Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
Coyne had grown up in the Cold War era and had heard about Stalin in school, but only as he got older did he begin to recognize who this “Lana” was. “I started to realize her importance in history, her pedigree, and what she’d actually done and how this affected diplomatic relations, but she was just another part of the family actually.” Of course he was curious about Stalin, but he didn’t ask questions because he didn’t want to destroy their friendship. He’d seen how this could happen. When the owner of an independent bookstore in Richland Center had grown curious about her past, she’d refused to set foot in the bookshop again. “My Mom, my sister Kathy, and I never pried. She was an individual. I never talked about her with friends. Few knew that I actually knew who she was. She was just Lana.”
11
By now Svetlana had developed severe scoliosis and had a terrible dowager’s hump on her back, to a degree that she had to use a walker, which she called her “four-wheel drive.”
12
She reassured Coyne that he shouldn’t worry when she walked out “like Queen Victoria” with her cane. When she was young, her brother had taught her the right way to take a fall.
13
She’d go to the secondhand store to buy her clothes. She would find an oversize man’s shirt, rip out the seams, and resew it so that it fitted perfectly, almost disguising her deformity. She claimed to have learned this trick from her dressmakers in Moscow. Her closets were full of the Indian fabrics Olga sent, which she’d convert into pillows and clothes as gifts for friends. She also made herbal remedies and healing tinctures from Russian folk recipes she’d learned as a child from her nanny. Because he worked for the airlines, Coyne traveled a great deal, and whenever he returned from a trip, he always had small gifts for Lana: chocolates from Switzerland, tea from England. She’d listen to his stories about his travels as if living them vicariously. “She wasn’t a happy person. She would laugh once in a while, but she was very serious.” And she was still very opinionated. “If she didn’t like something, she’d let you know.”
14
She also had a willed optimism. She liked to quote Aleksei Kapler: “My old, long ago dead friend [Kapler died in 1979] in Moscow used to say: ‘Life is like a zebra. You go through the black stripes, but you know that the white ones will follow.’ ”
15
Svetlana always kept up-to-date with Russian politics. She confessed to Bob Rayle in 1997 that even she had not thought that the USSR would “utterly collapse” so soon. She’d expected changes within the Party, as happened in China, but “events went ahead of everybody’s thinking.” But with her usual sarcasm, she warned Bob that perhaps the changes weren’t so
profound. “Old drunk Yeltsin and all the ‘apparatus’ behind him are still the old ‘bolshis,’ only now masquerading to be something else.”
16
When her friend the volcanologist Thomas Miller told her he was planning a visit to Russia in January 2000, she told him to be very careful, especially if he intended to bring money to scientists, which could easily be construed as foreign interference. Miller believed that Svetlana’s “sense of how power worked was impeccable.”
17
On December 31, 1999, when Vladimir Putin became acting president after Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned, she warned Miller:
Russia is quickly (in
my
opinion) sliding back into the past—with that
awful
former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I do hope and believe the people will
not
vote him into the Presidency—but, then of course elections always could be rigged…. The Tchetchen [Chechen] War—“the Glorious One”—was provoked by the old Russian method of provocation. The Tchetchens—feisty as they are—would
never
go outside their mountains
to bomb “cities
in Russia-proper”! That is just
not
the way of doing their Guerrilla-war—it was done by the KGB itself. And when Artem Borovik (investigative reporter)
wanted
to
see
more deeply into this business of Tchetchen War, and
how it was started
, he was quietly
disposed
of by the
same forces
.
*
I know all this
—
from the Times of Classic Communism & Cold War
. The foreign leaders of these Democracies should
boycott
Putin—but, instead, they are waiting to
embrace him, with good jugs of vodka. Ah, Thomas, be careful. The times of would-be-democracy are finished in Russia.
18
She reserved most of her political invective for her letters to Bob Rayle. Surely he could understand what she was talking about when she railed against the current American administration’s naïveté—or was it cynicism—as they misread what was going on in the new Russia. She wrote to say she was appalled when Vladimir Putin was elected in 2000.
Russia has changed the flag and some names, to be sure—yet it is still the
same USSR
, so far as I am concerned. And these days—when a shadowy KGB colonel
got on the top
(because he was wise enough to guarantee Boris Yeltsin to be spared from public
investigation
—and—most probably
prosecution
—in that field of corruption & money stealing—when the
New Man in Kremlin
is being pronounced by my local Public Radio as the “
sure hero of the Russians
,” as their “sure choice” for the next president—I can only swear in Russian (which is a very heavy swear, but no one understands, thank God)….
Thinking about Russia (and how little it is understood here in these United States) ruins my sleep.
19
She told Michael Coyne that Putin was reviving her father’s cult of personality. Coyne recalled: “The things Putin was doing to instill the memory of Stalin, whether it would be statuary or different things, she did not agree with.”
20
And, slowly, Svetlana began to believe that she, too, would become one of these symbols. She told Bob Rayle that she feared she might be deported back to Russia. Or after her death, perhaps a will
might be fabricated stating that she wanted her remains to be buried in her homeland.
21
For Rayle, of course, this was clearly paranoid. And it may have been. It was unlikely that President Putin was concerned with repatriating Stalin’s daughter, alive or dead. But Svetlana was thinking like a Russian to whom symbols meant a great deal. Her paranoia had a logic: it was not she, Lana Peters, the Russians would be interested in; they would be interested in finishing the story of Stalin’s greatness—the return of the prodigal daughter whom the West had stolen, but who had never really abandoned her father. It didn’t seem to her inconceivable that her ashes would be part of the statuary to commemorate the resurrection of the great Stalin.
