Stalin's Daughter (16 page)

An undated photograph of a young Aleksei Kapler, probably one of the two hundred photographs stolen from Svetlana’s desk by the KGB agent Victor Louis.

On November 8, a party was organized at Zubalovo to celebrate the anniversary of the Revolution. The guests included the famous, like the writer Konstantin Simonov, whom Svetlana admired, and the documentary filmmaker Roman Karmen. Much to her surprise, Kapler asked her to dance. She felt awkward and clumsy. She was so young. He asked her why she seemed sad and asked about the lovely brooch she was wearing,
a decorative touch to her austere outfit. Was it a gift, he wondered? Svetlana explained that it had belonged to her mother and this day was the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death, though no one else seemed to remember or care.
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As he held her, she poured out her life. She spoke of her childhood, of the losses she had endured, though she didn’t talk much about her father. Kapler understood that “something seemed to separate them.”
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Charming, daring, knowledgeable, experienced, Kapler was irresistible to an idealistic girl of sixteen. And he seemed to be equally drawn to her. The first film they saw together was
Queen Christina
(1933), starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert, a biopic of the seventeenth-century queen of Sweden, which distorted and absurdly romanticized her life. It is not hard to imagine the film’s impact on the impressionable young Svetlana as war raged in Moscow.
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“Spoils, glory … what is behind those big words? Death and destruction. I want people to cultivate the arts of peace,” says Garbo’s Queen Christina. The film is about “great love, perfect love, the golden dream.” The queen falls in love with Antonio, envoy from the king of Spain. “I have grown up in a great man’s shadow,” Garbo cries. “I long to escape my destiny.” “There is a freedom which is mine and which the state cannot take away.” Kapler recalled how they both identified with the film. She was the rebellious “royal daughter” demanding her own life; he was poor Don Antonio, the lover aspiring above his station.

Kapler brought Svetlana books that were forbidden, including Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls.
He’d gotten hold of a Russian translation that was circulating privately among friends.
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The novel had been officially banned; Hemingway’s portrait of the murderous Communist commissar who directed
the purges of Trotskyites in the Spanish Civil War was too revealing.

The couple looked for pretexts to be together. Of course the meetings had to be kept secret from her father. Kapler would wait for Svetlana outside her Model School, lurking, embarrassed, down the lane. They would walk in the woods, he holding her hand in his pocket, or amble along the Moscow streets under blackout, or go to the unheated Tretyakov Gallery and wander the halls for hours. They went to private film showings at the Cinema Artists’ Club and at the Ministry of Cinematography on Gnezdnikovsky Street. They saw musicals starring Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, as well as
Young Mister Lincoln
and Walt Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
They met at the Bolshoi and were most happy when they got the chance to stroll through the foyer during the performance.
²¹

Mikhail Klimov, Svetlana’s bodyguard, was always a few paces behind them. Kapler even enjoyed his company, offering him the occasional cigarette. Svetlana felt Klimov was kind and even pitied her “absurd life.”
²²
Perhaps they thought he wouldn’t betray them, but in fact Klimov was terrified by their growing liaison. He knew that Stalin had his daughter’s phone tapped and her correspondence opened, and that NKGB agents made daily reports to him on all her activities.

After all, what were they doing? With her guard constantly on their heels, they could never be physical lovers, and this charged their relationship with a romantic desperation. She thought Kapler the “cleverest, kindest, most intelligent person on earth.”
²³
For him, she was a bright Lolita, a child longing to be taught about the world. She was so appallingly lonely, “surrounded and oppressed by an atmosphere worthy of a god.” “Sveta really needed me,” Kapler said.
²⁴

The lovers blithely enjoyed their little deceptions. Kapler’s friends called him Lyusia (which sounds like a woman’s name).
Svetlana would go over to her grandmother’s apartment in the Kremlin to phone Kapler. Grandma Olga always thought she was talking to a girlfriend.
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Soon Kapler left on an assignment to cover the guerrilla war in Belarus, one of the most dangerous of the partisan fronts, and then he traveled to Stalingrad to cover the Battle of Stalingrad for
Pravda.
In the December 14 issue of
Pravda
, he published an article called “Letters from Lieutenant L from Stalingrad—Letter One,” by Special Correspondent A. Kapler. The letter purported to be a soldier’s description of Stalingrad to the woman he loves:

My love, who knows whether this letter will reach you? A really difficult journey awaits it. I will nevertheless hope this letter will reach you, that it will carry, under the enemy’s fire across the Volga, across the prairies, through storms and blizzards towards our lovely Moscow, my tenderness towards you, my dear.

