Stalin's Daughter (76 page)

Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky could see that Svetlana was lonely without her daughter and began to invite her to the odd dinner party when her husband was away on business. At one such party, Svetlana met Hugh and Vanessa Thomas. He’d written a seminal book, which Svetlana deeply admired, on the Spanish Civil War, and soon she was a regular visitor to their home. Vanessa found her compelling.

I remember Hugh and I thought she was like a little princess, living in this cell up the road. She was so simple, but she was awfully grand because she was very educated. She spoke French, and German, and very good English. She had very good manners, but humble—she was the daughter of the head of state of half the world! I don’t mean she put on airs at all. She was grand in a way a princess would be if she were living in a cell. She never behaved as a pauper, never spoke about money. She was loftily above it in an essential way. She sort of gracefully fitted in. Of course we talked about our children. We were both besotted by our daughters.
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Vanessa’s son Inigo Thomas worked for the
London Review of Books
and sent a request to Svetlana to write something for it. However, he made the mistake of addressing his letter to “Svetlana Alliluyeva.” Svetlana rang up Vanessa almost apoplectic, saying she was not using that name and their son had
exposed her. Vanessa apologized profusely, but she already took Svetlana’s explosions as simply part of the landscape. “Svetlana longed for an explosion so that we could all pick it up again. I’m very English. I couldn’t take all that Russian drama seriously.”

Indeed, when Thomas also phoned to apologize, Svetlana invited him to tea. He remembered being shocked at finding Stalin’s daughter in her charity digs: “broke, homeless, stateless, restless, pensionless.”
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She made him tea in the Formica kitchen with its worn floor and hard fluorescent lighting, ignoring her fellow resident, who was cooking an omelet on the communal stove. They drank their tea in her tidy bedroom, which held only a small bed folded into a sofa, a bookshelf, a chair, and a dressing table. There wasn’t a single photograph or painting on the wall, but on the dresser stood a bust of Olga made by the sculptor Shenda Amery.

Svetlana’s residence at 280 Ladbroke Grove, then owned by the Carr-Gomm Charitable Society, looks much the same in 2015 as it did when she lived there in the early 1990s.

And of course, the press tracked her down. An article appeared in the American magazine
People.
“Lana Peters, a solemn
woman in a bulky jacket, keeps very much to herself on the bustling streets of London as she quietly browses in antique shops and the library. Who would suspect that she was once known as Svetlana, the only daughter of the infamous Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin?”
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A photograph of a scowling Svetlana accompanied the piece. The house on Ladbroke Grove was described as “a group home for single people—many suffering from severe emotional problems.” The article contained the usual dark commentary about her father, her mother’s suicide, multiple divorces, lost children. There was nothing new in it, because her fellow residents had refused to talk to the reporter. Svetlana picked up and moved to a new residence on Nursery Lane around the corner.

But Svetlana’s circle of friends was widening. Through Nina, she met the Mexican diplomat Raoul Ortiz. In his early sixties, he was elegant, a gifted writer, and a passionate reader of Proust. They would go to the cinema together, to embassy parties, to concerts, and to the occasional restaurant. Ortiz felt there were many Svetlanas. “She returned to a person whatever their expectations of her were. I was an exotic character. She loved photographs of trees in spring, spouting new flowers. Meeting me and establishing a friendship brought her a new spring.”
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They never once talked about politics in the Soviet Union. In fact, what made him unique was that he was outside the circle of those obsessed by the USSR.

But then Ortiz was posted to Paris. As he was preparing to leave, Svetlana suggested how wonderful it would be if she moved to Paris and they continued their friendship there. “Not that she would dream of shacking up together. But she was lonely, and I had a very free life and was afraid of sentimental attachments.” He recognized that she saw him as a gateway to another life: “It is a mistake to think that Svetlana was running from something; rather she was always running towards something, a version of life that would be different, that would meet
her expectations of what a contented life could be.”
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He didn’t encourage her to move to Paris.

Svetlana met Laurence and Linda Kelly at a cocktail party at the Thomas home. When his father had served as British ambassador to the USSR in the late 1940s, Laurence Kelly spent six months at the British Embassy learning Russian. He knew firsthand the culture of paranoia that her father had instilled during the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign and the Doctors’ Plot. When Kelly was introduced to Svetlana as the author of a biography of the famous nineteenth-century poet and novelist Mikhail Lermontov, she froze, and then explained that Lermontov was one of her favorite poets. Soon Kelly was showing her his specialized library on Lermontov. Together they delighted in the poem Lermontov wrote when exiled by the tsar to the Caucasus: “Farewell, Smelly Russia.” Kelly was then working on research into Georgian history for his book
Diplomacy and Murder in Tehran
and promised to send Svetlana anything of interest he came across.

Svetlana would occasionally tell Kelly unexpected and entertaining anecdotes about her father, one of which was about Stalin “losing his cool” with his parrot.

The English tobacco company Dunhill, a maker of pipes, had given Stalin a particularly fine pipe. In his flat in the Kremlin, his tame parrot used to imitate the awful noises of throat clearing and spit that pipe smokers make when they light up. One day Stalin was having a tough time signing many lists with Molotov and he came home in a terrible temper. The parrot began his routine. Stalin took out his Dunhill pipe and killed the parrot on the spot.
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Kelly found Svetlana immensely entertaining. “Poor Lana was a last stranded fish in a society that could not understand her.”

