Stalin's Daughter (33 page)

But the political winds that had always shaped Svetlana’s life had again shifted for the worse. In October 1964, Khrushchev was deposed. He had made too many mistakes: his drinking, his mishandling of the Cuban missile crisis, his wildly unpredictable Thaw that disturbed the political status quo in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Slowly a palace revolution engineered him out. Leonid Brezhnev was elected first secretary of the Presidium, in effect the country’s leader, sharing power with Aleksei Kosygin as chairman of the Council of Ministers and Nikolai Podgorny as chairman of the Supreme Soviet. Soon these conservatives stopped the minor reforms.

Svetlana had felt somewhat invisible since her father’s death, unnoticed and anonymous as a public citizen. It had been wonderful to be almost forgotten. Now she was once again Stalin’s daughter, the bearer of the famous name and, to the conservative Communists back in power, this involved responsibilities. Even Mikoyan had forgotten what had been said about Stalin at the Twentieth Congress. One day he invited Svetlana and her children to his dacha for dinner. As they were leaving, he passed Katya a present. “Here’s a present for you—a rug. You
can hang it up on your wall,” he said. When they got home and unrolled the rug, they discovered it was woven with a portrait of Stalin. Svetlana rolled it up and put it away.
⁹

On May 3, she and Singh visited the Moscow office where marriages with foreigners had to be registered. The very next day, Svetlana was summoned to the Kremlin. It was an eerie experience. She passed through the Spassky Gate and entered the Senate building designed by Matvey Kazakov. She had lived for over twenty years in that first-floor apartment, and it was the same dreary building, with the same red rugs, the cold wood-paneled walls, the vaulted ceilings. She entered Kosygin’s office on the second floor, the office that had once been her father’s. She faced the stranger who sat at her father’s desk. She had never met him before.

His first question was why had she had stopped attending Party meetings. He insisted she must “rejoin the collective, occupy [her] rightful place.” She explained that she had to take care of her family and now she had a sick husband.

At the word
husband
, Kosygin responded angrily. There is only Svetlana’s record of the conversation, in which Kosygin sounds like the mad dictator Alice found when she went through the looking glass—the Red King, so to speak.

What have you cooked up? You, a young healthy woman, a sportswoman, couldn’t you have found someone here, I mean someone young and strong? What do you want with this old sick Hindu? No, we are all positively against it, positively against it!
¹⁰

Whatever the shading of the conversation, it was now official. Kosygin, in the name of the government, refused her the right to register her marriage to Singh. It would never be
allowed. As she left, she felt the Kremlin sarcophagus closing in on her again.

Svetlana again approached Anastas Mikoyan for help regarding her marriage. He had already assisted in getting Singh a contract with the Soviet publisher Progress, but this new request became the occasion for a terrible rift between Svetlana and her close friend Ella Mikoyan.

As Stepan Mikoyan explained it, Svetlana asked his wife, Ella, to arrange an interview with her father-in-law. Mikoyan agreed and suggested he and Svetlana meet at his dacha. However, this turned out to be the day an internationally acclaimed pianist was performing at the Moscow Conservatory, and when Mikoyan heard that Ella was attending, he wanted to go. He asked Ella to phone Svetlana to postpone the meeting until the next day. Apparently Svetlana was furious and turned her anger on Ella. Stepan Mikoyan recounted the rupture:

Uncharacteristically raising her voice, Svetlana attacked Ella with an avalanche of accusations and insults. The gist was that Ella had plotted against her and deliberately enticed her father-in-law with the idea of attending that concert to prevent Svetlana’s meeting with him. Svetlana slammed down the receiver.

That night, after the concert, Ella returned home to find a hand-delivered letter from Svetlana. She read it in tears and showed it to Stepan. “I could not believe what I read. It was flagrantly unjust and cruelly insulting.” Much later she showed the letter to her father-in-law. Mikoyan responded, “Her own father all over—can’t do without enemies.”
¹¹

Was this a fair appraisal? Svetlana certainly had an imperious side. From childhood—after her mother’s death, in a world
where everything was secret, too dangerous to speak about, even in such an atmosphere—Svetlana had learned her power. She knew how to get things from people. And when she was frustrated, she had no emotional blocks. Anger would well up in her and she would spew it out regardless of the consequences. People on the receiving end of her rage would not always know the cause.

