Stalin's Daughter (56 page)

Svetlana was now a forty-six-year-old single mother bringing up an infant. These were the cards she had turned up in her last gamble, and she was determined to make the best of them. Mostly, she feigned contentment. She told Annelise, “We are quite happy on our Wilson Road.”
²

For Olga’s second birthday, Wes sent magnificent flowers and toys but, to Svetlana’s shock, did not appear. She wrote to George Kennan:

After he [Wes] “won” the divorce, I phoned him to ask if he is happy now; he talked to me as a bitten dog, complaining that he is terribly unhappy, etc. But about visiting Olga he said “perhaps in the summer.” So she will never, I guess, have much attention from a daddy like this. I feel terribly unhappy about the whole thing, too. All my life I was used to idealize and romanticize a man I loved, and it always took me a long and painful time to be able to see a man as he really is; only then I would have relief. Although Wes showed us that he does not care about us too much, and in many ways he was not kind to me even when we lived together, I still cannot get rid of the good memories I do have.
³

Now she told Kennan, “The only goal of my life is to bring up this precious child the right way—the right American way—about which I truly do not know much.”
⁴

Svetlana could no longer afford a housekeeper and a gardener. She went back to Urken Hardware, where Mrs. Urken greeted her warmly, to purchase the cleaning supplies she needed. As the newspapers announced that Wesley Peters was seeking a divorce, she was buying a lawn mower and joining the noisy chorus of husbands cutting the lawn on weekends. All her neighbors pretended it was not Stalin’s daughter cutting the grass.

Everything about American domestic life had to be learned from scratch. Hella McVay, a teacher at a local private school, the Stuart Country Day School, remembered running into Svetlana at the Acme grocery store. Svetlana was standing in the aisle with Olga in the shopping cart, looking completely lost. McVay must have seemed approachable. “Svetlana came up to me and said, very shy, very quiet, ‘Excuse me. I would love to make ice cream cone for my daughter. Tell me how to do this?’ “ McVay hid that she knew who Svetlana was and took the task very seriously.

So I said, I like cones for my—I have two daughters—and I like sugar cones. Maybe she likes sugar cones too. I knew the little one’s name was Olga but I didn’t use it. She wanted to give her little daughter something that was American. And I showed her the cones and then I took her to the ice cream. Look, oh my God, how much ice cream we have here! All the flavors. Just pick your favorite flavor. Maybe you want to put vanilla at the bottom and maybe raspberry on top, or maybe chocolate and then vanilla, and make little scoops and then just let her lick and have fun and get messy all over. And she just thought it was so wonderful! And thanked me up and down and then picked up several packages, and then we kissed good-bye.

Hella McVay and Svetlana became friends.

I felt very strongly not to violate her privacy because one always read about the fear Svetlana had that she was only Stalin’s daughter. I mean I think women in general know that we are always in the shadow of a man up to a point, but being in the shadow of a monster who killed more people, I mean ten times more people than Hitler did … Svetlana wanted to disappear. And she always said she had two children but they were not free children. She wanted a child late in life here, a child born in a free country…. That was the phrase she used. I remember that.
⁵

When Olga turned two, Svetlana took her to the Presbyterian Cooperative nursery school and served happily as a “helping mother.” The younger mothers frowned upon her age—it was somehow unseemly to have a child in one’s midforties. Svetlana had begun to go under the name Mrs. Lana Peters and believed that no one knew it was she, Stalin’s daughter, who was changing the children’s diapers. But in small-town Princeton everyone, down to the local taxi drivers, knew who she was.

