Stalin's Daughter (74 page)

In August, two months after Tom Turner died, Svetlana was admitted to the emergency ward of a Madison hospital suffering an apparent heart attack.

She wrote to Philippa Hill that she felt she was sinking lower and lower from her “ideal.” “Anger makes a sickly heart…. I am cracking on every seam.” And then she went on a rant. She was angry at “stupid publishers, stupid newspapers, stupid politicians on my TV every night. Even stupid Gorbachev who BLEW such a GOOD CHANCE of BIG REFORMS in the USSR…. He missed his Supreme Hour.” She ended her letter to Philippa, “Well, poor late Tom loved to talk about this, politics and all. Now I have nobody to talk with. Darn it. It’s so sad.”
²⁰
Then she got the bill for her emergency stay in the hospital, which almost wiped out her savings.

How Svetlana survived financially was always mysterious, but it would seem that George Kennan’s appeal to Fritz Ermarth to help her—“necessarily clandestinely”—had been answered. For some time, she had been receiving regular monthly payments for translation work from a Washington agency.
²¹
She claimed she did not know the name of her “benefactors.” She told George and Annelise Kennan, “I do not know WHO
decides my fate. I suppose people in Washington…. Nameless shadows. All top secret. I NEVER was asked.”
²²

But she had begun to feel uneasy about the whole thing. While the checks arrived regularly, often no translation work followed. One of the checks had the name and address of a publishing house called Crocker located in Massachusetts. She wrote to inquire about her assignments but received no answer.

After Christmas, she wrote to Rosa Shand that she had made a new discovery. “The CIA people in Wash DC decided to pay me a ‘pension’
under a cover-up
of a translation work. Can you imagine that stupidity? … [They]
think
that paying me money they are
NOT
humiliating me.”
²³
She told Rosa that she had contacted her employer and he (she did not identify who this was but implied it was a CIA officer) informed her that the firm did not exist. “We thought you understood.”

Irate, she protested, “I felt like I was taken in. It was a cover-up.” “I had never been anyone’s spy and I couldn’t live on a pension or assistance, whatever, from the CIA.”
²⁴

Was her outrage sincere? Did she not suspect that her benefactors might be the CIA? It would seem that in her mind, as long as she was doing legitimate translation work, being unsure of the Washington source was not a problem. Many Soviet dissidents were supported in some way. The previous year, there had been Senate hearings, chaired by Senator Sam Nunn, to look into the general state of Soviet defectors in the United States; she’d been disappointed when she wasn’t called to testify.
²⁵
However, accepting a regular stipend directly from the CIA was another matter; it put her on a par with the KGB’s Victor Louis. Bob Rayle insisted she invariably refused his offers of CIA support. Perhaps, being Russian, she could imagine that one day she would be asked to pay back the CIA’s generosity.

Precipitately, Svetlana decided to bolt. It had been a desolate
fall alone in her Madison apartment, without Tom, without Olga. She had reached another dead end. As the Soviet Union disintegrated and “Gorby-mania” pervaded America, she was certain her newly completed manuscript, “A Book for Granddaughters,” would never be published in the United States. She had an open invitation to visit an old friend, Madame Helen Zamoyska, in Muret, France, and the Sinyavskys, with whom she had resumed correspondence, had implied that she might be able to find a French publisher. Underneath everything was, of course, her longing to be closer to Olga.

When Olga came home that December, Svetlana told her she was moving to France. The move, as usual, was hurried. Olga carried their old furniture off to secondhand stores, haggled over prices, and packed up the remainder of her mother’s things, which were to be shipped to England. Svetlana had a last meal with Wesley Peters at their traditional restaurant, the Don Q Inn in nearby Dodgeville. He was sweet; the talk was good; they spoke of Olga’s future education. And then she was gone.

She traveled first to the south of France, and then spent several weeks at a retreat at a Roman Catholic nunnery in Toulouse, about which she often spoke nostalgically. She visited the Sinyavskys in Paris, but it turned out they were not helpful in finding her a French publisher. She clearly hadn’t heard the gossip they’d passed on to the London
Times
in 1984 about her having been lured back to the USSR by KGB agent Oleg Bitov. Had she known, she might have saved herself a frustrating trip.

Where could she go? She had decamped completely from Wisconsin. The only place her feet could take her now was England. Olga was working in a bank and renting digs in Muswell Hill with three friends. She invited her mother to join her. Svetlana stayed four months, but of course this arrangement couldn’t last.

It was as if Svetlana had stepped into a void, but then a stone rose to give her a footing. Her former landlord in Cambridge, professor Robert Denman, put her in touch with Sir Richard Carr-Gomm, a philanthropist who had founded the Morpeth Society, a nonprofit charity that ran a number of privately funded housing complexes in London for distressed gentlefolk and indigent people.
²⁶
Svetlana moved into 24 Delgarno Gardens in North Kensington, where she had a room and shared the communal kitchen and bathroom with five other residents—a strange echo of the old communal apartments in Moscow.

