Stalin's Daughter (30 page)

Only in retrospect can one appreciate the touching absurdity of her actions that were dictated by the intensity of her feelings, tempestuous temperament of her father, and loneliness. At that moment you experience a difficult feeling of pity, admiration, and indignation. She is a slave to her passions; inside a slave, a tyrant always dwells….

Never in my life have I been so directly shaken and captured by the tragedy of another person. And never had I had such an intense need to run from a person, from the circle of her unresolved and suffocating tragedy.
³⁰

In 1967, when Samoilov learned the news of Svetlana’s defection, he wrote, somewhat chastened, in his diary, “She is more magnificent than I thought.” In chagrin, he added, “I understood and valued little in women who were close to me.”
³¹

The tragedy, according to Samoilov, was that “Svetlana was doomed to carry the cross of her origin for the rest of her life.” She could never completely renounce her father, even though she defiantly renounced his “spiritual legacy”—a paradox or duality that was impossible to live.

Svetlana’s situation may have been even more complex than this. Surely it is one thing to be the dictator’s son but quite another to be the dictator’s daughter. The son is required to be
like
his father and often becomes a parody of his father, disastrously so as in Vasili’s case. But Stalin had a special attachment to
Svetlana. He had given her his paternal love, such as it was—perfunctory, intermittent, crude, often cruel. It required abject submission. It was laced with contempt: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool!” Nevertheless, to her it often
seemed
tantalizingly real. The truth was that Svetlana did not know what love was. Some deep part of her probably believed she couldn’t be loved. She was still looking for a romanticized, idealized substitute for love. In this she was not unlike many women, though perhaps her case was extreme. She felt she needed a man to invent her or complete her. Her desperation came from the terror of being alone, but who among the men she was drawn to would bind themselves to Stalin’s daughter and take on that darkness?

Chapter 13
Post-Thaw

In 1962, Svetlana converted to the Russian Orthodox faith and was baptized in Moscow’s Church of the Deposition of the Shroud. This was firmly against Communist doctrine.

I
n the late 1950s and early 1960s, Moscow was an exciting place. It was an international city—with music, film, and dance festivals, world congresses of literature, international delegations of artists, foreign student exchanges, and an exciting
nightlife. Yet behind this facade of cosmopolitanism, everything was still under the control of the cultural commissars; the secret police remained active.

Almost from the outset, Khrushchev’s Thaw invited political chaos. In March 1956, immediately after the Secret Speech, as Georgians gathered in Tbilisi to celebrate the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, student demonstrators rioted. Dozens (some say hundreds) were killed by Soviet troops. Ironically, the students were protesting Khrushchev’s policies of de-Stalinization. Khrushchev had defamed Georgia’s favorite son. In October, Soviet tanks were rushed to Budapest to crush the uprising in Hungary, where students were demanding liberalization and an end to Soviet domination. The stability of the whole Soviet bloc was threatened. Soviet citizens waited anxiously to see what would happen.

In Russia, a
thaw
means both an easing and a muddy mess. Khrushchev’s Thaw went back and forth. In its early days, no one knew just what to expect, but it was soon clear that repression was still Party policy, though now it was intermittent. Khrushchev followed zigzag policies, retreating when necessary to save his own authority.

The fate of writers was a kind of barometer. In October 1958, when Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize, he sent a telegram to the Nobel committee:
INFINITELY GRATEFUL, TOUCHED, PROUD, SURPRISED, OVERWHELMED.
Four days later, the Politburo, which had banned his novel
Doctor Zhivago
as antisocialist and forbade its publication in the USSR, forced Pasternak to send a second telegram renouncing the prize.
¹
In February 1961, the KGB seized and destroyed the manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s
Life and Fate.
Yet in November 1962, despite objections from top Party members, Khrushchev allowed the publication in
Novy Mir
of
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s harrowing account of life in
the Gulag. No one could predict which was coming: a thaw or a freeze.

The spring and summer of 1961 were particularly hard for Svetlana. She was thirty-five. It is not a comfortable age. If one is still alone, one believes one will stay alone. Her children, now sixteen and eleven, were at school. Katya had her compulsory Pioneer meetings, and Joseph had joined the Komsomol. Svetlana recalled, “I was melancholy, irritable, inclined towards hopeless pessimism; more than once I had contemplated suicide; I was afraid of dark rooms, of the dead, of thunderstorms; of uncouth men, of hooligans in the streets and drunks. My own life appeared to me very dark, dull, and without a future.”
²
Beneath Svetlana’s carefully controlled exterior, there existed sorrows and suspicions, rages and frustrations, psychic wounds that she did not know how to face, let alone heal.

Gradually she had drawn close to Andrei Sinyavsky, her friend at the Gorky Institute, where she worked, and turned to him for consolation. Clearly he found her compelling. They were sitting on a small bench near the Kropotkin Gate when Svetlana mentioned the subject of suicide. Sinyavsky replied, “A suicide only thinks that he is killing himself. He is killing only his body, and the soul after that languishes, for God alone can take the soul.”
³
Svetlana may have remembered Grandmother Olga’s words: “You will know your soul when it aches.”

This is an intimate conversation that suggests there were other conversations. It was a serious mistake to awaken Svetlana’s expectations. A love affair began. According to her fellow researcher, Alexander Ushakov, gossip soon circulated in the Gorky Institute that one day Svetlana showed up at a dinner party at the apartment of the writer Andrei Menshutin, carrying her suitcase and demanding that Sinyavsky leave with her.
⁴
Sinyavsky’s wife, Maria Rozanova, later confirmed the incident in an interview:

Once Sinyavsky and I were having dinner at his colleague’s place … Andrei Menshutin, who, like us, also lived in a communal apartment not far from us. Suddenly the doorbell rings three times—Svetlana Alliluyeva.

