1953—same day as the composer Prokofiev, who received less fanfare.
Svetlana taught Soviet literature and the English language at her alma mater, Moscow University. She later worked as a translator. And she changed her name: to Svetlana Alliluyeva, adopting her mother’s family name. This was in 1957. She had wanted to do it before, in the interval between her high-school days and her university days. In fact, she brought up the subject with her father. One look from him suggested that this was a bad idea. But almost 15 years after the impulse, she went ahead and acted on it. “I could no longer tolerate the name of Stalin,” she writes. “Its sharp metallic sound lacerated my ears, my eyes, my heart . . . .”
Mussolini women have held on to the patriarch’s name, sometimes maneuvering legally to do it. Franco’s daughter has long used her maiden name: She is Carmen Franco, not Carmen Martínez-Bordiú. But Svetlana was different (and had a different father, to be sure). People assumed that the authorities forced her to give up “Stalin,” in the general, national “de-Stalinization” process. This was not so, according to Svetlana herself.
About the name “Alliluyeva”: It is akin to “Hallelujah,” meaning “Praise ye the Lord.” The name came to fit Svetlana better than it had her mother, whose god was Communism. In 1962, Svetlana was baptized in the Orthodox Church. Explaining this step, she writes, “The sacrament of baptism consists in rejecting evil, the lie. I believed in ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ I believed in truth without violence and bloodshed. I believed that the Supreme Mind, not vain man, governed the world. I believed that the Spirit of Truth was stronger than material values. And when all of this had entered my heart, the shreds of Marxism-Leninism taught me since childhood vanished like smoke.”
She further writes that “my father’s whole life stood out before me as a rejection of Wisdom, of Goodness, in the name of ambition, as a complete giving of oneself to Evil. For I had seen how slowly, day by day, he had been destroyed by evil, and how evil had killed all those who stood near him. He had simply sunk deeper and deeper into the black chasm of the lie, of fury and pride. And in that chasm he at last had smothered to death.”
In 1963, she met a man named Brajesh Singh, an Indian Communist. She was instantly drawn to him. His manners were European, she would later say. And there was another aspect: His “gentle calm” and “serene smile” suggested “the traditional Hindu virtues of nonviolence and spiritual equilibrium.” During their second conversation, Singh asked her, “Has life greatly changed in the Soviet Union since Stalin’s death?” Yes, of course, Svetlana replied—but these changes were perhaps not “deep or fundamental.” She then revealed to him her parentage. “Oh!” he said. Oddly enough, he would never question her about her father, in the three years they knew each other.
He was about 20 years her senior—in his mid-fifties, while she was in her mid-thirties. He was from an old, wealthy, distinguished family. He was losing his faith in Communism. More and more, he was feeling himself a Hindu. He and Stalin’s daughter fell in love and eventually lived together. They were a household, with Svetlana’s children, Josef and Katya. The shadow over this was that Singh was sick. He had been sickly, failing, for years. He and Svetlana wanted to get married—but for this they needed the state’s permission. Svetlana was still in a sense the state’s property.
In May 1965, she went to see the Number 1, Alexei Kosygin. He received her in her father’s old office. “What have you cooked up?” he said. “You, a healthy young 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.” If she and Singh got married, Kosygin explained, “he would then have the legal right to take you to India, a poverty-stricken, backward country! I was there. I know. Besides, Hindus treat women badly. He’ll take you there and abandon you.”
Svetlana and Singh never married, formally. But she always referred to him as her “husband,” and we may consider this relationship her third marriage. (There would be one other.) Singh died in October 1966. It was Svetlana’s wish to go to India, to spread his ashes on the Ganges. Singh had wanted such a ritual to be performed. But for this trip, as for a marriage, Svetlana would need the state’s consent. She went to see Kosygin again. Amazingly, he said yes: He gave his consent. Svetlana would be let out for a month. The only condition was that she not speak to the press.
So, Svetlana Stalina, or Svetlana Alliluyeva, would travel to India, urn in hand. The experience would radically change her life.
Worldly and intellectual though she was, she had never been abroad—except for ten days in East Germany: “I saw nothing but war ruins and frightened, silent people.” In India, she contrived to stay longer than a month. She in fact spent more than two months in the Singh family’s village, Kalakankar, in Uttar Pradesh. She loved life there. It would also be true to say she loved life outside the Soviet Union, and the Soviet bloc. She was required to attend some functions at the Soviet embassy in New Delhi. And she discovered something interesting: that she had “lost the habit” of a Soviet way of life. “India had set free something in me,” she writes. “Here I had ceased feeling like a piece of ‘government property,’ which in the U.S.S.R. I had been all my life.” She started thinking of not going back.
And on March 6, 1967, she walked into the U.S. embassy. She requested political asylum. An American on duty said to her, “So you say your father was Stalin? The Stalin?”
She was flown to Rome that very night. From there, she went to Switzerland. She was enchanted by this country, as most people are, and she would gladly have stayed there. But the Swiss government would have required that she not involve herself in politics in any way. And that was unacceptable to her. “To remain silent for another forty years could have been achieved just as well in the U.S.S.R.,” she writes. She wanted to explain, to one and all, “why I was cutting myself off forever from the Communist world.” On April 21, six weeks after she entered the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, she landed at Kennedy Airport in New York. Upon bounding down the steps from her plane, she said, “Hello! I’m happy to be here!”
But wait a second: Didn’t she have two children back in the Soviet Union? She did. This weighed on her mind before she went to the embassy, and it would weigh on her for many years afterward. As on other subjects, she said different things at different times. Often, she reasoned (or rationalized) as follows: Josef was 21, and married. Katya was 16, and more or less grown up. They could take care of each other, and their fathers loved them. I had done all I could for them. They did not need me in order to succeed. At other times, she thought she had committed a “sin” against her children.
There in the embassy—the American embassy in Delhi—she had written a statement about her life and intentions. It ended with these lines: “My children are in Moscow and I do understand that now I might not see them for years. But I know they will understand me. . . . Let God help them. I know they will not reject me and one day we shall meet—I will wait for that.”
When she arrived in New York, she said, “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia.” And she had not come empty-handed. She carried a manuscript: Twenty Letters to a Friend, which she had composed in the summer of 1963. She wrote the book at great speed: in just 35 days. It is all about her life, an outpouring of memories and thoughts, a testament. “The free letter form,” she writes in an author’s note, “enabled me to be completely candid.” Published in America, the book became a bestseller.
Authorities in the Soviet Union were not pleased with “the defector Alliluyeva,” as the state media had it. Kosygin came to the United States in June 1967—two months after Svetlana’s arrival—for the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey (with President Lyndon Johnson). He found time to denounce the defector to the worldwide press: “Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only
