Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Mom did whatever it was she was doing. I was chaperoned around, being shown the Acropolis. And I was gift shopping. I had been told I had all of these relatives—a brother, a sister, nieces, and nephews. So I had a whole bunch of people to buy presents for. And I had read that Russians really liked Adidas and couldn’t get them, so I was buying everyone Adidas.
1
It didn’t matter to a thirteen-year-old that she didn’t know the shoe sizes of all these strangers. When Svetlana joined the shopping expedition, she bought an embroidered dress for Katya’s daughter, Anya, and some amusing trinkets for Joseph and his wife. In the three days they had before the Aeroflot flight to Moscow, Olga fell in love with Athens. She laughed when she later read a report in a newspaper that she had tried to commit suicide by jumping off the hotel balcony.
2
On October 25, Svetlana and Olga left the heat of Athens behind and headed into a Moscow winter. As the descending plane circled over the vast empty landscape of Russia further effaced by a blanket of snow, Svetlana was shocked to discover she felt nothing. She was the
exile returned
; she should have been crying.
3
She’d asked Joseph not to come to the airport—it would have been too emotional to meet in public. The Soviet officials waiting at the VIP entrance seemed tense. A young woman approached with a bouquet of flowers: “Welcome home!” As they drove into Moscow, Svetlana barely recognized the city: the route was lined with block after block of monotonous high-rise tenement apartments.
They were escorted to the Hotel Sovietsky, one of the most expensive hotels in Moscow, overlooking the Leningrad Prospect. They climbed its elegant steps and entered its white marble lobby through the revolving doors, and there stood Joseph.
Some part of Svetlana’s psyche still carried the image of the young man of twenty-one whom she had left at Sheremetyevo Airport in 1966: slim, good-looking, with humor in his eyes. The thirty-nine-year-old man staring at her seemed tired and more embarrassed than happy to see her. Joseph was looking at a fifty-eight-year-old woman who was his mother but whom he hadn’t seen in eighteen years.
Svetlana always constructed a fantasy of how things would be. She and Olga were returning to a family who loved and would embrace them. Uncles, aunts, and cousins would surround Olga and lavish her with affection. There would be no recriminations, no regrets. The frozen moment dissolved, and Joseph’s father, Grigori Morozov, who’d always remained close to his son, stepped forward, followed by Joseph’s wife and fourteen-year-old son, Ilya. Joseph moved to embrace his mother and then, taking his wife by the hand, said, “Mama, this is Lyuda.”
The whole encounter was awkward. Joseph ignored Olga. Perhaps he was preoccupied, concerned that his mother like his new wife. Svetlana didn’t. She took an immediate dislike to Lyuda, who seemed so much older than her son, but she told herself not to meddle. The young boy, Ilya, stood by awkwardly. Only Grigori’s presence made the reunion less clumsy. He chatted affectionately with Olga in broken English and guided them to the elevator. Otherwise they might have remained frozen to the white marble floor.
The government had assigned Svetlana a luxurious two-bedroom suite. Even here the reunion did not go well, as they stumbled over each other in Russian and English. Lyuda filled a vase with water to hold the flowers the Committee of Soviet
Women had given Svetlana. Svetlana thought,
At least she’s practical.
Olga stared at these strangers. Grigori said they would meet downstairs in the restaurant, where he’d reserved a table. He reminded Svetlana that the restaurant was once famous for its chorus of Gypsy singers. It always came up in novels. Didn’t she remember? She did not. In the bathroom, Olga turned on her mother in anger.
This
was her brother, who supposedly loved her? He had looked her up and down and said nothing. He hadn’t even hugged her.
4
In the restaurant, Joseph and Svetlana held hands, but it was impossible to speak. The music was too loud. Grigori stuck kindly to Olga, trying to keep her entertained. Ilya remained tongue-tied and tense. Lyuda watched coolly. The familiar feast of vodka, caviar, herring, and pickles lay on the table.
Olga remembered the evening as totally unnerving.
