Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
November, the month Svetlana always identified with “the dying of everything,”
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had brought its usual painful spiral down. But then, on December 17, after fifteen years of silence, Svetlana received a phone call from her son. He spoke casually, as if a phone call were a normal occurrence and not a seismic shock. It seemed that the Soviet government had given him permission to contact his mother. Svetlana was elated. Soon affectionate phone calls and letters passed between them. She discovered that Joseph had remarried—he was hoping that one day she might meet his new wife, Lyuda. Ilya, his son, was now thirteen and living with his mother, Elena. When she asked about her daughter Katya, Joseph told her that Katya was now married, had a little girl, and was living in remote Kamchatka in Siberia, where she worked as a geophysicist, but he couldn’t tell her much else. He and his sister were no longer in touch. He had no photographs of Katya to send her. His letters often included requests for a particular medical text. Olga and Svetlana would rush off on expeditions to scour the bookshops of Cambridge and London, searching for volumes that might cost as much as £200.
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When Joseph finally sent Svetlana a current photograph of himself, she was shocked. The stranger in the photo was balding, middle-aged, with a sad expression in his eyes. He somehow resembled her brother Vasili. She rushed to the telephone, woke Joseph in the middle of the night, and, without preamble, shouted, “You’re drinking. I know those swollen eyes.” He was furious, of course, but he must have let the eruption pass, for
she was soon writing to Rosa Shand, “Time and distance have not changed anything…. Somehow I do feel all 3 of [my children] now together with me.”
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She was sure that one day Joseph would be permitted to travel to see her.
She resumed her voluminous correspondence. On one of her daily walks to the postbox, she met Jane Renfrew, a Cambridge professor and highly regarded archaeologist. Knowing who she was, Renfrew invited her in for coffee. They took to sitting in Renfrew’s warm kitchen for regular chats. Soon Svetlana was telling Renfrew of her past in the USSR. She talked about her father—how difficult it was to grow up and realize exactly who he was. Renfrew recalled thinking,
You can’t choose your father.
“It was hard for her, very hard. After all, he was her father, and her father did show a certain amount of affection for her.” She said, “I just wanted her to talk, because she needed to talk.”
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Philippa Hill, widow of a well-known physicist with some remote family connections to Russia, also lived on Chaucer Road and she, too, grew fond of Svetlana, whom she recalled as very warm. She only “needed steering out of her grumbles and then she could be a fascinating teller of stories from her past.”
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But Hill understood that Svetlana could be difficult. “Svetlana didn’t know how to manage life, really, I suppose. That was the truth of the matter.” Hill thought of her as “almost a gypsy”: “She lived a wandering life.”
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One of Olga’s closest school chums was a girl named Emily Richardson, and Emily’s mother and Svetlana soon became friends. Rosamond Richardson lived in a lovely thatched cottage in Saffron Walden and had converted her garage into a small studio with a sofa bed, which Svetlana used when she stayed overnight. Svetlana christened the studio the dacha. Richardson laughed at the memory of the morning Svetlana came to breakfast and said, “I hope you don’t mind. I’ve changed around the furniture.” She had moved the bed to the
other end of the room because she wanted to look in the other direction. “She was absolutely adorable.”
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I really loved Svetlana’s soul…. It’s hard to define, but there are some people who just have a dimension and a kind of depth in their core somewhere…. She could respond deeply to other people with enormous warmth…. There was a kind of deep spirituality about Svetlana. God in the widest possible sense, but always of course, being dissatisfied with its presentation so even Indian mysticism couldn’t quite fill the bill…. [This hunger] was powerful enough to keep her on that path, as it were, so that she didn’t get deflected because she didn’t find it.
But Richardson also understood that Svetlana could “change like the weather. She was very tricky.” Richardson felt this “had to do with an emotional woundedness that had never been healed.” Like Philippa Hill, she thought of Svetlana as a nomad.
Always expecting that the thing you’re lacking is about to be found around the corner … I read her as a deeply wounded person who was extremely bright. Her intellect was phenomenal and she was also a great soul. She had such optimism and incredible energy, which of course could get channelled down the wrong alleyway for her and into a lot of anger. To me that’s part of the whole story of her personality. She is both this and that.