Of course she was lonely. Old friends like Paul Chavchavadze and Edmund Wilson had died, but there were still the Kennans and a few new friends as well. And she continued her voluminous correspondence. She had met the writer Jerzy Kosinski in Princeton in 1970; they had talked for hours, and she had felt that, because he was Polish, he understood her and she him. She wrote to him:

When it comes to
talk
—the way we, useless Russian intellectuals are used to talk—then I have to knock my head against the wall. I am trying my best to become “Americanized”
in that—that is
not
to talk (or think) in those old, outdated Russian intellectuals way. I made some success. I can have a good American cocktail—chat by now pretty well. But sometimes I
miss
that luxury of talking-for-an-hour-with-someone-who-understands. I
had
plenty of this
luxury
in Russia—nothing else, but a lot of
this
…. It was very refreshing, you know. I have had a bit of the same luxury with George Kennan, with Alan.
⁶

She joked that if their conversation in Princeton had continued, she might have fallen in love with him, but “God saved us both from that. I’m afraid that would be quite a mess.” She had heard he was unwell. Her closing was charming. She wished him “luck (the writers need luck). What else? Much laughter, which gives good health. Some inner peace, if you like that (some people don’t)” and reminded him he had
freedom
, even more than she.

In his novel
Blind Date
, Kosinski introduced Svetlana as a character, and caught perfectly the shock that any expatriate Russian would have felt meeting her. By chance, his fictional character, Levanter, becomes a next-door neighbor to Stalin’s daughter in Princeton:

Her name alone, even over the telephone, was enough to call up visions of his Moscow past, and for him she became a direct link to the awesome power that Joseph Stalin had wielded. Levanter had to remind himself again and again that he was a lecturer in Princeton now, not a student in Moscow, and that he was talking with a woman who was just another neighbor and only happened to be the daughter of Stalin.

Levanter showed [his friend Romarkin] a few photographs of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Picking up the snapshots reverently, as if he were handling fragile and irreplaceable heirlooms, Romarkin carefully spread them out on the café
table and studied each one. “It can’t be,” he whispered. “The daughter of Stalin an American. It can’t be.” He shook his head. “If within a quarter of a century you and I can go through life under Stalin and then go halfway around the world and meet his daughter as an ordinary next-door neighbor, well, I guess that means anything can happen.”
⁷

Knowing the complex responses she evoked, Svetlana mostly avoided the Russian community. Evgeniya Tucker, the wife of the eminent historian Robert Tucker, recalled one friend saying about Svetlana, “Not in my house!” And when Evgeniya replied, “Well,
she
didn’t do it. It was her father,” the friend simply said, “Why should I shake her hand?”
⁸

Svetlana had only her faith in God left and sought out a church for solace. Her idea of God was, as she called it, “informal.” She detested all claims of the superiority of one faith over another. Because all religions were the same, the church didn’t matter, though she avoided the Russian Orthodox community.

A new assistant minister had arrived in Princeton at the Episcopalian Church of All Saints. He and his wife, Rosa, had just returned from nine years of missionary work in Uganda. Rosa Shand remembered her first impression of Svetlana, kneeling one row ahead of her across the aisle in church on Sunday. “She was curled so low I saw her as a ball of untamed orange hair.”
⁹
Her eyes lowered, her pose was penitential. What was she repenting? Her abandonment of her children? All her failures? She was so private that no one dared disturb her.

Rosa Shand had read her book
Twenty Letters to a Friend.
Svetlana, seated there in a suburban Princeton church, was the closest she had come “to the dark wellsprings of history.” After the service, Svetlana invited the Shands to visit her at her home. She’d found something in the young couple she responded to intuitively; perhaps they, too, seemed shell-shocked
by their reentry into affluent Princeton. And soon Svetlana visited them, though she requested that no one else be present when she came, saying it was hard to encounter unexpected strangers. In a very short time, Rosa underwent back surgery.

It happened quickly, as all things happened quickly when Svetlana made up her mind, and she made up her mind that she would be our friend. It was scarcely three weeks later, after I’d gone through a back operation, that Svetlana took me into her home. It was the first—though far from the grandest—of those Russian gestures that struck me with awe, made me feel our own inhibiting caution…. I don’t mean this spontaneous act of hospitality was particularly odd. Not then, but one already could feel the germ in her: that refusal to calculate…. At this point Svetlana’s gesture was a reaching out … a simple impulse toward companionship and kindness. In any case, it was a gesture I scarcely imagined a member of my own family offering.
¹⁰

Svetlana argued that Rosa needed time to recuperate. Her husband, Philip, could take care of the children. “You must have peace and breakfast in bed,” she said. Rosa was apprehensive. Svetlana’s “thunderous history pressed the air from my lungs.” What might they talk about? But she was in such pain that she gratefully accepted Svetlana’s offer.

