Stalin's Daughter (46 page)

Fischer knew Russia well. Enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution, he’d lived for nine years in Moscow until the Great Terror of 1937, when he quit the country, leaving behind his
wife and two sons. Through the intercession of Eleanor Roosevelt, he eventually got his family to the United States, but he abandoned them again, saying he preferred to live in hotels.
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Fischer was most famous for his coverage of the Spanish Civil War. He’d worked with Hemingway, with the novelist André Malraux, with John Dos Passos; he’d met Gandhi and Churchill. There were few among the famous whom Fischer hadn’t encountered. By the time Svetlana met him, he had published ten books, including a somewhat hurriedly written biography of Stalin completed in 1952, and a biography of Gandhi. Fischer was now a professor at Princeton, affiliated with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He radiated confidence. The sheer scale of his life, its encyclopedic breeziness, was thrilling.

And now Fischer sat across from Stalin’s daughter in a restaurant in Princeton. To him, of course, she was an opportunity. Svetlana would have the inside story. From the beginning, it was clear that Fischer was less interested in Svetlana than in the idea of Svetlana—as Stalin’s daughter, she was at the center of the maelstrom of twentieth-century history.

Fischer was obsessed with Stalin. In 1927, with a delegation of American labor leaders and intellectuals, he had spent six hours interviewing him. He described Stalin as having “crafty eyes,” a “low forehead,” and “ugly short black and gold teeth when he smiles,” but he was impressed. Stalin was “unsentimental, steel-willed, unscrupulous and irresistible.”
⁹
Irresistible
was not quite the word one would expect, but according to accounts of those close to Stalin, the
vozhd
could be charismatic and even seductive.

The Yugoslav author Milovan Djilas corroborated Fischer’s assessment. He knew Stalin well and described him shrewdly as a “cold calculator,” a man of “fanatical dogmatism,” but said that “his was a passionate and many-sided nature—though all
sides were equal and so convincing that it seemed he never dissembled but was always truly experiencing each of his roles.” Whatever he wanted “he could approach by manipulating and kneading the reality and the living men who comprised it.”
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Stalin had a capacity to focus so intently on whomever he was talking to that the person felt intimately connected, almost, for the moment, as if living in the reality he, Stalin, invented. One could almost say the same of Fischer. This gift of attention made him a brilliant journalist and a consummate seducer.

Svetlana would claim that Fischer was the first man to capture her imagination with the intensity of her long-ago lover Aleksei Kapler. At forty-one, she must have felt sixteen again. Indeed, she behaved as if she were.

Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Svetlana found Louis Fischer attractive. He was an outsize figure, larger than life. But in her way, so was she. Her old lover, David Samoilov, had said that there was something of the tyrant in Svetlana’s emotional exuberance. When she was drawn to someone, she dived into the relationship until it consumed everything else. She demanded a drama.

The affair with Fischer had been building for some time, but for Svetlana the climax came when Fischer invited her to accompany him to the memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King at the University Chapel in Princeton. She’d phoned Fischer when she heard the news of Dr. King’s assassination on April 4. The shock and distress in his voice had been palpable.

After they’d spent the night together, she wrote to Fischer that at the memorial service, as they had sat under the filtered light from the blue and yellow stained glass windows and the organ played, she’d had a “strange feeling” that she and he were “joined together.” “It was our wedding, the union of two souls to be always together, to do only good to each other. That was something that Martin Luther King left for you and me—because
he, certainly, left his heart with us, with everybody,
who was present
that afternoon at University Chapel.”
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But Fischer seemed unmoved by Svetlana’s romanticism. He was not looking for a soul mate. The central motive of his life was his own work, and at seventy-one, he cherished his independence. On their next encounter a few days later, he was decidedly cool. “I felt the strongest pain of uselessness,” she complained.

