Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Most Sundays Svetlana and Olga attended services at the Sioni Cathedral overlooking the Mtkvari River. Both were enchanted by the exquisite quality of the Georgian choir intoning the liturgy. Only here, it seemed to Svetlana, could people escape the grinding poverty and fearful repression that still pervaded Georgia. Only here did she feel anonymous and at peace. Of course, this was an illusion. Even at the Sioni, people knew who she was. When she sought a private audience with the patriarch, he was comforting. He told her, “You should write to your own children only words of love. Nothing else. They have forgotten what is love and forgiveness. Never blame them; never argue with them. Just tell them how much you love them.”
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Svetlana kept writing to her daughter Katya, who had said, “No contact whatsoever.” All her letters came back. Katya’s father,
Yuri Zhdanov, by now a professor of biochemistry at the university in Rostov, wrote a kind letter and sent pictures of Katya and her daughter, telling Svetlana to be patient. “Katya is incredibly self-sufficient and independent. Listens to no one’s advice.”
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Neither her son nor her grandson wrote or visited. Svetlana decided the authorities had brainwashed her children.
Chauffeured by Jora, Svetlana and Olga would drive into the countryside as Svetlana tried to recover her Georgian roots. They visited the town of Gori, her father’s birthplace, where a monstrous shrine with Corinthian columns covered the humble two-room house with the one bed on which the Djugashvili family slept. There was no fireplace; cooking was done in a small pot on a
karasinka
(kerosene burner). Olga was appalled by the misery of it all.
Nearby stood an equally monstrous two-story museum with marble entrance and rising staircase that now traced the history of Stalin’s glory. Svetlana detested the display and instead looked for mementos of her paternal grandmother. The only reminder of Stalin’s mother was a pair of her glasses. Though Svetlana had met her grandmother only once, she loved her for those last words to her son which had so amused him: “But what a pity you never became a priest.” They also visited the local school where Stalin began to study Russian. Svetlana told Olga her father’s Russian was quite good, though he never fully lost his Georgian accent. Svetlana had refused the invitation from the museum’s chief curator, Nina Ameridzhibe, to attend the ceremony marking the 105th anniversary of Stalin’s birth that December 21, just after they’d arrived. Ameridzhibe claimed that one million people visited the museum in 1984, breaking all previous records.
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Still, whenever they went to a museum or even the church, people stared. Olga was young and resilient, but for Svetlana it was gut-wrenching.
My greatest burden lay in the need of everyone to tell me “what a great man” my father was: some accompanied the words with tears, others with hugs and kisses, a few were satisfied with only stating that fact. I could not avoid the subject or the confrontations on beaches, in dining rooms, on the street…. They were obsessed with his name, his image, and, being obsessed, they could not leave me alone. It was a torture for me. I could not tell them how complex were my thoughts about my father and my relationship with him. Nor could I tell them what they wanted to hear—so they departed from me in anger. I was continually on edge and nervous.
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Olga was angry at her mother’s mourning over Joseph. “You had me,” she would say. “Was that not enough for you? No! You wanted them all too. See what you’ve got! We should be living in England like we were. You asked for this!”
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There were many things Olga loved about Georgia and the friends she made, but there were “a lot of hardships.” For one, her mother was drinking too much, and so was she. They would be invited to Georgian feasts that still followed the tradition of the
tamada
(toastmaster) proposing continuous toasts. “I was fourteen! In Georgia, there were endless dinners with four bottles of wine and you had to give toasts in a ram’s horn! Including the children. You couldn’t not toast.”
Even more disturbing was the problem Olga was having with male attention. She had discovered that foreign girls were considered loose by Georgian standards, and already so tall and lovely, she was fair game. “I was always getting groped by older men. It was horrible, and if I was ever left alone … I just couldn’t stand being left alone…. I don’t think I’d even thought about boys yet.” And there was another problem. At fourteen, Olga was of marriageable age.
