Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Olga now had permission to leave, but Svetlana must have been terrified that she herself would be trapped in Moscow and separated from her daughter. Could she lose a third child? She wrote to Gorbachev again, this time including a formal petition to the Supreme Soviet asking to renounce her Soviet citizenship.
Svetlana made it back to Tbilisi in time to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. A few friends prepared a Georgian feast for her and sang to the accompaniment of their guitars. She told them nothing of her plans. Why make them “accomplices”? She recalled the night with fondness: “duets, trios, an endless sequence of traditional melodic songs about love, death, separation and longing, beautiful eyes, and love for the motherland … endless, captivating beauty, melancholy old melodies and tunes streaming one after the other like a murmuring brook.”
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She watched Olga sing, accompanying herself on the piano. It was beautiful and sad. She cried and felt grateful for the generosity of these Georgians, who had extended her and her daughter such warm friendship. And for that single moment the weight of her anxieties lifted.
While Svetlana was in Moscow, Olga managed to acquire a little Pekinese puppy, which she named Maka. Svetlana also discovered that her daughter, who would turn fifteen in May, had developed a girlhood crush on an older man. She was worried. Would this be a complicating entanglement? They had to leave immediately. She knew she had to handle Olga carefully. She told her they would soon be going on a trip to Moscow, but not to worry, they’d be back for visits.
On March 20, the night before they were to fly out of Tbilisi, under the unbearable stress of wondering if she would be abandoned alone in Moscow, Svetlana suffered what appeared to be a heart attack. That Thursday evening, she went to bed feeling pains in her chest and left arm and could hardly breathe. She woke Olga and asked her to fetch a doctor. How could this
be happening just as she was preparing their escape! Olga was terrified as she watched her mother turning blue. She thought Svetlana was dying.
At the Tbilisi hospital, doctors determined that Svetlana had had not a heart attack but rather a cardiovascular spasm caused by stress. She was ordered to remain in the hospital for two weeks for a thorough checkup. Svetlana was immediately suspicious. Why two weeks and why now? When the acquaintance of a friend connected to the hospital assured her that her condition did not require a lengthy hospital stay, she concluded that these orders came from Moscow. The authorities were trying to prevent her from leaving Georgia.
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She was right, of course, in believing that Moscow knew her every move. Indeed, the very night of her hospitalization, the Politburo was discussing her fate. A top secret document, dated March 20, 1986, recorded the minutes of the meeting chaired by Mikhail Gorbachev with at least fifteen other Party officials in attendance, including comrades Andrei Gromyko and Yegor Ligachev.
Among the topics on the agenda were the war in Afghanistan (they discussed the psychological state of the leaders) and a telegram from Aden—the USSR was then Yemen’s main backer—requesting permission “to execute 50 people.” This was disapproved on the grounds that “these sorts of actions may exacerbate internal conflict.” There followed a discussion about naming an icebreaker after Brezhnev. This was agreed to, but the icebreaker would be put in the water without any public fuss. Brezhnev’s was not a popular name in these shaky times.
Then Comrade Gorbachev said, “There’s one other thing,” and read Svetlana Alliluyeva’s letter to the men at the table. Comrade Viktor Chebrikov, chairman of the Committee for State Security (the KGB), remarked, “The first letters were good, there was gratitude. It seems there were about 50% of
the problems that she didn’t even mention. Tonight they drove her to the hospital [in Tbilisi] with a heart attack.”
Gorbachev responded, “We need to figure out the opinion of her daughter and meet on a personal level.” He didn’t want to meet Svetlana himself. “If I go, I’ll have to comment on Stalin, Stalingrad, and all that.” His family still bore the scars of Stalingrad. After some discussion, it was decided that Comrade Ligachev would meet with her.
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Svetlana was right in assuming that the secret police were keeping tabs on her, but her anxiety that the government was trying to control her was paranoid. In fact it didn’t know what to do with her. Sadly, this was when her son, Joseph, chose to phone her. He didn’t get a chance to offer his commiseration. She was irate. Why was he calling now? He hadn’t bothered to call in
fifteen months.