This whole, long, huge table full of people drinking and eating and talking Russian, and there’s only this one guy [Grigori] who’s sitting here and talking to me. And he’s talking to me like I’m six. And I’m thirteen. But he was one of the few that spoke English. Really terrible English. That first night was awful, and I thought, Oh my gosh, Mom’s going to be reunited with Joseph. This is it. I’m done.
5
Svetlana had expected an outpouring of love from her son and seemed incapable of anticipating that his reaction might be complex. She believed she had been faithful all these years in her love for her children. But how was he to know this? All Joseph knew was what Kremlin propaganda had reported. She was anti-Soviet, unstable, a wealthy American who brought them Greek trinkets as homecoming gifts. It would take time to dispel this version. Wrapped in her own longing and now distress, Svetlana lost sight of Olga sitting among these strangers
and would look back ruefully: “It is amazing how, when the heart has already made a decision, reason only supplies every possible reassurance in detail.”
6
The next day a friend of Joseph’s from the Institute of Foreign Relations brought champagne and flowers and prepared Svetlana for the arrival that afternoon of two officials from the Foreign Office who were going to help her “to begin readjustment to the Soviet life.” When she tried to ask about Russian schools for Olga, he made it clear that all such questions should be directed to the two officials. Svetlana was being reminded that decisions were made “up there on the top,” as they said in Moscow.
7
The first order of business would be to reinstate Svetlana’s Soviet citizenship and confiscate her and Olga’s American passports.
The international paparazzi were already lurking outside the hotel. When Svetlana and Olga emerged, one reporter asked Olga, “Are you Olga Peters?” Svetlana grabbed her daughter’s arm and pulled her back into the hotel. It was the first time Olga began to understand who her mother really was.
8
On November 1, the Supreme Soviet reclaimed Citizen Alliluyeva by special decree. On November 2, a brief announcement appeared in
Izvestia
and on the evening news:
The Soviet authorities considered and complied with a request made by S. I. Alliluyeva, who has returned to Moscow, for restoring her to the citizenship of the USSR as well as for granting Soviet citizenship to Alliluyeva’s daughter Olga.
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The Communist Party was keen to make a propaganda fuss over returnees. Ironically, the same week that Svetlana arrived, another Soviet exile returned, posthumously. The remains of the legendary singer Feodor Chaliapin, who had died in Paris in
1938, were flown to Moscow and reburied with ceremony in the legendary Novodevichy Cemetery, where Stalin’s memorial statue to Svetlana’s mother, Nadya, still stood in splendid isolation.
10
“Entrance is free. But you pay dearly at the exit,” as Svetlana’s second husband, Yuri Zhdanov, used to say.
11
She knew there would be a price to pay for permission to return, and she paid it at a seventy-minute press conference on November 16, held at the offices of the Soviet Women’s National Committee before a restricted audience of foreign and Soviet journalists. Accompanied by Foreign Ministry officials and a translator, Svetlana read a prepared statement in Russian, and occasionally corrected the translator, who read it in English. She seemed composed and spoke without emotion, beginning with a brief saga of her life in the West. After her defection to the United States in 1967, she claimed she had found herself in the hands of “lawyers, businessmen, politicos and publishers who turned the name of my father, my own name and life into a sensational commodity…. I became a favorite pet of the CIA and those who even went to the length of telling me what I should write and what I should not.”
12
Later Svetlana would claim that her Soviet interpreter had mistranslated her. She had said, “They treated me well, for I was everybody’s pet” and had never mentioned the CIA. This was probably disingenuous; the statement reflected what she had often said to friends. However, it is probably true that, because she had little choice, she simply acceded to the ministry’s demands. “I wanted to talk and answer questions. They wanted certain things to be there. They made me write texts in Russian, which they all approved. I felt very awkward. I wanted to say simply, ‘I came to join my children.’ “
13
At the press conference, she described her second book,
Only One Year
, as a “collective production” by those she “ironically thanked” in her author’s note. When this comment was reported in the West, the historian Robert Tucker insisted that
Only One Year
was entirely her own work and explained, “It appeared that she was trying to dissociate herself from the book,” which was “even more anti-Soviet” than her
Twenty Letters to a Friend.