In Tbilisi, they had a tradition: it was not unknown for a girl to be kidnapped. If you’d been out of your house, in another building with a man overnight, you had to marry him. Otherwise you were shunned from society. It happened to a fourteen-year-old girl I knew. It was terrifying. And I was a pretty good bachelorette. Kidnapping Stalin’s granddaughter would have been quite a prize! It was a risk.
And then there was just the whole dark side to it, the whole behind the Curtain Communist side. I was living this weird sheltered, secluded life with about four different governesses coming every day. My mother stopped me from going out, trying to protect me from getting kidnapped. And what was she going to do? She couldn’t write. We were fighting a lot. I was really fiery. I just had a feeling of despair and was not able to plan a future. This is what we’re going to be doing for the rest of our lives! Of course it was wonderful going to the ballet, and seeing friends. And there were many good days. But I was playing it, as if I were this shallow social butterfly who could find herself happy in any situation.
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Friends from Moscow visited. Stepan Mikoyan, who was with a Soviet Air Force group that was touring all the capitals of southern Russia to publicize aviation, stopped two days in Tbilisi and had dinner with Svetlana and Olga. To him, Svetlana seemed completely alone. “Maybe she was just conscious of a certain estrangement and isolation; quite a lot of people were feeling hostility towards her. The Stalinists hated her for having ‘betrayed’ her father, and the anti-Stalinists disliked her for being his daughter.”
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Svetlana invited her cousin Kyra, the daughter of Pavel and Zhenya Alliluyev, to come to Tbilisi for an extended visit. Like the rest of the family, Kyra was able to separate Svetlana from her memories of her incarceration and five years of exile under Stalin.
She and Svetlana had been very close as children. They shared memories of parties in the Kremlin. “The time passed joyously…. Grandpa [Sergei] was not very jolly, but grandma [Olga] would pick up a guitar and sing.”
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Kyra remembered how she and Svetlana watched movies, especially the American ones with Deanna Durbin. When Kyra stayed overnight, she would sleep in Svetlana’s room. After nanny Alexandra Andreevna left, Svetlana “would ask me to dance. She would sit on the bed and I would dance to Strauss on the gramophone. Svetlana was a very nice girl.”
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Svetlana thought the ebullient Kyra’s adventures as an actress would entertain Olga. The visit went well at first, but soon degenerated into hostility. Kyra complained that Svetlana seemed displeased with everything and Olga was “spoiled and whimsical” and said, “It was hard to be with them both.”
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Kyra’s brother Alexander noted that Svetlana and Kyra were both strong characters, both volatile, and they fought a lot. He wasn’t surprised when Kyra returned to Moscow.
Back in England and in America, Svetlana and Olga had not been forgotten. In Cambridge, Vera Traill had taken it upon herself to rescue Olga from her mother. She wrote to Sir Isaiah Berlin. “I’m hyper-active about Olga.” She had found Svetlana’s address in Tbilisi through an old friend and was looking for anybody going to Georgia who might search Svetlana and Olga down. “It must be somebody with perfect Russian (i.e., an émigré), intelligent and discreet,” she said. She had found a couple going to Tbilisi, but they were hopelessly naive. “They will return with nothing or be expelled as spies.”
Apparently Traill was in contact with Wesley Peters. She told Berlin:
William Wesley Peters (he always signs with both names in full) asked for Olga’s address, applied for a visa, was refused both & now is sitting back in despair. He
could
do more, of
course—at the very least insist on regular contact by post or telephone—and I keep prodding him, but what holds him back, I think, is that he is uncertain of his welcome. He feels he did not do enough for Olga & feels guilty; also, apparently he saw a letter written by O. from Cambridge, which contained a “hostile reference” to him.
Traill reported that she then wrote to Friends’ School. “Explaining that I want to encourage Wes Peters to more effort, I said I wd be grateful if they could ask O.’s friends if she had ever said nice things about her dad.” She found the school’s reply “monstrous” and sent it on to Berlin. “You’ll have to pinch yourself at every par…. False, pompous, utterly irrelevant. I feel both bewildered and sick. I thought quakers were do-gooders, they’ve been known to help in famines & plagues. Why suddenly this frantic fear of ‘getting involved’?” Berlin disappointed Traill. She was irate when he too refused to get involved.