Well, dear, you have taken my life in your hands, now, DO SOMETHING with it: throw it away, press it to your heart, put it aside gently, put it in the freezer for a while, to keep it there—DO SOMETHING, if you really are concerned about me and my feelings. BUT, please, PLEASE, do not just play the game with it…. My only peace is near you, when I embrace you and your hands ARE AROUND ME. Svetlana
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Having clearly raised her expectations, Fischer seemed to have been in retreat from her all-consuming passion. He warned her that he needed his independence for his work. She countered: “You do not need a mistress—forgive my vulgar words. Neither I ever looked to find a lover. We both need something else—warmth, friendship, understanding…. It is love. Everyone needs it.”
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By June she was assuring him she would follow his “way.” “I will not come and will not make telephone calls.”
¹⁴
She even promised to write shorter letters.

Unfortunately, she could not control her anger. In a burst of fury, she stormed over to his house and returned all his things, including a ring he had given her. Three days later, in a five-page letter, she tried to explain why she had been so upset. It is a very sad letter.

She had come home from an unsatisfactory meeting with
him—she realized he had made sure to have his housekeeper present to avoid her passionate expectations. Then she found out inadvertently that his excuse for cutting their encounter short—that he had to meet an ambassador for lunch—was a lie. He had really been having a casual lunch with Dmitri Nabokov and his wife.

She got home in a horrible mood, which as usual she acknowledged was her own fault—she should not have barged in on him. Then she found that a rat had come to die in her garage. It was an ordinary domestic drama—a neighbor had probably set out rat poison—but for Svetlana it was traumatizing.

The animal looked dying, breathing heavily, could not run away and looked at me with that terrible expression of a dying creature, not much different from a human being. I am not afraid of rats and mice, as some people are, but that was different, that was frightening because it was death. May be simply my nerves were already strained. The rat could not go away from my garage, she came not from my home, from outside, and she just came here to die. I locked the door from the garage to the kitchen, and could not eat any supper. From time to time I opened the door to see. The rat was slowly crawling over from one place to another. The big flies were already sitting on her back.

Louis, that night was really a nightmare. I did not sleep, thinking about that animal in my garage. We were two alone in the whole house…. I was thinking about myself in the most gloomy and tragic ways—just something like that rat, whom nobody really can love or need…. This rat was like something very BAD in my own soul.

And—in half an hour—Burgi called to tell me the terrible news about Robert Kennedy…. [Kennedy had been assassinated at midnight on June 5.]

And, of course, I was already in a tragic mood and horrible news only PROVED that there is NO justice in this world, so the answer came back to my mind very quickly. Everything is so bad, because Louis does not love me anymore.
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It is hard to know how a man like Louis Fischer would have reacted to such a letter. Her candor and the intensity of her feeling may have moved him. He knew her history—few were more intimately acquainted with death than she. But he was far too cynical and far too worldly to want to take on her raw need.

The affair continued but remained secret. When the Kennans invited her to dinner, Svetlana would suggest it might be nice if Mr. Fischer joined them. Fischer took to phoning her every day at 10:00 a.m., and he would drop by 85 Elm Road to sit for an hour or two while she read him pages from the new book she was working on. When he was away, as he often was, she sent him chatty letters and settled for the assurance of his continued attachment. There was another explosion when she suspected he was seeing a young woman named Deirdre Randall. Her suspicion was right, of course, but he must have reassured her. He remained
tentatively
in her life.

The hook for Svetlana was that, as Fyodor Volkenstein had once done with her first book, Fischer was encouraging her to write. She was working hard on her new manuscript, but she wrote to him, “I need a help. It does not mean that I need an editor or advisor or co-author, no, but I badly need the help of sircumstance [
sic
], the help of an atmosphere which surrounds me…. I need your presence … even a silent one.”
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However, to understand this love affair, it is important to know who Fischer really was. He was a romantic predator. He drew women in but had no desire to fulfill their expectations once he’d raised these. Svetlana was simply one in a long line of women who’d fallen for him.