Today it snowed. It is winter in Stalingrad. The sky descended and became low as the ceiling in an
izba.
This gray, cold weather is especially agonizing on a day like this. One thinks of their loved one. How are you doing now? Do you remember Zamoskvorech’e? Our rendezvous in the Tretyakov gallery? How, while it was closing, the guard was kicking us out by ringing his bell, and how we could not recall which painting we sat in front of all day, while looking into each others’ eyes. Until now, I know nothing about that painting except that it was wonderful to sit in front of it, and I thank the artist for that.
²⁶

Kapler went on to describe the war to his lover. The article reads like a film script about the heroic purity of war, in which love, suffering, friendship, and death are focused a million
times more intensely than in ordinary life. Caught up as they were in the frenzy of romantic obsession, it was as if the lovers, too, were living in a film. Kapler ended his letter on a note of longing:

It is almost evening. It is also almost evening in Moscow. You can see the ragged Kremlin wall from your window and the sky above it—Moscow’s sky. Perhaps, it is also snowing there right now.

Your,

L.

It is impossible to imagine Stalin’s outrage as he read this and recognized the reference to Svetlana. Kapler later claimed he hadn’t intended to send the article to
Pravda.
“Friends had played a trick on him.”
²⁷
But he had dared to write a love letter to the dictator’s daughter, an indiscretion that should have been unimaginable. Marfa Peshkova remembered Svetlana bringing the newspaper to school. Though Svetlana understood the danger of Kapler’s words, it was also clear she was deeply moved.
²⁸

When Kapler returned to Moscow for the New Year’s celebrations, Svetlana told him they must not meet or even call each other. They managed silence until the end of January and then resumed their phone calls. They developed a code. He or she would call and blow air twice, to say, without words, “I’m here. I remember you,” and hang up.
²⁹

One evening at the beginning of February, Kapler got a phone call. The gruff voice on the other end of the line was that of Colonel V. Rumyantsev, second in command of Stalin’s security detail. He told Kapler the security agents knew everything and suggested he leave Moscow immediately. Kapler replied, “Go to Hell.”
³⁰

Through February, Kapler and Svetlana resumed their walks in the woods and their theater outings, with her bodyguard in tow. At the end of February, they arranged a last rendezvous. They found an apartment near the Kursk Station used by Vasili’s pilot friends for assignations. But the faithful Mikhail Klimov stayed with them. Svetlana persuaded him to sit in an adjoining room, though he insisted on keeping the door open. In silence the lovers kissed for the last time. They were ecstatic at touching, grief-stricken at parting; their leave-taking was devastating to Svetlana. It was February 28, her birthday. She had just turned seventeen.

Kapler was preparing to leave for Tashkent to shoot a movie based on his screenplay
In Defense of the Fatherland.
As Kapler reported it, on March 2 he drove to a committee meeting for the film industry. As he got out of his car, a man approached, flashed an identity badge, and told him to get back in. The man got into the passenger seat, and when Kapler asked where they were going, he replied, “To Lubyanka.”

Kapler responded, “Is there any reason for this? Have I been accused of anything? Is there a warrant against me?”
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The man said nothing. Kapler could see there was a black Packard following them. In the passenger seat, he recognized General Nikolai Vlasik, chief of Stalin’s personal security, and knew he was doomed. They drove into Lubyanka Square, where the statue of Felix Dzherzhinsky, the founder of Lenin’s secret police, the Cheka, stared across at the dreaded prison. The heavy gates of the Lubyanka swung open. The massive neo-baroque building was synonymous with the terror of the NKVD. Under the tsars it had been an insurance firm, and it still retained its imposing marbled entrance and wooden parquet floors. Below, in its labyrinthine basement, were the cells and torture chambers that had seen much service in the late 1930s.

The KGB’s infamous headquarters and prison on Moscow’s Lubyanka Square (informally known as “the Lubyanka”), where Beria had his office, still looks much as it did during Stalin’s time in power.

Kapler understood that he was a top priority when Deputy Minister Bogdan Kabulov arrived. No mention was made of Svetlana. And Stalin’s name did not come up. Kapler was being accused of contact with foreigners—which was irrefutable; he knew all the foreign correspondents in Moscow—and of spying on England’s behalf.

Kabulov intoned, “Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, on the basis of Article 58 of our law, you are under arrest for having made known in your speeches your anti-Soviet and Counterrevolutionary opinions.”
³²
No trial was needed. No defense could be mounted. However, instead of the usual ten years for this offense, Kapler was sentenced to only five years in a labor camp.

Kapler’s belongings were confiscated and itemized for his signature. He was not allowed to communicate with his wife, Tatiana Zlatogorova, and certainly not with Svetlana. But Kapler was too famous to merely disappear. The war had released
some tongues, especially in the military and at the front, and his arrest was a major scandal.
³³
Neither his epic films nor the appeals of his more courageous colleagues helped, however. Everyone knew that the cause of his arrest was his indiscreet affair with the daughter of the
vozhd.

In retrospect, Kapler would say he knew that the relationship with Svetlana would inevitably end, but he was strangely enthralled. Asked why he didn’t heed the general’s advice, Kapler replied, “Who knows? It was also a question of self-respect.”
³⁴
What drew him to Svetlana was what he called “the freedom within her,” her “bold judgements.” In his mind, it was an “innocent enchantment,” not a seduction. He recognized her desperation; he felt he understood her.

Vasili’s son, the theater director Alexander Burdonsky, would later comment that Kapler was an intelligent and charming man: