Stalin's Daughter (50 page)

Twenty-five years later, Meryle Secrest, who’d written a biography of the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and approached Svetlana with the idea of writing her biography (an idea Secrest eventually abandoned), asked her directly about the “collective authorship” of
Only One Year.
Svetlana stated, “No one has written anything for me. I wrote it all,”
³³
but said she did feel that, by posing questions to which she felt obliged to respond, her editors at Harper & Row swayed her to write a more polemical book than she’d initially intended. Fischer encouraged her to remove references to her belief in God in the first part, but she rebuffed his suggestion, retaining the chapter “Destiny,” about her baptism in the Russian Orthodox faith
in 1962. She decided to keep it in the book after the Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas visited her in Princeton, and said that, if she believed in faith (he didn’t), she should write about it, because he would like to understand the impulse toward the spiritual. This was why she’d included him in her acknowledgments.
³⁴

In fact, rather than influencing her, Louis Fischer had stolen from her. It was she who reported in
Only One Year
that she had heard her father on the telephone responding to the murder of the actor-director of the Yiddish State Theater, Solomon Mikhoels, in 1948 with the comment, “Well, then, a car accident.” In his 1969 book,
Russia’s Road from Peace to War
, Fischer reported the story: “Stalin received the news by telephone and apparently … said …”
³⁵
Fischer offered no source for the anecdote. He edited Svetlana out of the story.

It mattered. The international Jewish community was desperate to know what had happened to Mikhoels. Svetlana’s book came out after Fischer’s, and thus it was as if she were copying
his
anecdote and claiming it as her own. When she confronted Fischer and asked why he hadn’t acknowledged her as his source, he said he’d forgotten, but when she asked his editors at Harper & Row (she and Fischer shared the same publisher), they told her they’d advised him to include her name, but he’d refused. It was a deep betrayal. When Fischer died in 1970, this scandal of “literary theft” fizzled out.
³⁶

Ironically, the one area where Svetlana would later admit she’d not been candid in
Only One Year
was in her description of her experiences in Italy and Switzerland. The US State Department had made it clear that she was never to reveal the role the Italians played in her “stopover” in Rome, because it had been illegal, and the Swiss had asked her not to discuss their political role in her defection.

That fall Svetlana read chapters of her book over the Voice of
America. The Soviet Foreign Office immediately protested to the US Embassy in Moscow, which replied that what a writer read over the air was the writer’s private concern. The Soviet government was so infuriated that on December 19, two days before the ninetieth anniversary of Stalin’s birth, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (executive council of the parliament) passed a decree stripping Svetlana Alliluyeva of her Soviet citizenship. She was charged with “misconduct, defaming the title citizen of the USSR,” a crime her father had invented in 1938 during the Great Terror.
³⁷
When American media asked her for her reaction to this news, she said she was overjoyed. She commemorated the event by climbing with a friend to the top of the Empire State Building.
³⁸

The reviews of
Only One Year
were mixed. Edmund Wilson in the
New Yorker
was effusive in his praise, claiming that
Only One Ye
ar was “a unique historical document, which will take its place, I believe, among the great Russian autobiographical works: [Alexander] Herzen, [Peter] Kropotkin, Tolstoy’s
Confession
.”
³⁹

Margaret Parton wrote in the
Saturday Review
: “Her character remains the same: gentle, nature-loving, profoundly religious. What seems new is the clear-eyed, almost hard objectivity with which she describes Russian society and her father who had terrorized her. She is even capable of occasional irony; explaining why her father left no will, she remarks that ‘He lived above material interests at the expense of the State.’ “
⁴⁰

However, some reviews were nasty.
Life
published a review titled “Svetlana Faces Life.” “Who needs it, after all? We have had better harder-eyed witnesses to these truths.”
⁴¹
The political Left hated the book for its “fairytale version” of the United States. In his review titled “The Princess” in
Commentary
, Philip Rahv wrote that he didn’t believe Svetlana went to India with the sole purpose of scattering her husband’s ashes. “Her
eyes were already riveted on distant America, so big and so glamorous.” She knew that her book would be “the ticket to another life.” She built up “a fancy-picture of America staggering in its naiveté…. Now that she knows the horrid truth about [her father], she has found another cult-object she can worship, and this time it is nothing less than a whole country…. The term ‘democratic socialism’ is not mentioned in her book; nor is the term ‘capitalism.’ … Clearly, Svetlana is not a woman capable of communing with history. She is merely its victim.”
⁴²

From her letters to friends, it is clear that Svetlana was growing tired of these attacks. She was feeling buffeted, bruised, pushed around, and often not a little paranoid. And soon she was dealing with problems with the French translation of her book.
⁴³
Apparently pages, paragraphs, and phrases of her text had been omitted. Odd jokes and humorous phrases had been inserted. Some criticisms of the Soviet regime had been softened, and friendly attitudes toward the Americans had been omitted. The translator had imposed his own political agenda. Harper & Row and the firm of Greenbaum, Wolff, & Ernst demanded that the translation be withdrawn.

But there was a much more serious concern
—Only One Year
was causing dangerous repercussions for her friends in the Soviet Union. In writing the section of her book titled “We Shall Meet Again,” Svetlana wanted to honor the Russian intelligentsia and to protest their treatment.
⁴⁴
These Soviets were not the gray conformists the West thought them to be, but rather were highly original, uniquely talented individuals. But she should have known that her portraits of friends would put them at risk.