She wrote back to Rayle, who had obviously dismissed her concerns.
I am pleased to know, though, that the idea of my “being sent home” upon requests of the communists or KGBists, strikes you as insane. I think—it is insane, too. But so is the whole business of Chechen war; and of the former red spy becoming new President of Russia. People know who I am—here and there—and is ENOUGH…. Nobody needs me there as Lana Peters; they need me as Svetlana Stalin.
22
She told Rayle that, of course, everyone in Russia in her childhood had grown up paranoid and fearful. What did he expect? But if she were ever deported to Russia, she would arrive dead because she would kill herself on the way.
Svetlana perceived, again faster than many, what was happening to human rights in Russia under the surface. She saw the growing strength of the FSB (the former KGB), the restrictions on the media, the arrest of business oligarchs as a warning to stay out of politics, and later the passage of legislation that
forced burdensome reporting requirements on Russian and foreign NCOs (noncommercial organizations), essentially charities and human rights organizations.
23
She lamented that the Russian people looked the other way; their standard of living had vastly improved as oil and gas sales boomed, but graft and corruption were rampant and, anyway, they were fed nationalist propaganda and the history of Russia’s greatness “as if it were mother’s milk.”
24
Perhaps for everyone in old age the world constricts and fear expands to fill the small circle of one’s existence. Kathy Rossing was aware that Svetlana often lived in fear. She now believed that Russian intelligence agents might abduct her on the streets of Richland Center. When Kathy dismissed the idea, Svetlana replied, “You don’t know what they could do. I saw people disappear. You don’t understand. I saw people disappear all around me and they didn’t come back.” And Kathy thought,
You’re right. I’m coming from a different background….
“Lana could see a lot of things that had been present in her dad’s government coming back. She thought Putin idolized her father and was fashioning himself after him. She always feared it would be her son Joseph’s responsibility to come for her body.”
Svetlana hired a lawyer in Spring Green to draw up a legal document that would prohibit Joseph from getting access to her body or her remains. Kathy and her brother helped pay her lawyer’s fees in order to ease her mind. She gave Kathy a list of names at the State Department and other contacts. “If she came up missing, that’s where she would be, and we needed to get the government involved to get her back here.”
25
Svetlana wrote to Bob Rayle that she was in physical pain. She was feeling old, she was feeling used, and she wanted the last word. “
I want
my reputation & character of a
decent woman
restored. I want my
name
as a
writer
, who writes her books
without
ghost-hired-persons, to be
restored.
I
want
my name
Svetlana not to sound as a
threat
.”
26
Her deepest concern was that people still believed she was a rich woman.
27
Some even said she was masquerading as a welfare recipient. One of Olga’s boyfriends had asked her, “Do you have access to those funds, stashed in Switzerland?” A Hungarian expatriate kept pestering her: “Tell me, in secret, where do you keep those funds of yours?”
28
That she herself had decided to stop in Switzerland was a lie “worthy of the Kremlin.” She complained to Bob, “It hurts me and affects my life UNTIL this day.”
In 2005, at age seventy-nine, Svetlana wrote Bob and Ramona Rayle a series of numbered letters. It was as if she hoped to repeat the structure of her first book
Twenty Letters to a Friend.
These letters were meant to correct the calumnies of the past. Returning to old wounds, she retold the narrative of her defection and arrival in America, raging at the lawyers, the bankers, the diplomats, and the journalists who had swindled and slandered her.
Svetlana’s rage was intemperate and almost impressive. Once started, she couldn’t control her invective and would give vent without restraint, leading many to compare her rages to Stalin’s. But one could also say that her anger was particularly Russian; it served as a purgative. She could never understand the American habit of diplomatic niceties. “Oh, how I hate that American habit,” she’d complain. “ ‘How are you?’ ‘Fine!’ ‘Great!’ You might be just widowed, but you HAVE to say FINE!”
29
She nursed her hurt; she felt she had been used, whatever the diplomatic expediencies. But her “Letters to Bob and Ramona Rayle” petered out when her anger did, and she dropped the idea.
Svetlana met Marie Anderson in the fall of 2005. A friend had asked Marie if she could help move Svetlana to a new residence—just a few boxes—because she had a car. Svetlana had lost none of her persuasiveness. Marie took to driving her
when she needed to go somewhere. She vividly remembered the time they returned to Svetlana’s apartment in Richland Center to find a stranger sitting in the foyer. In a heavily accented voice, he’d asked if they knew Lana Peters. He’d tried knocking on her door, but she hadn’t answered. Marie responded, “No, not really,” and Svetlana said, “Maybe she’s gone for the weekend.” After they returned to her room, Marie stayed with Svetlana, who was clearly frightened. It wasn’t very long before there was a knock on the door. It was a local police officer, who knew who Svetlana was. Apparently the man, accompanied by a woman, was driving a rental car with New York plates. The woman had phoned the owner of the retirement home, and the owner, becoming suspicious, had called the police to check on Lana. The stranger claimed that all he wanted was to ask Svetlana to sign her book. The police escorted the couple out of town.
30
On a trip through Spring Green in 2006, Bob and Ramona Rayle stopped to visit Svetlana one afternoon. She took them to visit the grave of Wesley Peters, and then they went to a restaurant where she and Bob reminisced about their time in India in 1967. How had she had the strength to make such a monumental decision? In a follow-up letter, she wrote: “
Nowadays
,
weak and fearful
, I often get amazed that
I’d done that
. I
was
afraid
of nothing
—then. I love to recall those days …
such fun it was
.”
31
Her defection was her stamp on the world. She had “slapped the Soviet government in the face.”
32
She had fooled them all.