The Menshutins had a very small room. I, together with Lida, started to scurry to get her another chair, but Svetlana declared, “I will not sit down. Andrei, I came for you. Now you will leave with me?” I asked, “Svetlana, what about me?” Alliluyeva told me, “Masha, you took Andrei away from his wife, and now I’m taking him away from you.”
⁵

It was as if Svetlana were still the little “hostess” in the Kremlin, commanding love and expecting her command to be obeyed. Rozanova described how her husband’s “jaw almost fell off”; she said to him coyly, “Andrei, don’t you think that while studying the history of the USSR, you’ve gone too far?” “Of course, I asked him about it, very matter-of-factly. Yes, he fucked her once. So what?”

Rozanova found it easy to blame Svetlana. She was “a hysterical woman—to have such a father.” Sinyavsky was just being a man. She recalled his famous joke. He used to say, “If I’m sitting in a train car with a woman, I have to make her an offer, as a polite human being.” Rozanova added that in a relationship, sexual fidelity “is not important. [This] is not what connects people. Without me he would not be able to work, nor live. To live—it is not the same as making soup.” But she would never forgive Svetlana.

Svetlana didn’t seem to understand the sexual double standard that flourished everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the “sexually deranged” one, while the artist Sinyavsky was forgiven his sexual dalliance, necessary for his work, which had so raised her hopes. The women became rivals and enemies,
while the husband stood blithely by. And Svetlana was far from unusual in believing that her only route to a creative life was adjacent to a man. She retreated once again, but it must have been embarrassing to face down the gossip at the Gorky Institute. Later she would write admiringly of both Sinyavsky and his wife in her second memoir
Only One Year
, never alluding to this humiliation, and would assume she could pick up her friendship with them both.

However, Sinyavsky did have a lasting impact. As a committed Christian, he probably influenced her decision to convert to the Russian Orthodox faith. In the spring of 1962, she was baptized in a small Byzantine church named Deposition of the Shroud, beside the Donskoy Cathedral, the same church in which Sinyavsky had been baptized a few months earlier.

A second influence was, ironically, her father. Stalin had introduced her to Christianity when she was an adolescent. She’d been rooting around in his library and had come across a book called
The Life of Christ.
She was appalled and, indoctrinated as a good atheist, expressed her shock to her father: “You know it’s a lie, it’s mythology.” And Stalin responded, “No, he was a real man. He actually lived.” That afternoon, calling on his training in the Tbilisi seminary, he recounted for her the life of Christ—her father, of all people! The memory of sitting on Stalin’s lap as he recounted the life of Christ hugely amused her.
⁶

Though it was illegal, many Russians were secretly converting to Christianity in the early 1960s as a protest against Communism. For some, this was a nostalgic return to a vanished Russia. Others felt a genuine longing for spiritual values. But for Stalin’s daughter to break the Party rules was dangerous. In order to protect them both, Father Nikolai Alexandrovich Golubtsov baptized her privately and did not record her name in the church register. She would always recall Father Nikolai’s words of reassurance. “He said God loved me, even if I was
Stalin’s daughter.”
⁷
The remark suggests a depth of loneliness that is devastating.

Accustomed as she was to ideological conformity, Svetlana must have been deeply moved to find herself in the Church of the Deposition of the Shroud, with its beautiful onion domes, hidden in a Moscow suburb. The tiny vaulted stone chapels drawing the gaze upward, the burning incense and many candles lighting the gloom, and the hypnotic chanting of the choir, would have been intoxicating after the gray uniformity of Moscow. Since the days when she had wondered at the smiling Buddhas in the yurts at Zubalovo, Svetlana had tasted metaphysical longing. Her compulsive search through world religions began with her baptism. She read voraciously—about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity—and would eventually try many in her search for inward peace.

She must have had many motives for converting, but one, she maintained, was her brother’s death. In January 1961, Khrushchev had arranged his release from Vladimirskaya Prison, but Vasili lasted only three months, racing around Moscow and drinking with his Georgian cronies at his favorite restaurant, Aragvi, before he disappeared. The family finally located him in Lefortovo Prison, but he was so ill that he didn’t have to serve out his term. With his retired general’s pension, he moved to Kazan. Broke and broken, he died on March 19, 1962, at the age of forty-one, after a bout of drinking, leaving behind four wives and several children. Svetlana remembered the boy who had shown such promise before his mother abandoned him. She no longer hated him.
⁸

That same year, 1962, Svetlana reconnected with her past in a way that was both moving and devastating. She met her cousin, Ivan (Johnreed) Svanidze, whom she had not seen since the arrest of his father and mother in 1937. Stalin had had his father executed in 1941. His mother was executed in 1942. As
a child, Svetlana had adored her aunt and uncle. It was Uncle Alyosha who brought the yurts to Zubalovo, told the children stories of the ancient Persians and Hittites, and recited Georgian poetry. When Svetlana met their son, Ivan (as he now called himself, having dropped the Johnreed), after twenty-five years of silence, probably at the Institute for African Studies, where he was a researcher, they both plunged back into that past with fervor. But the encounter had its dark side.

Svetlana was devastated when Svanidze showed her letters his parents had written him from prison before their executions. They had assumed he was being taken care of by his relatives, but this was not the case. Knowing the price exacted for associating with children of “enemies of the people,” the family had been afraid to shelter him. When Svetlana’s brother Yakov tried to help him, his wife pleaded that they would be putting themselves at risk.
⁹