Stalin's Daughter (27 page)

Svetlana’s brother Vasili never recovered from his father’s death. After Stalin’s funeral, he was summoned by the Ministry of Defense and offered a provincial command. When he insisted that he would command only in Moscow, the ministry refused. Vasili took off his insignia and resigned. He spent the following month, April, carousing in restaurants and bars, often falling into drunken rages during which he denounced government officials, who, he claimed, had murdered his father. The Ministry of Defense was not pleased. After a drinking bout with foreigners, he was arrested on April 28, 1953.

Vasili was accused of dereliction of duty, of beating junior officers, and of being involved in illegal deals and high-level intrigues that had ended in some people’s being sent to prison and even to their deaths. His former flatterers denounced him, and a military collegium sentenced him to eight years in Vladimirskaya Prison, 110 miles northeast of Moscow. He could not understand how this could happen to Stalin’s son. From prison he sent begging letters and letters of outrage, which went unanswered.
Unlike his sister, Vasili didn’t understand that, his father dead, he was now nobody.

In the winter of 1954, Khrushchev took pity on him and had him transferred to the Barvikha Sanatorium. Soon his old cronies showed up with vodka, and again he went on drunken binges. He was sent back to prison. His third and current wife, Kapitolina, and Svetlana visited; he’d beg them to intercede, but there was nothing they could do.
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As she had sat keeping vigil over her dying father in early March 1953, Svetlana had believed that a “deliverance of some kind” was coming. In fact, there was no liberation. She continued to live with her two children in apartment 179 in the House on the Embankment. Looking out from her balcony, she could see below in the courtyard a small sixteenth-century church with beautiful onion domes and across the river, the Kremlin, where she had spent her childhood. As before, she continued to feel hemmed in by “the attention of some, the dislike of others and the curiosity of absolutely everyone.” Her father’s ghost haunted not just her but the country. She lamented, “He is gone, but his shadow still stands over us all. It still dictates to us and we, very often, obey.”
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As her children grew up, although both her ex-husbands visited, Svetlana was essentially on her own. She learned to be domestic, cooking a bit, sewing, using the gas stove—all things servants had done before. Her nanny was now living with her own son in a Moscow apartment. Svetlana was awarded a government pension of two hundred rubles a month (about fifty dollars in 1950s currency), and the children each received one hundred rubles.
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Looking back, Svetlana’s son, Joseph, would say their life was very quiet. His mother didn’t like going out much, seldom invited guests, and received only friends who sat with her in the kitchen, as was the Soviet custom. There they ate their lunches
and had their evening tea. For dinner, they mostly picked up precooked meals from the House on the Embankment kitchen. Svetlana took the children to symphony concerts at the conservatory, and they went to exhibitions at the Tretyakov Gallery. As with all Communist children, much of their life was organized by the state. Katya and Joseph became Octobrists, then Pioneers, and finally joined the Komsomol.

Svetlana had a small car called a Pobeda (Victory). When the Management Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party demanded that she exchange it for a Volga, a more appropriate car for the daughter of Stalin, according to a friend, she “refused on principle.”
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She’d also been assigned a sumptuous dacha, but her adopted brother Artyom Sergeev said she asked to be given a smaller dacha instead. She told him, “I don’t want to be in a large Sovnarkom [Council of People’s Commissars] dacha.”
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As a Soviet, she had no problem with the state controlling all property; she simply wanted to be treated as
ordinary.
Of course, compared with the vast majority of Soviets, she still had a very privileged lifestyle.

The modest dacha she found was in Zhukovka, just outside Moscow, where she and her children spent summers and weekends. When she was short of money, knowing she would be recognized at the shops, she would ask her cousin Leonid’s wife, Galina, to sell some of her coats or jewelry for her.
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It would have provoked a scandal if Stalin’s daughter were caught selling her clothes. In Zhukovka she tried to re-create the pleasures of her own childhood. The children played in the woods, rode their bikes at breakneck speed through the village lanes, swam in the streams, and camped in tents under the stars.

Relatives visited. Her nephew Alexander Burdonsky, her brother Vasili’s son, remembered the dacha fondly:

Zhukovka was not even a village. It was just scattered dachas in a forest that belonged to the Soviet Ministry…. On this giant territory that stands on the Rublevsky highway, Svetlana had a small property surrounded by a small fence. There was a house and a garden of flowers, not a vegetable garden. It was a small two-story house. Downstairs there was a hallway, next to it the dining room and then two rooms and a glassed terrace. To the right, there was a kitchen. And upstairs there were three bedrooms—Joseph’s room, Katya’s room, and Svetlana’s. It was not a large dacha…. There was already some furniture there—real dacha furniture made of wicker. It was quite sweet. All the knickknacks—different vases, etc.—were hers. I really loved that dacha.
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Anna’s son Leonid and his new wife, Galina, also visited. Galina remembered Svetlana as adventurous at that time. She loved pranks. The route to Zhukovka was guarded at intervals by sentry boxes in which stood vigilant policemen whose job it was to keep outsiders off the highway. Nearby were the dachas of the rich Party officials and also the special compound for scientists.

One day Galina saw the gates of Svetlana’s dacha suddenly open and her car come flying through. Two police cars roared after her and pulled her over, and the officers jumped out. There was a moment of shock when they recognized the woman they were following; then they beat a hasty retreat. As Svetlana had come to the sentry post where she was meant to stop, she stepped on the gas. “She was terribly delighted with herself,” Galina recalled. She loved to thumb her nose at the bureaucrats.
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In 1954 Svetlana completed and defended her dissertation, “Development of Russian Realist Traditions in the Soviet
Novel,” and was awarded her graduate degree.
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The books on the bookshelves in her apartment ranged from Chekhov and Dostoyevsky to Jack London and Maupassant. She also had the Russian moderns—Akhmatova, Ilya Ehrenburg, and Konstantin Simonov—and read many foreign authors as soon as their writings were translated, occasionally working as a translator herself. On the living room wall was a small silver-framed photograph of her father in his marshal’s uniform, one of her mother with her as an infant in her arms, and photographs of Joseph and Katya.

