Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
She told Rosa the film had taken her back to Moscow in 1962 and to her spiritual mentor, Father Nikolai, whom she revered and whose words she always remembered. “He did not say that Christ cannot love me, Stalin’s daughter.”
7
He had baptized her.
She had had a reassuring dream about Father Nikolai just before moving to Princeton in 1967. In September 1970, she saw him again in a joyful dream, predicting wonderful news, and then discovered she and Wes were going to have a child. Many years of silence had followed. These were her worst years, but she had dreamed about him again this very March and was certain something important was coming. She had never imagined it might be this film. She begged Rosa to understand.
Please do not think I am exaggerating the importance of some movie production. You know: in Soviet Russia, in that silent society,
e v e r y sign
is important, every little symbolic move, word or even ballet dance is a communication. One has to learn to read those silent signs. I have learned to do so….
I cannot tell you what a magnificent, and also mysterious effect the last photographs convey. One must be, of course, familiar with that gentle green land … the meadows and the skies, those pale clouds, those gently rustling groves, those wild flowers. MOTHER, childhood, love, gentleness …
Here it is not a sentimental image at all. It is not “Mom & Apple-pie” of Protestant virtue, righteousness, and all good things…. Here it is Life itself, in its every little sweet moments of existence, fragrant, immensely peaceful, filled with that blessing and grace…. Life as Oblomov was able to perceive it. Although he was indeed a lazy, sleepy man, he had a gift of communicating with grasses, flowers and clouds, that gift of contemplation which is in fact, the essence of Russian Orthodoxy.
8
But the film had a more heartwrenching element that Svetlana did not mention to Rosa. The film begins and ends with images of Oblomov as a child running rapturously through green meadows. It is a dream sequence, a memory of waiting for, longing for, his mother, who has returned from a long journey and whom the child is instructed not to waken. The mother never appears in the film; she is only an absence. It is impossible not to imagine Svetlana shaken by the child’s voice crying with such rapturous anticipation for the mother who will never appear.
Oblomov
brought Svetlana back to her Russian roots. She had vehemently insisted that her daughter would be American, giving Olga the best American education and deliberately
eliminating all things Russian from the child’s life. She refused to teach Olga the Russian language. Clearly she was insulating her daughter from her history. She knew the cost to Olga of being identified as Stalin’s granddaughter, but she had never examined the toll this sacrifice had taken on her own psyche. She lamented to Rosa that she had cut herself off from the “music and fragrance of my native tongue. I have suppressed all this and made it silent. Stay there, inside, but shut up!” It was a terrible surgery. “My soul was crying, like in prison and I did not know why. Now it is released.”
9
This was
Oblomov
’s message.
And then, that summer of 1981, there was silence. Rosa did not hear from Svetlana until September, when she wrote to say that her life had again plunged into chaos during the summer and she had lost her peace, remarking with rueful irony that after the film “some kind of fresh breeze came strongly through my whole being—but for a while only.”
10
Needing to find a cheaper residence than 53 Aiken Avenue, in June Svetlana spent a frenzied month hunting for a new home. Finally she signed a contract to buy a small house in nearby suburban Lawrenceville, about twenty minutes from Princeton. She had decided to give the public school system a try and enrolled Olga in the Lawrenceville Intermediate School.
And then, at the beginning of July, she left on a trip to England. That February the British journalist and media personality Malcolm Muggeridge, notorious for his conservative Christian propagandizing, had written to invite her to do an interview with him on the BBC. He was proposing a discussion about the resurgence of Christianity in the Soviet Union. He said that she, who had been at the very center of the “materialist-atheist apparat,” must have some insights.
11
At first she refused, complaining that after every public appearance,
her words were always twisted, and she was tired of the hate letters that followed “from the left and from the right and from the very middle.” As a strange non sequitur, she added, “Men are able to easily disregard all this; I cannot.” She just wanted to live in peace and avoid “unnecessary hatred.”