And yet, in this instance, she must have been thinking,
A concert! And Singh’s life was on the line!
But her response was also intemperate. She accused Ella of sabotaging her when all poor Ella was trying to do was help, and Svetlana had probably not explained the gravity of Singh’s need. Her father’s teaching: “Don’t ask. Command.”

Apparently, despite Svetlana’s tirade against Ella, the meeting with Mikoyan took place the next day. He was unhelpful. “Why is it necessary to marry?” he wanted to know. He and his wife had lived as common-law partners for forty years. “Formal marriage has no significance in love.” He then warned against her friendships with foreign ambassadors. “This Kaul is very pushy,” he said. “Not at all like other Indians. Keep away, keep away from him.”
¹²

That fall, in 1965, the Gorky Institute, where Svetlana continued to work, was in turmoil. In September her friend Andrei Sinyavsky and his fellow writer Yuli Daniel were arrested for spreading anti-Soviet propaganda. They were accused of allowing their novellas, depicting Soviet society as surreal and menacing, to be reproduced as samizdat—typed copies passed clandestinely among friends. They had even allowed their work to be published in the West under the respective pseudonyms Abram Tertz and Nikolai Arzhak. Khrushchev’s Thaw was officially over. The repressive Brezhnev era had begun. Now anyone caught with samizdat could expect to be brutally punished, and everyone was frightened.

On December 5, Constitution Day, a few brave souls organized a public rally to demand an open trial for the writers. This was the first independent political rally in Moscow since 1929. Only two or three leaflets announcing the rally were posted at Moscow University, but soon the whole of Moscow knew. A young dissident, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, was carrying a poster:
WE DEMAND AN OPEN TRIAL FOR SINYAVSKY AND DANIEL.
A KGB officer ripped out the word
open
from the poster. “It seemed he especially disliked that word.” About fifty people gathered at the Pushkin Monument in central Moscow, though thousands stood on the opposite side of the street. They had come to see what would happen to the demonstrators. “Would they be shot then or later?”
¹³

The trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel opened on February 10, 1966. Despite the attempted intervention of organizations like PEN International, Daniel was sentenced to five years and Sinyavsky to seven years of hard labor in prison camps.
¹⁴

Svetlana was appalled. This was grotesque, ugly, unconscionable. She came home each night to Singh with tales of the kind of meetings that were going on at the Gorky Institute, and he would ask, “But why? Why? … Seven years of prison for writing books? Just because a writer writes books?”
¹⁵

By this time, her friend Alexander Ushakov had become secretary of the Party organization at the Gorky Institute. The atmosphere was tense. Even before the so-called trial, organizations like the Union of Writers were required to condemn Sinyavsky and Daniel in mass proclamations, as in the old days when Stalin had established the system of collective condemnation and shunning. After the trial, Party committees at the various institutes circulated an official letter to the
Literary Gazette
approving the sentences. Campaigns were launched against those who abstained from signing.

Ushakov remembered chairing the meeting of the Party
bureau at the Gorky Institute. “Suddenly Sinyavsky was arrested. No one knew…. We had to take some kind of stance about this.” Ushakov said to the Party members, “We should not think this is our doing. Everything is so turbulent in our country and this is the context in which Andrei existed,” the implication being that Sinyavsky knew what he was getting into by publishing his books outside the country. Ushakov then described Svetlana’s sudden entrance.

Svetlana came in. She was not a member of the Party bureau. She came to the Party bureau and after I made my speech, it was understood that I supported the idea of keeping everything inside the Institute. Suddenly she gets up and delivers a political speech in defense of Sinyavsky. And I say, “Who invited you?” I say, “There’s the door. We did not invite you here.” Later she told some of my acquaintances, “Sasha [Ushakov] has become rude. He kicked me out of the Party bureau.” I was not rude, but she should have known. She could go to Red Square or write a letter to the TsK [Central Committee]. As if anything depended on us!
¹⁶

Svetlana was no dissident. She avoided what she called politics, but for the second time, she made a public protest, saying in her speech defending Sinyavsky that the Gorky Institute should have publicly supported him and the staff should never have been forced to sign an open letter denouncing him. It was shameful that those who had refused to sign were subjected to a witch hunt.
¹⁷
Fed up with the brutal hypocrisy of it all, that summer she quit the Institute.