Svetlana’s solution to keeping herself and her children safe was to disavow politics. She called this abstention “my weird and preposterous double life.”
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Outwardly she lived on the fringes of the government elite, enjoying its material comforts. Inwardly she felt total alienation from the elite. She longed to be anonymous, but most people continued to see her as the princess in the Kremlin. The GUM department store still sold the perfume called Breath of Svetlana. The government had made it clear that she must not speak out publicly about her father. Anything connected to Stalin was state property, and this, she understood, made
her
state property too. In any case, she didn’t believe that anything Stalin’s daughter could say would be helpful. It would inevitably be filtered through people’s responses to her father and distorted. Few were neutral about Stalin: people either worshipped or reviled him.

On one occasion, however, she did speak out publicly. She had joined the Communist Party in 1951 when her father had insisted that it was “unseemly” for the daughter of Stalin not to be a member. Mostly she sat silently through hours of mandatory, boring Party meetings, knowing her absence would have been noted. When the journalist Ilya Ehrenburg published his novel
The Thaw
in 1954, the Party was outraged and wanted him censured. Courageously Svetlana came to his defense. She deeply admired him.

The winter after Stalin died, Ehrenburg rushed to complete his new novel. It was an immediate sensation, and its title entered the Russian lexicon—the post-Stalin era was called the Thaw, at first with optimism and later with cynicism. The novel’s main character was a brutally indifferent factory manager who forced his workers to live in wretched conditions in order to fill industrial quotas. Through one of its minor characters, a Jewish doctor, it was also the first novel ever to convey the dread created by the Doctors’ Plot. The treatment of its central love story advanced the idea that the state surveillance apparatus had no right to enter private lives.

The regime came down hard on Ehrenburg. Konstantin Simonov, then editor of
Novy Mir
, attacked the novel as “too dark.” He said it falsely portrayed Soviet life “as a great deal of misery and too little happiness” and that “it imitated Western patterns.”
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Svetlana stood up at a Party meeting and defended Ehrenburg, saying that she “could not understand in what way Ehrenburg was to blame, when our own Party’s press admitted the mistakes of the past, and innocent people, wrongly condemned, were returning from prisons.” She was bluntly told that her statement was “irresponsible and politically immature.”
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She later wrote Ehrenburg a fan letter. “I am truly grateful for your rare ability to find words of truth, to say them out loud, without the duplicity which, for many of us members of the modern Soviet intelligentsia, became second nature.”
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She may have had in mind Ehrenburg’s project
The Black Book.
In 1944, before the war was over, he organized a team of two dozen writers, including Vasily Grossman, to compile and edit testimonies of survivors of German atrocities against Soviet Jews. One and a half million Jews had been killed by execution units that followed the Wehrmacht into Soviet territory. Ehrenburg left the project in disgust when the role of
Soviet collaborationists in the betrayal of Jews was edited out.
The Black Book
went unpublished for decades.
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In her private life, however, Svetlana continued to feel isolated. A friend at the time, Olga Kulikowsky, described her as “one of the loneliest women I have ever known.”
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Another friend, Tatiana Tess, said, “Her search for happiness was boundless.”
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A die-hard romantic, she longed to meet someone who wouldn’t think of her as Stalin’s daughter. In 1954, at a Congress of Soviet Writers in the Kremlin, she thought maybe she had found that person.

As she walked through the dazzling gold glitter of Saint George’s Hall, unexpectedly and to her shock, she ran into Aleksei Kapler. For a second she was frightened that he might ignore her, but he was his usual ebullient self. He simply stepped out of the entourage of film people surrounding him and said, “Hello.” Then he took her hand and laughed. Everyone watching the encounter knew the resonance of his gesture.

Kapler had been released from the Inta Labor Camp in 1953, shortly after Stalin’s death, and had returned to Moscow with his new wife, the actress Valentina Tokaraskaya, whom he’d married three months after his liberation. Her visits and food parcels had kept him from dying, and furthermore, marriage gave them the legal right to a large flat in Moscow.

Svetlana and Kapler left the Congress together, walked across Sokolniki Park to a tiny café, and picked up the relationship that her father had terminated so viciously eleven years before. She was terrified that Kapler would hold her responsible for the horrors he had endured and begged him to understand why she had never attempted to contact or help him. Had she done so, his sufferings would have worsened. He didn’t reply.

However, he did tell her about his release from the Gulag. After his case was reviewed, he was told he had been “rehabilitated”: “You can go home now.” He was given a telephone,
but he could think of no one to call. He finally phoned his sister in Moscow and said, “Hello, I will be seeing you soon. Sit at home. I’m coming.” He walked slowly from the Lubyanka prison. It was summer, July. Suddenly he felt his feet could no longer carry him. He sat down on a bench. The children were playing in the park, the leaves were rustling in the sunlight, and he burst into tears. He told Svetlana, “I sat there and cried rivers of tears. Then I went to my sister’s. Thank God I cried it out before I got there.” A disheveled man crying alone on a bench in a park didn’t arouse any curiosity in those days.

The old attraction flared up again. They were soon secret lovers. She was astonished that he was “still the same.” She would look back fifty years later and marvel: “He just laughed at everything. He laughed away everything. He could do that. Not many people could.”
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