12
But gradually the thought of traveling to England became too seductive. She felt it was cynical on her part to agree to be interviewed, because she had turned down so many American invitations. Nevertheless, she accepted, but on one condition: “Could you please, somehow, try to separate me from my father’s name, life and philosophies? It is very necessary to do so, otherwise you will keep trying to communicate with my father through me.”
13
Of course the request was pointless. The reason Muggeridge wanted to interview her was that she was Stalin’s daughter: this made her thoughts on the new Christianity in Russia all the more sensational.
Svetlana set out for London in early July 1981. With the BBC paying for her stay at the Portobello Hotel near Stanley Gardens, she spent three days in the city walking through the streets and found it thrilling. She felt nostalgic for “old stones.” She spent five days with Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge at Park Cottage, their country house near Robertsbridge in East Sussex. The resultant interview, “A Week with Svetlana,” culled from twenty hours of talk, was eventually broadcast on BBC 2 the following March. The visit proved to be a quiet interlude; the bucolic walks down English country lanes were therapeutic. She may have reflected that her life might have been this comfortable if she hadn’t lost all her money.
She’d sent Olga to Wisconsin to spend the month of July with her old friends, Herbert and Eloise Fritz, who ran a summer camp near Spring Green, and was hoping her daughter might reconnect with Wesley Peters. Secretly, Svetlana often thought of herself as still married to Wes, perhaps because he
and Olga were so much alike in character. In Olga’s memory, the meeting was a bust. Yes, she met her father, but he was “just some reserved stranger.”
14
Whenever Svetlana said Wes liked something, Olga would snap back, “So what?” to which her mother would reply timidly, “It ought to matter.”
15
During her trip to England, Svetlana began to conceive of a new plan. Olga needed stability, continuity. England was so pleasant; the people were so kind. She wrote to the Muggeridges that she wanted to find a good boarding school for Olga in England and live nearby. Did Kitty know any good schools? She would need to have an income, of course, but she could work as a companion to an elderly lady or old couple “who would be educated and sophisticated enough … to enjoy having a misfit like me as a companion…. I can cook, sew, clean, drive, shop, take photographs, type (slowly), handle mail.”
16
She loved old people and would do this with pleasure. She was currently helping a ninety-three-year-old woman in Princeton.
On her return, Svetlana plunged back into the chaos of her life, resuming the ritual of unpacking and scouting out her new neighborhood. She immediately disliked it. There was no place to walk. The streets were filled with cars in the evenings; she missed the lovely trees of Princeton. But she had signed a contract to buy the house and was trapped. She berated herself. She should have known better than to listen to real estate agents. She waited anxiously for Olga to return from Wisconsin. Without her daughter, she roamed the empty house, hoping for things to fall into place.
Then she discovered, to her horror, that the principal and most of the children at Olga’s new school were Ukrainians. How would the Ukrainians respond when they found out who Olga was? So many of the hate letters she received were from Ukrainians telling her “to drop dead, or go back to red Moscow where you belong.”
17
A key to Svetlana’s psychology was that she would sometimes convince herself of paranoid explanations in order to do what she really wanted to do—in this case, move. If the school administrators had found out that Olga was Stalin’s granddaughter, would they have said anything? Stuart School protected Svetlana’s and Olga’s privacy.
Of course, paranoia was a reflex response for most Soviet political exiles, let alone for Stalin’s daughter. It was an automatic self-defense. The purges and famine in the Ukraine had been particularly brutal during Stalin’s regime. It would take only one person to begin a hate campaign. Svetlana decided she couldn’t take the risk. They couldn’t live in Lawrenceville. They must move again.
Whenever she felt cornered, Svetlana acted precipitately, making frenzied decisions. She found another house, this time in nearby Pennington, and bought it, further depleting the principal of her investments. Now she owned this house and the Lawrenceville house and was almost out of money. She wrote to Kitty Muggeridge ruefully, “I feel I am a bad mother.”