Richardson thought Svetlana was exhausted by the misrepresentations that people casually attached to her.
She wanted control over all that, didn’t she? To some extent it’s understandable, because she had so many interpretations
laid upon her, she wanted control over the material. But the way she did it was very extreme…. It didn’t knock her off course. It knocked everybody else off course. Flattened everybody else like skittles, but she carried on.
Richardson saw this as Svetlana’s tragedy. Everyone reflected back to her the fact that she was Stalin’s daughter—people couldn’t help themselves—so that an uncontaminated self-knowledge was almost impossible. “I’m not sure she could see herself as she really was.” But Richardson felt that the one thing holding Svetlana in the world was her love for Olga. “Their mutual love was never destroyed or squandered.”
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That December Svetlana decided to officially convert to Catholicism. She joined the Catholic Church of Saint Mary and All English Martyrs and even attended several days of a retreat at the convent of Saint Mary in Suffolk. She now determined that Olga should move to the Chelmsford Catholic School in Essex, where she would receive a more disciplined education. But Olga wanted none of this. She loved Friends’ School. When she took the entrance exams for the new school, she marked X’s in all the wrong places in the multiple-choice questionnaire and managed to fail. She was delighted with herself, but her mother was furious. She knew Olga had done this deliberately. When they got home, Svetlana lit into her. But Olga’s will was stronger than her mother’s. She stayed at Friends’ School until she was eighteen. When Svetlana complained to Terry Waite that the school wouldn’t get her daughter into Oxford or Cambridge, he replied, “You don’t understand. She’s got to be accepted. She’s going to be a teenager. Quakers are the only people who are going to give her what she needs. She’s going to get a good education here, but the most important thing is she’s going to be safe.”
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Waite was right. At Friends’ School, bullying was unacceptable. As Olga remembered it, if you were caught smoking or drinking, or kissing a boy, you’d get a detention. “But any form of racism, sexism—God forbid!—fighting: instant expulsion. Even name-calling was unacceptable.” The school protected her and this would prove invaluable. The first test came at the beginning of April during her first year at the school.
The
Daily Mail
had discovered that Stalin’s eleven-year-old granddaughter (she would be twelve in May) was living in Saffron Walden and that her mother resided in Cambridge on Chaucer Road. The reporters descended on Friends’ School just before Easter break in the first week of April. Olga looked back on that incident with a kind of annoyed amusement.
All the kids were leaving; some of us were staying an extra night. I was due to stay an extra night. And suddenly one of the teachers told me that she was going to drive me home. To Cambridge, which was about an hour and a half away. I thought that was really weird. But we didn’t have a car, so I just figured Mom didn’t want to come up on the bus to get me. I had to duck down as we drove out of the gates. The teacher told me to lie down in the backseat and cover myself with a blanket. And there were paparazzi all around the gates. And I could not understand what was going on. And I assumed—I remember thinking, I assumed that it was happening to all the kids—they were having to smuggle the kids out of the school for some reason, I didn’t know why! So I got home and there were reporters outside on the sidewalk and outside the front of the house.
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Svetlana was very angry. She had wanted to tell Olga about her grandfather in her own way and only when she thought her daughter was ready. She sat Olga down and showed her
a picture of Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in Germany in July 1945 and said, “That’s your grandfather.” Decades later she recalled: “Mom told me about it all, and showed me the photos and tried to explain. I mean, I barely had a grasp on American presidents at this point.” Svetlana consoled her. “Never mind about that, you’re American as apple pie, your father’s American.”
Svetlana knew that more had to be said, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. How do you tell your child that her grandfather was Joseph Stalin? She asked Jane Renfrew if she would speak to Olga about Stalin, but Renfrew demurred, suggesting that Svetlana instead ask the headmaster of Friends’ School.