The Kellys took to inviting Svetlana to stay at their cottage in Cumbria in the Lake District. The bucolic landscape with its undulating green hills, flocks of grazing sheep, and farm carts lumbering down the narrow roads spilling their hay was seductive; it seemed nothing had changed since the nineteenth century. One afternoon, the Kellys suggested a visit to Pamela Egremont, mistress of nearby Cockermouth Castle. She turned out to be an exquisitely beautiful woman in her sixties who had traveled all over Southeast Asia and China. Soon Svetlana was visiting her at her elegant London residence. Pamela Egremont’s fondest memory of Svetlana was of her sitting on the living-room sofa talking about Stalin. She spoke of how her father had prevented her from studying literature at Moscow University because she would get involved with dreadful people like
poets.
“He looked very, very cross,” she said.

As Svetlana was telling me this, she stood up and stamped to the end of the room and stamped back again and suddenly her whole face looked almost like her father’s (I’d seen pictures of him). She turned herself sort of into him, and then she plumped back on the sofa and said, “Don’t talk to me again about my father.”
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The people who most disgusted her, Svetlana told Pamela Egremont, were all the lackeys around her father in the Kremlin, always giving her little presents and trying to please her to get on her father’s good side. “She saw through them. I thought she was an admirable woman, considering what she had gone through and all the parts she had to play.” Only once did she experience Svetlana’s vitriol. She had just read a new biography of Beria, and asked for Svetlana’s opinion. Svetlana flared up. “Don’t ever speak to me of that man. He killed eight of my relatives.” While many American friends thought Svetlana was
unstable, Pamela Egremont thought “she was amazingly normal, solid as a rock.”

After her return from the USSR, Svetlana had resumed her friendship with Rosamond Richardson. Richardson was already well known for her books on gardening and cooking; she had a particular gift for writing about foods in their natural context. On one visit to Saffron Walden, as they were having tea, Svetlana suddenly turned to Rosamond and said, “We should do a book together.”
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Richardson remembered that it was as if the idea had flown in through the window. Svetlana was proposing a book based on Richardson’s interviews with her. In her mind, she would at last be able to talk about the Alliluyevs and the succession of strong women in her family. She wanted it understood how the Revolution had destroyed them.
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Only anger and black humor had saved her grandmother. In her last years, Nadya’s mother, Olga, had lived alone in the Kremlin. Once she explained to Svetlana how she survived. “You know, I make lots of tea for myself. I put it on the table and I say, ‘Bitte schön’ [Have some] and then ‘Danke schön’ [Thank you], and then I drink.”
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Her grandmother couldn’t do anything to stop Stalin, but her stoical self-discipline and black humor kept her going.

Listening to Svetlana’s stories, Richardson commiserated. “How much you have suffered!” To which Svetlana replied that she had not suffered. It was the people returning from the camps who had suffered.
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She often thought of her friend Irina Gogua, who had been very close to Nadya. Gogua had been arrested in the mid-1930s and spent seventeen years in prison and exile. She never spoke in detail of those years, but she did explain how she survived. Svetlana repeated Gogua’s words as if they were scorched into her memory. “I built myself a theory. I had to accept what happened to me. It was totally unjust. I had done nothing, but I had to accept. Otherwise, I saw people who couldn’t accept, who were bashing their heads on walls
and protesting, and they were pretty soon dead, because they couldn’t.” And Svetlana added, “Oh yes, people get wise there. When it comes to the worst thing, you get wise.”
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The project with Richardson soon solidified into a book about the Alliluyev family. Svetlana made several excited phone calls to Moscow to family members who rarely spoke publicly. She said to them, “Open the door to Rosamond. She’s an authentic person.”
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With Svetlana’s blessing, Richardson flew to Moscow with her translator and spent a week interviewing Svetlana’s cousins and extended family. The family members spoke candidly to her, and their voices emerge as a tragic narrative of imprisonments, deaths, and disappearances under Stalin.

The trouble began when Richardson returned to London. Svetlana had expected to listen to and transcribe the tapes, but Richardson didn’t offer them to her. She knew that Svetlana could be “tricky,” as she put it, and some members of the family were not entirely flattering about her. Also, the family’s conversations were about “what it was like to live under Stalin’s shadow and clearly some nasty things were going to come out of the woodwork. I knew how fragile Lana was, emotionally, and I just didn’t want to upset her about stuff she didn’t need to see.”
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Later Richardson would concede that she’d been wrong. Svetlana could take it all.

Instead Richardson gave her several of the chapters. Svetlana wrote to her cousin Kyra in Moscow that she was not impressed. Kyra recalled: “She said that Rosamond was too much into politics. But I think that everything they did to us, Alliluyevs, was politics. If it was not politics, what was it?”
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But Svetlana was angry—Rosamond was writing another book about her father, not the Alliluyev family memoir she was hoping for. When it was published in 1993, Stalin’s picture graced the front and back covers of the book. Sadly, it could not have been
otherwise. It was Stalin, and the brutality that he and Beria (as the family insisted) had committed against the Alliluyevs, that sat at the core of family memories. Richardson received a very nasty letter from Svetlana. “I remember thinking if she’d been Stalin, I’d have been dead. I really felt the power of Stalin in that letter. The portcullis came down.”
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Richardson never heard from Svetlana again.

And Svetlana washed her hands of the book, though not without writing a letter to the
London Review of Books
in which she insisted that she and Richardson were supposed to be writing a book together about her mother’s side of the Stalin family, until Richardson had cut her out. She added a nasty barb: “As an author of cookbooks, Ms. Richardson does not seem to be especially well qualified to write about Russian history.”
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She was right. The book’s strength was not its historical account but its penetrating interviews.