To friends in America, she extolled British benevolence. “English charity workers are quite special folks.”
²⁷
The city offered so many things free to seniors: city transport, concerts, libraries where she was able to study subjects she had always wanted to pursue. Her favorite excursion was to Regent’s Park, where she sat to write her letters. She assured friends, “I don’t mind to live on charity check. I don’t mind to have furniture from a charity truck. I don’t mind. It doesn’t humiliate me at all. I didn’t want to live on considerable pension, originating from CIA, because I don’t think it’s right. I had four books which could be published, and I could have money from my literary work.”
²⁸

She was receiving about €60 a week from the Carr-Gomm Society, with which she paid her room and board and living expenses.
²⁹
She spoke affectionately of fellow residents: “an American, a Chinese cook, a reformed alcoholic, a one-time housekeeper, a gay man of 24.” The tedious part was sharing the bathroom, which nobody bothered to clean. Nevertheless, she would tell a British friend, “Fate always sends me unusual people who pull me out of the abyss.”
³⁰

Svetlana started to march in London peace rallies to protest nuclear weapons. This was not a new obsession. A few
years back, she’d written to George Kennan, “OH, HOW I WOULD LOVE to live under a government which does not possess atom bombs and does not threaten anyone.”
³¹
“George, you are a great peacemaker…. PLEASE DO SOMETHING. RIGHT NOW. SOMETHING REALLY BIG.”
³²
Svetlana herself might have been able to muster considerable publicity for the antinuclear cause, if it were known that Stalin’s daughter was marching in London peace rallies, but she preferred to remain anonymous, always afraid of enemies who would twist her motives. When her friend Philippa Hill made the mistake of calling her her “own worst enemy,” she responded, surprisingly temperately:

I do
not
think that
I am
my own worst enemy—simply because
I do have
so many Good & Terrible Enemies—so many as you, my dear, would never have….
My
Enemies—are really not mine, but my Father’s. But they
use me
as a substitute image. Every psychiatrist would explain this to you. I have to confront very
real enmity
, very real malice, and very
real obstacles
.
³³

Angela Lambert, a journalist for the
Independent
, managed to track Svetlana down in March 1990 soon after her arrival in London. Lambert must have touched something in Svetlana, for she spoke with remarkable candor. She said she no longer held the “pleasant illusion” that she could escape the
label
of Stalin’s daughter, and added, “It was partly my own fault”:

I lived my life the way I could—though I could have lived it better—within a certain limited framework called Fate. There is something fatal about my life. You can’t regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter. I was born into my parents’ fate. I was born under
that name, that cross, and I never managed to jump out of it. I just passively followed the road of my pilgrimage.
³⁴

Passive
was hardly the word that many would have applied to Svetlana, but it was the way she thought of herself.

Those who saw Svetlana as the Kremlin princess seemed to think she’d been brought up in fairy-tale indulgence. Instead, like all Soviet citizens, she had been trained to follow a strict code of obedience. Soviets were told where to live, where to work, where they couldn’t travel. Svetlana looked to others—to the protectors, the mentors, the guides—for the direction she must take. This was what she meant by her passivity. But then she would rage: at herself, and at them for controlling her. “I could never emerge in my own capacity,” she lamented. She didn’t recognize that she had stood up to them all.

She told Lambert wistfully:

I want one thing: for my books to be published. I just dream that my story will finally reach readers. At least I would hope I can convince the readers of my book that I have had nothing to do with my father’s philosophy and what he did. Then I shall feel I have done something. Without that, I see my life as totally useless.
³⁵

She smoothed with delicate hands the cloth covering the table they were sitting at and smiled at Lambert. “It’s been a heavy life, my dear: heavy to listen to; heavy to live.”

That November, she sent Rosa Shand a one-line Christmas card: “Dearest Rosa, I think—I’m
alive
after this dreadful year. It must be better now.”
³⁶
But her optimism had begun to sound a little phony. Even to her.

Chapter 34
“Never Wear a Tight Skirt If You Intend to Commit Suicide”

Svetlana and Olga together, c. 1994.

O
n May 3, 1991, Svetlana’s friend Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide. He wrapped a plastic bag around his head and suffocated to death, leaving a note: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity.”
¹
When she read about his death in the London newspapers, Svetlana
was profoundly shocked. Memories flooded in of the times she and Olga had visited him in New York—he’d taken them on a ride in a horse-drawn carriage through Central Park while his wife, Kiki, snapped photos. He’d signed her copy of his novel
The Painted Bird
, “For Svetlana who understands.”
²
What did she understand? She must have known that Kosinski had lived since 1982 under accusations of plagiarism, of employing ghostwriters, and of having willfully distorted the facts of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor. Kosinski’s defenders, like Zbigniew Brzezinski (national security adviser during the Carter administration), claimed that the Communist government of his native Poland had smeared him.
³
Was this what Svetlana, equally slandered by the Soviet Communists, understood? But she believed Kosinski had a good life: a beautiful wife, a lovely apartment, his books published. And now he was what she called a suicider.

The news of Kosinski’s suicide sent her spiraling downward. She was living without money in gray, rainy London with no idea what cards fate was about to deal her. One day that May she walked to London Bridge and looked down into the muddy waters of the Thames. Hiking up her narrow skirt, she tried to climb the railing. A strong hand pulled her back to the pavement. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a stocky figure with a red Irish face and gray hair in a dark raincoat walking quickly from the scene. Two young constables picked her up and packed her into a police car. As they drove her home, they chatted about the soccer match on the radio. When they arrived at her door, they told her sternly, “Never do that again!” In bed that night, she tried to put a plastic bag over her head. It didn’t work. She fell asleep. The next morning she awoke and it all seemed a terrible nightmare.
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