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When Olga returned to school at the end of the week, again driven by a teacher, reporters were still lurking. Her picture had been in all the newspapers. Reporters played riffs on the nickname she’d acquired at school, “Jolly Hockey Sticks,” referring to her long legs and American origin. None of the adolescents had much of a grasp of who Stalin was, but Olga did remember that one of her roommates in her dorm exclaimed, “My God, I’ve been sleeping next to a Russian this whole time. I could’ve been killed in my sleep.”
The newspaper articles that followed made public the details that Svetlana had guarded so carefully: the school Olga attended, its fees ($3,000), a description of Svetlana’s flat, and the name of her landlord. When the reporters contacted her, she replied briskly, “I do not grant interviews to anyone…. There is absolutely nothing to add to the full truth that we are here in England for the education of my daughter.” By late May, even the
New York Times
had picked up the news: “Stalin’s Daughter Living in British University Town.” The source of much of the information seemed to be Malcolm Muggeridge, who was quoted as saying that Svetlana was a woman broken by her fear of her father, whose death had come as a relief. It was crude; it
was painful. The truth was so much more complex than this.
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Concluding that Muggeridge was the leak, Svetlana was livid. He had violated her daughter’s privacy. He had exposed her. In her unbridled rage, she wrote to him: “I curse the day I wrote you…. You are one of those obsessed demonic natures who ought to be
avoided
at all costs.”
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At the same time as the press was harassing her, Svetlana was expressing her frustrations to Isaiah Berlin and his wife. Since her arrival, they had met her only twice for luncheons in a café. Was that friendship? Berlin had led her to expect so much more. He was the one who’d sought her out in America. It had been his advice that brought her to England. She’d pulled up all her roots on his recommendation, and yet he had not introduced her to a single friend.
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That summer, she managed to resume work on her manuscript and soon sent a draft of two hundred pages to Hugo Brunner at Chatto & Windus. Expecting a Kremlin family memoir, Brunner was not pleased. He wrote back that he was impressed by how much she’d written, but he thought the manuscript would be better placed with an American publisher. He wished her good luck and told her he would love to hear how things went.
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The brisk casualness of Brunner’s dismissal cut deeply.
Svetlana was caught in a bind. People were interested only in the Kremlin Svetlana, in what she might say about Stalin. She knew she could make a fortune writing about Stalin, but she refused to be her father’s biographer.
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She wanted to tell her own story. Her manuscript, “The Faraway Music,” was a narrative of her arrival in the United States, her marriage to Wesley Peters, and Olgivanna Wright’s unscrupulous treatment of her. She also outlined her manipulation at the hands of lawyers and included her contracts with Copex in an appendix. Renouncing her paternity, she dedicated her book to the spirit of her
mother, Nadya. “I am a daughter of Nadya Alliluyeva, not of Stalin,” she wrote defiantly.
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She sent the book to Peter Jovanovich, the managing director of a London subsidiary of the US firm Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Jovanovich found the book a moving “odyssey and a search” but said that it had structural problems.
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He was right. Though it had lovely lyrical moments, the book was driven by undigested invective. Had Svetlana been willing to be edited, it might have become a compelling book, but Jovanovich suggested so many changes that Svetlana decided he was altering her work. Eventually he withdrew his offer.
She now turned her attention back to Isaiah Berlin, asking him to read her manuscript. When he did not reply, she was shocked. She thought his secretary, Pat Utechin, must have turned him against her.
Utechin had been exceedingly friendly, even before Svetlana arrived, and helped her to settle in Cambridge. When Svetlana mentioned that her son, Joseph, had phoned her after sixteen years of silence, Utechin said she knew many Oxford dons who traveled to Moscow. They might manage to meet her son and bring her news of him. But after her initial excitement, Svetlana had second thoughts. Perhaps she was remembering the Krimsky/Kurpel affair of seven years back. Suddenly she was sending Utechin long epistles—would the person Utechin had in mind know what he was doing? Otherwise it might be dangerous for her son. Would the Oxford dons be discreet? If not, she herself might become a subject of gossip in Oxford. Though British, Utechin had been married to a Russian and had deep connections in the Russian exile community. Svetlana was certain she had become the subject of rumors.