18
At least Pennington was an old town with sidewalks. The house at 440 Sked Street was a traditional Cape Cod on the outskirts of town with two bedrooms upstairs, a living room with a wood-burning stove, a dining room that Svetlana turned into her study, and a big kitchen overlooking a sheltered backyard. The large trees in the distance screened her from her neighbors’ view. She set about digging up the back lawn and planting her garden. She enrolled Olga in the Toll Gate School in Pennington.
But she was already restless. She wrote to Kitty Muggeridge:
Oh I wish there were no fence, and fields and hills would go endlessly—or the sea, the lake, the river—something that is not limited, not bordered. Frankly I do not need that vegetable garden because the peasant roots in me are not
stronger than those gypsy roots from my Grandpa Alliluyev. I wish I could go on those innumerable trips all over the world, preferably by slow freighter ship, with a small cabin, so that we would stand for a long time in every port, where tourists do not go.
19
Poignantly, Svetlana always claimed her maternal grandparents’ bloodline. Grandma Olga was from German/Georgian peasant stock and Grandpa Sergei was part Russian, part Gypsy. It was an ancestry she could celebrate. If she hadn’t lost her money, she would have traveled—back to India, to Japan, China, South America, Spain, Greece. But as she told Kitty, 99 percent of people live very far from their dreams. At least she had her sweet daughter. “So I go back to my laundry … and my house repairs.”
20
Svetlana had renewed contact with an old Georgian friend, Utya Djaparidze, now a professor at Hartford College, in Connecticut. Utya was horrified to learn she was living in suburban Pennington. Pennington would ruin Olga! They would both end up as “Archie Bunkers.” Olga needed New York City to know the world. Utya suggested a number of private schools. Svetlana wrote to Rosa: “I was SO HAPPY that someone was telling me all this. And she was already taking in her hand our
lives
.”
21
One of the worst legacies of Svetlana’s childhood was her terror of acting independently and getting things wrong. And almost invariably, it was a man she turned to. She told Rosa, “I
know I failed
to make my own way in this modern jungle of freedom to which I have run fourteen years ago,” and reported Utya’s words. “ ‘Ludka [Utya’s son]
is a man
and he CAN take your life in his hands and help you and Olenka’—she was shouting at me—and I was melting like ice-cream under sun,
and swelling with tears, hot tears of love and gratitude, happy to accept all this and obey and to agree—because I know she understands—I know she knows.” Even as she thought of her own submissiveness as a failing, Svetlana seemed unable to resist. She told Rosa, “
I have lost my own will completely
. Unless something or somebody takes my hand and pulls it strongly in the right direction, I would not be able to do things myself.”
22
Some would diagnose Svetlana as manic-depressive, or bipolar, but such a diagnosis would not take into account the pressures she still lived under as Stalin’s daughter. It was as if Svetlana had two modes: abject submission and total rebellion. She had married a Jewish man against her father’s wishes long before she had defected from his country, for which act she believed, accurately, that he would have killed her. Her father’s censure lurked in her mind long after his death. She was always fighting to find her own authority, her own way. She would abjectly accept others’ advice and then rebel. Each new step was inevitably fraught with misgivings. Was she doing the right thing? Yet it could also be said that part of this dynamic was a trait of Soviet psychology. To survive in the Soviet Union, it was customary, indeed necessary, to identify a patron or protector under whose wing one could shelter.
23
Svetlana was thinking not of New York, but rather of Europe. Like many European émigrés, she believed American children were undisciplined. Olga was already a little rebel. Svetlana told Rosa: “We
act exactly
as it is described in all those dreadful Mother-Daughter books I have seen…. My American daughter gives me all that constant disagreement about everything.”
24
Olga was a very bright child doing badly at school. If she could adapt, an English or Swiss boarding school with high educational standards would put her back on track.