Running from Stalin

Autumn, 1984. The prestigious English-language spetsshkola [special school] where I, a recent college graduate, had just started to teach history was abuzz. In the teachers’ lounge there was only one topic of conversation – our director had received a phone call “requesting” that he speak with Svetlana Alliluyeva, who was interested in arranging admission for her daughter. 

Of course, all the teachers knew who Alliluyeva was. Her name had long since disappeared from the pages of Soviet newspapers and she was rarely recalled. But the older generation could well remember photographs showing Comrade Stalin with his daughter Svetlana – the very picture of family happiness. In 1956, after the 20th Congress of the CPSU (when Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” denouncing Stalin), Svetlana Stalina became Svetlana Alliluyeva (taking her mother’s last name). By then, she was no longer associated with familial bliss, but with romantic escapades. 

The thing that our generation most remembered was the scandal that took place during the spring of 1967, when Stalin’s beloved daughter ran off to India. In 1963, while recuperating in Kuntsevskaya Hospital from having her tonsils removed, she had become acquainted with an Indian Communist named Brajesh Singh, a man 15 years her elder, and married him. This appears to have been the only more or less tranquil period of this unfortunate woman’s life. With her husband’s death in 1966 it came to an end. Alliluyeva was permitted to travel to India to scatter Singh’s ashes. 

Once there, however, she went to the U.S. Embassy and asked for political asylum, later publicly burning her Soviet passport. At the time, a bawdy little ditty made the rounds of the viperous Moscow intelligentsia. It began with the words: Калина да малина, сбежала дочка Сталина… [“Snowball tree, raspberry, Stalin’s daughter has run away…“]. 

But nearly 20 years had passed since then. Even Stalin was rarely mentioned publicly, to say nothing of his daughter. The scandal that had erupted after the release of her book in the West, Twenty Letters to a Friend, had been forgotten, and few knew what this woman, who had disappeared from sight so long ago, had been up to in the free world. And suddenly, here she was right in our school. It was a rather strange feeling, as if, instead of a well-dressed woman who had done a rather skillful job of hiding her years, we were being visited by a ghost from the past. It is interesting that in the teachers’ lounge we were seriously wondering whether or not the school would accept her daughter – as if the decision depended on the school director, influential as he may have been. Alliluyeva was being given quite a reception in Moscow, and if she had wished it, her daughter Olga would certainly have found her way into a Moscow classroom. 

The director was gracious with his distinguished guest, although he did not miss the opportunity to mention that his parents had been victimized during the Stalin era. Svetlana took this revelation in stride. But then it turned out that her daughter did not speak Russian and had never in her life studied, for example, physics or chemistry. Providing her with a Soviet education began to look problematic. That was the last we saw of her. Then we heard rumors that Alliluyeva had moved to Georgia. We forgot all about her. In 1986, when Stalin’s daughter again decided to leave the USSR, the news was drowned out by so many earthshaking events that Svetlana’s second disappearance went almost unnoticed.

Such was our brief encounter with the tragic specter of a bygone era: the little girl who lost her mother, learning only many years later that she had committed suicide; the teenager growing up with a despotic, but much-adored, father, sheltered by Kremlin walls from a country awash in blood and dying of hunger; the young woman witnessing the tragic lives of her brothers – one died in Nazi captivity, while the other became an alcoholic and wound up in prison after his father’s death; a member of a twisted family, the head of which destroyed most of his own relatives; an attractive woman who married many times, but was never able to achieve ordinary family happiness. 

At age 16, Svetlana fell in love with Alexei Kapler, and suffered her father’s wrath. The man she loved was 40 years old and a Jew. He paid for his dangerous liaison with the teenager with many years in labor camps. What must this young woman have felt, knowing her first love had been sent to prison by her father? Her first marriage – to a policeman – was also broken up by her father, who simply sent her a new passport that did not include a stamp indicating her marital status. There was a son from this marriage, and relations with him would prove to be very difficult. 

Her second husband was her father’s choice, but they were soon divorced. Here again, it was not the ordinary drama of a young couple not able to work things out. Yuri Zhdanov was the son of one of Stalin’s closest associates, the man who organized the cruel and shocking ideological campaigns of the late 1940s. Svetlana’s new father-in-law, Andrei Zhdanov, had labeled the poet Anna Akhmatova “part nun, part whore.” 

All of this probably was of little concern to Svetlana at the time, and she of course would not have known of the theories that emerged much later – today there are historians who believe that Stalin was responsible for the death of Andrei Zhdanov, who had served him so loyally. This is the backdrop against which her second loveless marriage was arranged. Is it surprising that many decades later the girl born into this marriage, after being abandoned by her mother and going into hiding among the volcanoes of Kamchatka – away from meddlesome journalists and troubling memories – would not want to meet with this specter of the past and would write Svetlana Alliluyeva an angry letter saying that she forgave her nothing.

Once she left the charmed world of the Kremlin inner circle, it seems that Svetlana Alliluyeva was never able to find her place in the world. Hers is the tale of an unfortunate woman who went from the adoration of her father to his condemnation; who wrote a book laying the blame for all the ills of the Stalin era on Beria’s shoulders; who fled the Soviet Union and wandered from one country to another, and about whom it was once rumored that she had circled the entire globe. She sent her American-born daughter to a Quaker school and later, in the 1980s, after returning from Russia, it seems that she herself spent time in a convent. She got rich thanks to the sensational success of her book Twenty Letters to a Friend, and then went broke either through the efforts of one of her erstwhile husbands or as a result of ill-starred forays into the stock market. It was said that she received money from Stalin’s secret Swiss bank account, but nobody was ever able to prove it. She was on the dole for a while in England, and now, having lived into her eighties, she appears to have returned to her American daughter – the only one of her children who has not renounced her.

In ancient times, one of the worst curses you could wish against someone was that every misfortune would befall his or her innocent children. Perhaps this helps explain the many misfortunes of Svetlana Alliluyeva.