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But people who genuinely cared about Svetlana were worried. Joan Kennan had somehow found Svetlana’s address in Tbilisi, probably through her father. Certainly the CIA would have known it. Svetlana was overjoyed to get her letter and sent back photographs of Olga, lamenting, “My Katya did not want to see me (us) even once! And I thought all these years that they were missing me badly. What blindness.”
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Rosa Shand had also managed to get Svetlana’s address, probably through Utya Djaparidze, her Georgian friend in New York, and wrote to her. Svetlana wrote back to say she and Olga were fine. Olga had learned to speak Georgian and Russian in a remarkably short time. “She makes everyone here so happy when she speaks their tongue.”
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Rosa wrote back:
Your pilgrimage has been a courageous one, and you go on probing, & I trust you will somehow make sense of it
all as your beloved Dostoyevsky did…. I love you. I wear that coral necklace that reminds me of your extraordinary generosity. And I send my love to Olga.
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The truth was, Svetlana was not finding it easy to make sense of her pilgrimage, and Rosa, underneath her reassurances, was genuinely anxious. Utya Djaparidze wrote to Rosa giving her a clear idea of Svetlana’s isolation. Utya had heard from friends of her brother in Tbilisi that he often saw Svetlana and Olga. Utya feared Svetlana was “a dangerous acquaintance for him.”
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He’d spent fifteen years in the camps and his family was still blacklisted.
Underneath her bravado, Svetlana was, in fact, desperately seeking a way out of the USSR. She now realized that Olga wouldn’t be able to live in Georgia or anywhere in Russia. She had brought her daughter here, and this fiasco was all her fault. Luckily for Svetlana, things were changing in Moscow. The ailing Chernenko had finally died, and in March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power. He was rumored to be a liberal, but Svetlana saw him acting cautiously, still hemmed in by the hard-line Communists he’d inherited from his predecessors. His first reform was a severe clampdown on the consumption of vodka. In December 1985, Svetlana took her courage in hand and wrote to Gorbachev asking permission to leave. They’d been in the USSR one year. She received no reply.
In February she slipped away, leaving Olga on her own in Tbilisi, and took the train to Moscow. She’d made this trip from north to south by train every summer of her childhood—the railway cars with their sleeping berths hadn’t changed a bit. But this time the trip was a kind of torture as she contemplated her renewed entrapment. Would she and Olga ever be allowed out of their golden cage? She used her two days on the train to organize the rhetoric she would need to argue with Party officials.
She could not afford any missteps, any impulsive words this time.
She stayed with her cousin Vladimir at his home on Gorky Street, much to the rage of Joseph’s wife, who phoned demanding to know how he could let that woman stay with his family.
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On February 25, the day of the Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Soviet Party (the first congress presided over by Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary), Svetlana headed to the American Embassy. She was now a Soviet citizen, and no Soviet citizen could enter a foreign embassy. She was stopped and taken away by Soviet militiamen. Later that afternoon, two Foreign Ministry officials met with her to discuss her situation. Clearly Svetlana’s letters to Gorbachev had reached the top of the echelon. She was informed, “Your daughter can return to her school in England … as a Soviet citizen of course, and she will return here to you for her vacations.”
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Svetlana was advised to move back to Moscow to live.
Two days later, back in Tbilisi, Svetlana managed to phone the headmaster of Friends’ School to say that Olga would be returning to school. He replied that the school would be delighted to welcome her back. It would be best if she returned by April 16, in time for the beginning of the spring term. Shocked to have gotten through to England on her own phone—the line must have been opened, though she assumed it was monitored—Svetlana called Sam Hayakawa in San Francisco to say that Olga had been given permission to leave. She urged him to get the information into the news so that the Soviets would not be able to back down. She begged him to let the US Embassy in Moscow know that she, too, wanted to return, but her American passport had been confiscated. “You can’t imagine what I’ve gotten myself into!” she lamented. Hayakawa had recently been elected to the US Senate. He reassured her. “It’s OK. All will be well.”
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