drink all night and could translate it in time for the deadline.
In Priscilla’s opinion, whoever had an affair with Max had to be smart enough “to know he wasn’t marriageable material. But Svetlana had a tropism towards men and wouldn’t have applied that kind of sophistication.”
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