14
She told the reporters that she and her daughter had been greeted like the prodigal son in biblical times, and she was grateful. The bulk of her address was about her personal reasons for her return: her longing to see her children, her deeply held religious beliefs, and her concern for Olga’s education. In fact, she had run out of money to keep Olga at her boarding school, and she imagined that in the USSR, where education was free, she could find the equivalent of her old Model School No. 25, which had provided her with a brilliant education and had been more of a home than her own home in those brutal times. She concluded by saying that this would be her last press conference. That night, clips from the press conference were featured prominently on Russian TV news broadcasts, but these clips were only from the officially prepared parts of her statement. Her comments about her personal motives for her return and her religious beliefs were edited out.
For the Soviets, Svetlana’s return was a propaganda coup. Preparations were under way for a huge celebration the next year of the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. The Politburo was busy rehabilitating Stalin as a military genius and brilliant diplomat. Television documentaries showed Stalin addressing the army in Red Square in 1941, with Hitler’s troops only twenty miles from Moscow; in his marshal’s uniform posing with Roosevelt and Churchill at Tehran and Yalta; and charming Truman and Clement Attlee at the Potsdam Conference, as he outnegotiated his allies. A feature film based on John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
was rejuvenating the Bolshevik revolution as directed by men of passion and principle. But all this propaganda masked
a fragile government. Svetlana had returned to the USSR at a very shaky moment. Konstantin Chernenko, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, who had succeeded Andropov as the country’s leader, was old, ailing,
15
and rarely seen in public; he would be dead within the year. Behind the scenes, as the economy disintegrated, reformists in the Communist Party were battling the old guard.
The Soviet population was still divided about Stalin. Photos of Stalin could be seen dangling from strings on the windshields of cabs in Moscow and trucks on the Trans-Siberian highway, but some people remembered the purges and the price paid in human lives. The younger generation seemed ignorant of that past and ready to accept Stalin as the great commander in chief who guided the Red Army to victory and saved the Allies; the prewar purges of the Soviet command and the postwar treatment of returning soldiers had been edited out. In this context, Stalin’s errant daughter’s return and public contrition were invaluable to the Party. Of course, there were those who seemed to have no idea who this Alliluyeva woman was.
16
The Moscow correspondent for the
Washington Post
, Dusko Doder, reported being asked by a young taxi driver, “Who is Alliluyeva?” When he responded that she was Stalin’s daughter, the taxi driver replied, “I didn’t know Stalin’s real name was Alliluyev.”
The reaction in the US press to Svetlana’s return was predictable outrage. Who did she think she was?
Defecting
from the free world back to the Communists! The headlines blared: S
TALIN’S
D
AUGHTER
B
ACK IN THE
S
OVIET
U
NION
A
FTER
17 Y
EARS
17
and S
VETLANA’S
F
LIGHT
: B
ACK
W
HERE
H
ER
T
ROUBLES
B
EGAN.
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Two articles in particular were utterly damning, both by Sovietologists who had known her personally.
Professor Robert Tucker titled his article “Svetlana Inherited Her Tragic Flaw.” Acknowledging that he knew her, Tucker described Svetlana as driven by her inner demons, voicing “angry
recriminations” against everyone, including her American ex-husband, Wesley Peters. She refused to speak of Stalin because she couldn’t admit to herself that “she was—in some sense—like her father”: her “low speaking voice,” her eyes with their “yellow glint,” her “inner imperiousness,” her refusal to accept criticism. She had rejected Tucker’s editorial suggestions for her book, the principal one of which was his suggestion to change the title to
Leavetaking.
Unlike her father, “who would destroy those with whom he broke,” all she could do was flee. “She is her father’s daughter in a way that has finally brought her back to unfreedom … the last misfortune bequeathed to her by the terrible man who was her father.”
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