Singh was very worried. The Politburo was spearheading the return to Communist Party orthodoxy. Tensions in Moscow between the old guard and the reformers were building
and were splitting families and friendships; ideological battles raged. Singh, who always encouraged Svetlana’s writing, said that she must send her manuscript of
Twenty Letters to a Friend
abroad. Any apartment could be searched by warrant, any manuscript confiscated. Everyone knew by now that the KGB (the Russian initials of the Committee for State Security, the omnipresent secret police and spy agency, so renamed in 1954) had raided Vasily Grossman’s apartment and taken away not only his manuscript of
Life and Fate
, but also his carbon copies, his notebooks, and even the typewriter ribbons. (A surviving typescript of the novel was microfilmed, smuggled out of the country, and published in the West in 1980, sixteen years after Grossman’s death.) Singh arranged to get a copy of Svetlana’s manuscript to Ambassador Kaul, who took it with him to India in January 1966, safely carried in his diplomatic pouch.

After the trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, at least ten well-known Moscow intellectuals were arrested, and one disappeared. The wife of V. V. Kuznetsov reported that on November 1, 1966, at 6:00 a.m., her husband was seized and driven in a police car to the Moscow Regional Psychiatric Hospital.
¹⁸
She hadn’t heard from him since. Singh had every reason to be concerned.

Now the isolation of Singh began. He had fallen under the shadow of the government’s displeasure, and old Indian friends stopped visiting. His nephew, Dinesh Singh, who had risen to become deputy minister of the Department of Foreign Affairs under the pro-Soviet government of Indira Gandhi, stopped corresponding. Only his brother Suresh Singh continued to write from the village of Kalakankar. Only Singh’s old friends, Ambassador Kaul, and Ambassador Murad Ghaleb from the United Arab Republic, continued to visit.
¹⁹

Soon Singh’s work as a translator at his publishing house, Progress, was called into question. The chief editor of the
English Division, Vladimir N. Pavlov, who had been Stalin’s translator at Yalta and elsewhere and had been in charge of Stalin’s correspondence with Churchill, questioned Singh’s capabilities. The chief editor of the Hindi Division corrected his Hindi translations. It was clear that forces were at work to discredit Singh as incompetent so as to rescind his legal right to stay in the USSR. Clearly Svetlana had been correct. Only if he were married to her would Singh be safe from expulsion.
²⁰

But all these political machinations soon became irrelevant. It was clear that Singh was terminally ill. He was admitted to the Intourist Polyclinic, where he was wrongly diagnosed with tuberculosis. Finally Svetlana got him back into Kuntsevo Hospital. He made multiple visits, each time more ill. Rules had changed even at Kuntsevo. Foreigners were now isolated on a special floor, and friends had to secure official passes to visit. Still, his friends the ambassadors came.

Svetlana began to spend the whole day with him. When he was strong enough, they would go to the garden. She would sit at his feet, and he, eyes closed, with his hand on her head, would speak of India and sometimes read the Vedic hymns. At night at home, she would discuss his case with Joseph, who was now studying medicine at the university. Joseph would consult his books. The outlook was not hopeful. Singh wanted to return to India. Desperate, Svetlana wrote to Brezhnev, begging to be allowed to take him there. Her stay would be short. He would not live long.

It was not Brezhnev, but Mikhail Suslov, the Party’s chief ideologue, who responded. He summoned her to the Communist Party Headquarters on Old Square. When she again asked for permission to register her marriage, he replied that her father had established a law against marriages with foreigners. It had been a good idea. He told her that she would not be
allowed to go abroad. Why would she want to? It was unpatriotic. If Singh wanted to go back, that was his business. No one was preventing him.