He might at least have called Olga. Had he such close ties to the authorities that he knew immediately that she was in the hospital? She asked him brutally, “What is it? Do you intend to bury me soon? It’s not time yet.”
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They both hung up.
She was sure the authorities were going to try to use her son to stop her from leaving. Possibly she had spent too much time in the Soviet Union. The habits of suspicion were so deeply ingrained in her, as they were in her fellow citizens, that nothing could be taken at face value. There was always a subtext.
In fact, the authorities were now thinking it would be a good idea to get her out of the country. As her cousin Leonid Alliluyev remarked, “Svetlana was a bomb: Stalin, her defection. There were already so many governmental problems that they wanted to get rid of her.”
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Svetlana’s only thought was how to get out of the hospital before someone “poisoned” her. She simply walked out of the hospital that Sunday when no doctors were around and took the trolley home.
Her and Olga’s departure would be one more silent leavetaking.
Not a soul in Tbilisi realized it would be permanent. The only one who knew was the ghost of Svetlana’s grandmother. Before they left, Svetlana visited the grave of Stalin’s mother, Keke, in the small cemetery on Saint David’s hill above Tbilisi, asking herself, “My illiterate, hard-working Grandmother managed to live a decent, honest life to her very end. Why is it that I cannot find my own right way?” She thought of the words of her old lover, David Samoilov: “Remember your brother, Alenushka! And never, never come back.”
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But she feared the future.
When Olga’s piano teacher, Leila Sikmashvili, later found out they were not returning, she never forgave Svetlana. Looking back, she would say that one of the great regrets of her life was that she should have abducted Olga. Olga could have married that boyfriend—the man never stopped loving her—and she might have had a happy life in Georgia as the mother of six children.
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The disconnect between a Georgian and an American version of happiness could not have been clearer. When Olga learned she would be returning to Friends’ School, she was over the moon.
Svetlana and Olga, carrying Maka, flew to Moscow on March 27. They left behind most of their personal belongings: books, papers, heirlooms. Leaving things behind never bothered Svetlana. As Olga put it, “She was always leaving things all over the globe.”
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It was as if Svetlana refused to carry her history with her. But Olga put her foot down. They were not leaving Maka behind.
They checked into the Hotel Sovietsky. They had a much smaller room this time because Svetlana was paying for it. Olga received a Soviet passport with an exit and entry visa (the special document necessary for travel abroad), which they had requisitioned in Georgia. She would be allowed to travel to England as a Soviet schoolgirl. Svetlana still had no such document. Nothing about her leaving the USSR had been cleared
up. They ended up staying in Moscow for twenty nerve-racking days, waiting to hear.
Svetlana spent many late nights walking in the Moscow streets with her nephew Alexander Burdonsky. One night she turned to him and said, “You want to ask me why I intend to leave?” “Yes,” he replied. “Can you understand this feeling? I walk around Moscow…. There is no one here. Just crosses. Crosses everywhere … crosses, crosses, crosses.”
He understood she was saying that the “milieu of people who were close and interesting to her were no longer around. None of the people about whom she was nostalgic existed anymore.” He would reflect only later that she had
needed to come here in order to say good-bye to all of this forever. It was necessary to come back to understand that little has changed—in the psychology of the authorities primarily—nothing has changed. And when once again she was offered to live here, to be given an apartment, to be given this, to be given that, to be given a dacha—to once again be settled like a wolf amongst the red flags. All of this for the second time—her whole being categorically and with rage rejected this.
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Burdonsky also realized that Svetlana had to leave the USSR in order to protect Olga. He found Olga “delightful, a completely wild creature, with a character that she’d inherited from Svetlana.” Under her quiet surface, Svetlana had always been a rebel in a world where rebellion was unthinkable. “No matter how much pressure she received, she was still a disobedient creature. And Olya [Olga] was also a disobedient creature. Like her mother.” Burdonsky knew Olga could never survive in the repressive Soviet system. “Of course there was conflict; they were so much alike, but it was clear they loved each other very much.”