It turned out that they talked mostly about children and played with Olushka (Svetlana’s endearing nickname for Olga). Svetlana said that she was not too worried about her daughter Katya. Katya had discovered her passion for science at the age of eleven and was very close to her father, Yuri Zhdanov. It was Joseph who worried her. By now he was a doctor, but what scars did he carry? Not only from her abandonment of him, but did he feel guilty about the way he had been forced by the KGB
to vilify her? It was nothing! What choice did he have? She spoke so longingly of sitting with her son at the kitchen table, laughing, crying, discussing everything in their old apartment in the House on the Embankment, that Rosa imagined she almost knew him.

Rosa was shocked by the total absence of any signs of Russianness in Svetlana’s home and by the collection of modern gadgetry in her kitchen. How had she found such an item as an electric garlic press? “Television,” Svetlana told her. She seemed to be eternally mopping the already spotless kitchen floor. “She didn’t mean to be different, she meant to get things right, master the American ways.”

One morning, when Svetlana was unaware she was already awake, Rosa glimpsed her in the kitchen through her open bedroom door.

It seemed to me I looked on all she had thoughtfully hidden. I looked on desperation. She wasn’t moving, but you could not call her resting. She was perched on a stool in the middle of the kitchen, her mop tossed down, her back erect, stilted, gripping her automated eggplant peeler as if she had to fit like a robot in the tin-bright sheen of this kitchen. She stared out the window hopelessly, anxiously, so weary with faking she belonged with gadgets it was clear she wouldn’t survive them. Abruptly I felt my helplessness in the face of the losses gnawing her…. What in the name of the twisting corridors of history was Svetlana doing here, clinging to an eggplant peeler in the rarefied elegance of Princeton?
¹¹

But Rosa could talk books, and to Svetlana this was a salvation of sorts. Over vodka, they discussed the ideas of the Danish philosopher-theologian Søren Kierkegaard, whose existential theories of faith as passion so moved Svetlana. They
talked of Simone Weil, the French theologian and mystic, and of her tragic history. And there was always Pasternak. But Svetlana’s writer was Dostoyevsky. Ah! That story
The Gambler.
Rosa said she preferred Chekhov. When Rosa mentioned that she delighted in the sassy poetry of Marina Tsvetayeva, Svetlana erupted as only she could: “Tsvetayeva’s nothing. Leave her—she was weak—she committed suicide.”
¹²
Rosa must read Anna Akhmatova’s
Requiem.
That poetry had moral grandeur.

Requiem
was Akhmatova’s cycle of poems about the horrifying years in Russia under Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s, when she had lined up each day for seventeen months at the prison in Leningrad to deliver a package to her son Lev, arrested for counterrevolutionary activities. It began with the famous moment when an old woman in the line had whispered, “Can you describe this?” and Akhmatova said, “Yes, I can.” The poetic sequence was her requiem to Moscow, its streets bloodied by the wheels of Black Marias, the Kremlin towers like the “wailing wall,” and “hieroglyphics cut by suffering on people’s cheeks.”
¹³

As Svetlana talked, Rosa was examining the photographs in the book
Pasternak par lui-même.
When she looked up, she saw that Svetlana was crying. “She had her elbows on the table, her hands in front of her mouth, her knuckles white. Tears rained down her freckles. She said, ‘Akhmatova lost her son. Did you know she lost her son?’ “
¹⁴
Akhmatova eventually recovered her son. Lev was released from the Gulag in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, but he was bitter when he returned from the camps, believing that his mother, who had fought so hard for his release, had not done enough to save him.

Svetlana had a vague notion that maybe she could buy a bigger house and Rosa, Philip, and their daughters could share it, but the family soon moved to Texas, where Philip had been
offered a teaching post, though the friendship continued in letters for years.