Rosemary Sullivan - Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015

First published in the United States by Harper in 2015

Copyright Rosemary Sullivan 2015

Rosemary Sullivan asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

Cover design by Gregg Kulick

Cover photograph Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780007491117

Ebook Edition June 2015 ISBN: 9780007491124

Version: 2015-05-21

For my mother,
Leanore Marjorie Guthrie Sullivan

Frontispiece: Eight-year-old Svetlana with her father, Joseph Stalin, on vacation in Soshi.

(Svetlana Aliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)

Contents

W hat would it mean to be born Stalins daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it? In the USSR, Stalin was mythic. He was the vozhd , the supreme leader who built the Soviet Union into a superpower and won the war against the Nazis. To his millions of Soviet victims, however, he was the man responsible for the Terror and the infamous Gulag. In the West, he was widely demonized as one of the worlds most brutal dictators. Try as she might, Svetlana Alliluyeva could never escape Stalins shadow. As she lamented, Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my fathers name.

In the USSR, her life was unimaginably painful. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide when Svetlana was only six and a half. In the purges of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, Stalin did not spare his family. Her beloved Aunt Maria and Uncle Alexander Svanidze, the brother and sister-in-law of Stalins first wife, were arrested and executed as enemies of the people; their son Johnik, her childhood playmate, disappeared. Uncle Stanislav Redens, the husband of her mothers sister Anna, was executed. Uncle Pavel, her mothers brother, died of a heart attack brought on by shock. When shed just turned seventeen, her father sentenced her first love, Aleksei Kapler, to the Gulag for ten years. The Nazis killed her half brother Yakov in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. In 1947 and 1948, during the wave of repression known as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, her mothers sister Anna and Pavels widow, Zhenya, were sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement. Zhenyas daughter Kyra was imprisoned and then exiled.

After her fathers death in 1953, the tragedies continued. Her elder brother, Vasili, was arrested and eventually died of alcoholism in 1962. Her literary friends in the mid-1960s were sent to forced-labor camps. When she finally found peace in a loving relationship with a man named Brajesh Singh, she was officially refused the right to marry him before he died, though she was given official permission to carry his ashes back to India.

In the middle of her life, at the age of forty-one, Svetlana Alliluyeva decided, impulsively, to defect. On the evening of March 6, 1967, she walked into the American Embassy in New Delhi requesting asylum. This was both an escape from her past and a search for the freedom denied to her in the Soviet Union, where she claimed that she was treated like government property. The American State Department initially refused her entry into the United States on the grounds that her defection would destabilize relations with the Soviets. She waited in Switzerland as diplomats searched for a country to take her.

When she was finally allowed into the United States on a tourist visa, Americans greeted her as the most famous defector ever to leave the USSR. She was soon the millionaire defector Twenty Letters to a Friend , the memoir she had written in 1963 and carried out of the Soviet Union, was bought for an advance payment of $1.5 million. But she did not understand the concept of money; she gave away much of it and soon lost the rest to the manipulations of Olgivanna Wright, the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, who lured her into marriage with Wesley Peters, the head architect of Wrights Taliesin Foundation. At the age of forty-five, Alliluyeva gave birth to Olga Peters. Her daughter was a consolation. She had abandoned her twenty-one-year-old son, Joseph, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Katya, when she fled the Soviet Union. KGB intrigues prevented her from contacting them for the next fifteen years.

Her laconic humor helped. She could say, I dont any longer have the pleasant illusion that I can be free of the label Stalins daughter.... You cant regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didnt marry a carpenter. She spent most of her forty-four years in the West as a nomad, moving over thirty times, even briefly defecting back to the Soviet Union.

She was called unstable. The historian Robert Tucker remarked that despite everything, she was, in some sense, like her father. And yet its astonishing how little she resembled her father. She did not believe in violence. She had a risk takers resilience, a commitment to life, and an unexpected optimism, even though her life spanned the brutalities of the twentieth century in the most heartrending of ways, giving her a knowledge of the dark side of human experience, which few people are ever forced to confront. Caught between two worlds in the Cold War power struggles between East and West, she was served well by neither side. She had to slowly learn how the West functioned. The process of her education is fascinating and often sad.

Alliluyeva had as much trouble explaining her father as anyone else did. Her attitude toward Stalin was paradoxical. She unequivocally rejected his crimes, yet he was the father who, in her childhood memory, was lovinguntil he wasnt. She sought, with only partial success, to understand what motivated his brutal policies. I dont believe he ever suffered any pangs of conscience; I dont think he ever experienced them. But he was not happy, either, having reached the ultimate in his desires by killing many, crushing others, and being admired by some.

However, she warned that to dismiss him as simply monstrous would be a grave error. The question is what happens to a human being in his private life and within a particular political system that dictates such a history. She always insisted that her father never acted alone. He had thousands of accomplices.

Svetlana Alliluyeva imagined that in the West she could construct a private life as a writer and find someone with whom she could share it. Despite valiant efforts, she believed she had failed, though others are not so sure. Its astonishing that she survived at all.