Ironically, it was Svetlana’s old enemy Victor Louis, who had tried to sell her
Twenty Letters to a Friend
in a pirated edition in 1967, who advised the international press that Svetlana was in Moscow seeking permission to leave. He reported it was unlikely that the Soviet authorities would grant her exit papers, although they would probably give them to Olga. “You just can’t change your citizenship every few months,” he said. “She cannot simply go to the airport and leave. She has to go through the bureaucracy.” He added, “It might be embarrassing to them to let her go.”
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One day a well-dressed, efficient, cheerful young woman from the American Embassy slipped into the Hotel Sovietsky under the pretext that she was visiting another delegation (a visit to a Soviet citizen by an American Embassy official was absolutely forbidden), and knocked on Svetlana’s door. Olga hadn’t seen an American in a very long time and began to cry on the spot.
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Svetlana always encouraged her daughter to stand up for herself. When someone asked a question about what Olga thought, Svetlana would say, “Ask her!” Now the American Embassy official asked Olga if she wanted to return to England. Thoughts of a boyfriend waiting in Tbilisi vanished like smoke. “Yes,” Olga said, speaking as eloquently and diplomatically as she could. When the woman returned in a week, she opened her briefcase and pulled out two American passports, one for Olga and one for Svetlana. Svetlana believed Senator Hayakawa had used his influence with George Shultz, then US secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, and pulled strings.
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On April 3, Svetlana got a phone call from a Foreign Ministry official, who said, “You may leave with your American passport if you do not want to wait until the cancelation of your Soviet citizenship. This will take some time.”
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On April 5, Comrade Ligachev invited her for a talk. A driver took her to Staraya
Ploshchad (Old Square) and the offices of the Central Committee. The corridor with its Kremlin-style carpet runner looked and smelled exactly the same as it had on the day she had met Comrade Suslov to ask permission to register her marriage to Brajesh Singh. She felt she was in a bad movie, a rerun in which the opening and closing scenes were implausibly repeated.
As a secretary sat nearby recording their conversation in shorthand, Ligachev dismissed her. “The Motherland will survive without you. The question is: Will you survive without the Motherland?”
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And he added: “Behave,” by which he meant, of course, no more interviews, no books. And of course Svetlana would disobey. Soviet officialdom believed books were bombs. So did she. Alas, few in the West, where she was heading back, believed books had such power.
A ticket was arranged for Svetlana through the US Embassy. She was booked to fly out the day after Olga on Swissair with a stopover in Zurich before proceeding to the United States. Svetlana and Olga spent their last days in Moscow entertained by “the Alliluyev boys.” The international media were already phoning the Hotel Sovietsky. Even Olga’s father, Wes, phoned. Svetlana thought,
Better late than never
, though she did wonder whether his motive for phoning was to look after Olga’s welfare or to arrange his own public image before the press onslaught that was on its way. In the
Washington Post
, he was reported to have spent a year working for Olga’s return. He advised Svetlana that Olga must be “circumspect” in what she said. The situation was delicate. Svetlana responded that Olga was still outspoken. Her father told the newspapers he was glad “that [Olga] wasn’t crushed.”
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Olga’s uncles and her mother saw her off at Sheremetyevo Airport. It was a strange moment when she kissed her mother good-bye. She still couldn’t quite believe she was leaving. She had dreamed of this moment almost every night and worried
she might wake up and it wouldn’t be real. “I imagine people dream—not that I want to call this experience prison—but I imagine that people do dream of getting out of prison every night.” There was even a moment when she got back to England and thought,
This is a really long dream.
At the airport, Olga could see that her mother was frightened, though Svetlana tried bravely to hide her fear. “She still wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to leave. Not until she actually got on the plane.”