Meanwhile, fifteen months after her defection, political intrigue continued to swirl above Svetlana’s head. When Robert Rayle and his wife, Ramona, returned from India that April, Rayle’s boss at the CIA asked him to serve as Svetlana’s case officer. He would be responsible not only for her welfare but also for her “exploitation” for the maximum benefit to the US government. The idea now was to make Svetlana the center of a “propaganda campaign” against the Soviet Union.
¹⁷

Rayle told him this was a bad idea. If the CIA tried to make Svetlana a “featured, public spokesperson against the USSR,” she would feel manipulated and might turn against the United States. He refused the assignment. Instead, he worked on covert actions to help émigré groups and facilitate the transmission and publication of dissident literature. It was exciting work: one of his student contacts came back from the Soviet Union with “a footlocker of manuscripts by Nadezhda Mandelstam.”
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Rayle’s boss next turned to Donald (Jamie) Jameson. This was a wise choice. Svetlana soon trusted Jamie and became very fond of him. When he visited her in Princeton, she would tell Louis Fischer that her “ ‘invisible friend’ from Washington” was in town.
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It was probably Jameson who facilitated her application for “residence status.” In June 1968, she took the bus to New York to get her resident card and her reentrance permit. Alan Schwartz accompanied her to the INS.
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“We were both so worried, like schoolchildren before an exam,” she wrote to Fischer. “Actually I feel a little different after this, somehow calmer. Driving home on the bus yesterday feeling totally, totally at home.”
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She told Fischer that while she was in the city, the General (her lawyer, Edward Greenbaum) gave her yet another “astronomy lesson,” as they called his talks about her finances. “I find it so difficult and I understand very little, but I’m trying.”
²²
Her money was invested in the name of the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff
& Ernst in a New York bank, which sent regular monthly transfers to her bank account in Princeton. When she wanted to buy a large item, she had to ask her lawyers to send her an advance.
²³

One of the items she bought that summer was a bottle green, four-door Dodge sedan, which she kept for ten years. She had fantasies of driving across the country, but she didn’t have a driver’s license. Evenings, she sat behind the wheel of her car, remembering her days as a teenager when she drove surreptitiously through the streets of Moscow with her Alliluyev cousins. Finally the gardener’s son offered to teach her to use an automatic transmission. She passed her driving test. Now she felt free; she could go anywhere.

That July, after she’d submitted an outline and a first chapter of her new book, she signed a contract with Harper & Row for an advance of $50,000 (Copex Establishment was not involved). The amount reflected the middling sales of
Twenty Letters to a Friend.
As Pamela McMillan had feared, Greenbaum had oversold the serialization rights; people read the extensive extracts and didn’t buy the book. But for Svetlana, money had no real meaning; she was simply happy to be back at work.

She spent her days writing. Placing a low stool on her back terrace and her typewriter on a chair, she sat barefoot in shorts and T-shirt, smelling the freshly cut grass, and worked. She still wrote in Russian, and the ideas flowed quickly. She would take breaks and head to the local grocery store on Nassau Street to buy her food or to Urken Hardware to buy supplies from friendly Mrs. Urken. Sometimes she would take the bus to New York to see her editor, Dick Passmore, at Harper & Row, and it became their habit to go out for a quick supper at the Jolly Shilling on Lexington Avenue, where the steaks were good and a blind pianist played with his Alsatian dog resting beside him.
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Svetlana was still getting so much mail that she longed for a secretary rather than all her lawyers and agents. One letter in particular must have moved her deeply. It was from the Russian writer Arkady Belinkov:

AUGUST
18, 1968

Dear Svetlana Iosifovna,

I read your book four months ago in Moscow, but, of course, couldn’t write to you from there about its enormous meaning, high literary achievements, and role in our fate. Books like these people read at night and all in one go, from them are written out quotes that are passed around the city and return to you as almost unrecognizable tales. You Muscovites, you all remember this so well.