One of the unwritten laws in the Soviet Union was that you never spoke. She had changed names, but it was not hard for the KGB to identify the people she meant. Certainly her disguise of the black specialist in African song and culture under
the name “Bertha” was no protection for Lily Golden. Lily found herself increasingly followed and watched. Party hacks who had long been trying to kick her out of the Institute for African Studies were encouraged to harass her. She discovered that one “friend” was checking the titles of books she borrowed from the library while another was reporting all her meetings with foreigners. She had already been blacklisted from travel to scholarly conferences abroad, and any hope that this ban might be lifted was now gone. Lily fought back and endured the isolation but was shocked that Svetlana had exposed her.

Lily’s daughter, Yelena Khanga, thought perhaps Svetlana had been caught up in the enthusiasm a writer feels when she creates a book, not measuring the consequences. Perhaps the dizziness of freedom to speak out in the West had dulled her censors, leading her to break the code of
loyalty and discretion
among friends in the USSR.
⁴⁵
Her cousins Alexander and Leonid Alliluyev later claimed that none of her relatives, indeed not even her children, had suffered.
⁴⁶
However, Lily Golden maintained that all of the friends Svetlana mentioned were put on a list and banned from traveling.
⁴⁷

It is unclear whether Svetlana knew about the impact her book was having on her friends in the Soviet Union, but she told people she was sick and tired of writing books. Though she had an idea for a new book based on the letters she was receiving from around the world, she now said she didn’t plan on writing anymore. It would be fifteen years before she published her next book. But it was not exhaustion or disgust over the reception of her books that caused this interruption. She was heading into a completely new and heartbreaking disaster.

Chapter 24
The Taliesin Fiasco

Svetlana married Wesley Peters, the head architect of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Foundation, on April 4, 1970, at the Taliesin West compound in the Sonoran desert.

S
vetlana had been in the United States three years now and was still receiving letters from strangers around the world. In November 1969, persistent letters began arriving from
Olgivanna Wright, the widow of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, exhorting her to come to Arizona to visit the Taliesin Fellowship. Svetlana didn’t know much about the famous architect, and friends tried to warn her gently that the “Fellowship,” as Wright’s School of Architecture was called, was
strange
, but in the books and pamphlets Olgivanna was sending, Taliesin looked exceedingly beautiful.

Svetlana had planned a monthlong trip to California to meet a number of her new pen pals, and then intended to go on to Hawaii to visit a Russian-born American painter she had met on Long Island. She decided she would stop in Phoenix for a week. It would be an American experience to add to her list. Truthfully, she was desperate to put Louis Fischer and Princeton gossip behind her.

There was an unexpected hook in Olgivanna Wright’s letters. Olgivanna wrote that her eldest daughter, Svetlana, had died in a car accident twenty-five years earlier. What a strange coincidence that Svetlana should carry the same magical name, which means “enlightened.” The name itself was a talisman. According to Olgivanna, they were destined to meet.

Svetlana had an equally compelling fantasy. She knew that Olgivanna was Montenegrin and was only four years older than her own mother, Nadya, would have been if had she lived. She imagined a woman with the dark Georgian looks of her mother. As she remembered it, “We both expected something very important to come out of this meeting, both caring for beloved images and fantasies…. Apart from this strange connection, I really did not expect anything exciting from the Arizona desert.”
¹

Svetlana had no idea that she was about to encounter a titan who’d already plotted the role she was to play in the world of Taliesin. Few could stand up to Olgivanna Wright.

Olga Ivanovna Lazovich was born in the kingdom of Montenegro
in the Balkans in 1897, and her genetic inheritance was fierceness. Her father was a chief justice and her mother was a general in the Montenegrin army who’d once ridden on the back of her father’s saddle into battle against the Turks. Olga viewed her mother, the general, with awe and fear. At the age of fourteen, she was sent to Batum (Batumi) on the Black Sea to live with her sister. While visiting friends in Tiflis, Olga found her escape route. Now nineteen, she married a Latvian architect named Valdemar Hinzenberg. She weathered the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Tiflis and learned what near-starvation was. Soon she gave birth to her daughter Svetlana. In Tiflis she met the Armenian “spiritual teacher” Georgi Ivanovich Gurdjieff. Coincidentally, the Gurdjieff family knew Joseph Djugashvili before he was Stalin. He’d rented a room from them when he was a student at the Tiflis Seminary. He made himself memorable by stiffing them for the rent.
²

By the time Olga met Gurdjieff, he’d transformed himself into a mystic, teaching his spiritual discipline of cosmic dance based on his theory of astral bodies, through which one could achieve the higher consciousness of the true “I” and work out the laws of the universe. To avoid the Bolsheviks, Gurdjieff fled to Constantinople, where he established the first version of his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. With her three-year-old daughter, Svetlana, Olga joined him. The route to becoming Frank Lloyd Wright’s wife was arduous and led through France to Chicago, where Olga met Wright at a theater performance in November 1924. He claimed he immediately fell in love with Olgivanna, as he renamed her. By the end of January, she had moved permanently to Taliesin. She was twenty-five.

Wright built the first Taliesin on his estate in Spring Green, Wisconsin, in 1911. Three years later, while he was on business in Chicago, a servant, in what was presumed to be a fit of
insanity, set fire to the house after nailing all the doors shut, leaving only a small hatch open. As the people inside crawled through the hatch, he killed each one with an ax. Devastated, Wright vowed to rebuild, and by 1932 he had established the Taliesin Fellowship. Seven years later, he expanded Taliesin to include a second estate, Taliesin West, in Arizona, which served as the Fellowship’s winter home.