Stalin’s daughter out to spread those ashes—the ashes of the man whom he had forbidden her to marry.
Night and day, the Soviet propaganda machine worked against Svetlana. Stung, fuming, she held a little ceremony at a charcoal grill. She announced to those present, “I am burning my Soviet passport in answer to lies and calumny.” When the passport had been reduced to ashes, she took those ashes and blew on them. Away they went on the wind.
In 1969, she had another memoir published, Only One Year. This memoir, she wrote in America. Its title was not a good one, as she would admit in her third memoir. The title had worked better as she had conceived it in Russian. What the author meant was, “Look what has happened to me, in just one year!” In any case, the second memoir was a bestseller, like the first. It covered the tumultuously eventful year she had from the time she left the Soviet Union. Its dedication: “To all new friends, to whom I owe my life in freedom.”
During that first year outside the Soviet Union, she talked on the phone with a Russian who had been in America for a long time: Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister whom the Bolsheviks overthrew exactly 50 years earlier, in 1917. He had read Twenty Letters and liked it. In due course, Svetlana became a U.S. citizen and registered with the Republican Party. Her favorite magazine was National Review, she said—the conservative, anti-Communist journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. She donated $500 to the magazine.
A very strange episode, in a life of very strange episodes, took place in the first few years of the 1970s. The widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great architect, repeatedly invited Svetlana to visit her at Taliesin West, near Scottsdale, Arizona. I will have to take a little time to explain Taliesin West. Mrs. Wright will take some explaining, too.
There are two Taliesins: the one near Scottsdale and one near Spring Green, Wisconsin. At these places, the architect established his home and studio and school. Wisconsin was for the summer, and Arizona was for the winter, generally speaking. Also, Taliesin (at either location) was a commune, or “fellowship.” After the architect’s death, his widow, Olgivanna, became the mistress of Taliesin.
Once, she had a daughter named Svetlana. In the 1940s, this Svetlana was a young mother, and pregnant with another child. She was killed in a car crash. Her two-year-old son was killed along with her. Many years later, Mrs. Wright began reading and hearing about a new Svetlana—the famous one, who had defected from Russia. She felt a connection to her. And, as I’ve mentioned, she repeatedly invited her to come visit her in Arizona. Intrigued, Svetlana finally accepted.
Mrs. Wright was keen for her to meet Wesley Peters, the senior apprentice to her late husband. He was also her son-in-law—the widower of the late Svetlana, and the father of those children. Peters still lived in the Taliesin fellowship, as he always would. Svetlana Alliluyeva was immediately drawn to him. He had “an Abraham Lincoln face,” she writes, meaning that it was dignified, sad, and kind. (This portrait comes from Svetlana’s aforementioned third memoir.) Mrs. Wright had been hoping she would have a special liking for Peters. She did. They were married three weeks after her arrival in Arizona. Mrs. Wright was introducing her as “my daughter Svetlana.”
Stalin’s daughter now styled herself “Lana Peters.” In 1971, the year after they were married, she and Wes had a baby, Olga. Svetlana was 45 years old; she had had her first child, Josef, at 19.
Initially, Svetlana enjoyed her life with Wes Peters. But she soon disliked life in the fellowship, a “queer institution,” she writes. Mrs. Wright ran it autocratically. And Wes had no desire to buck her. Svetlana found Taliesin stultifying and oppressive. It reminded her of a previous life: “After my first three blessed years of American freedom of choice, informality and friendliness, I felt as though I were back in my forbidding Soviet Russia.” In addition, the marriage was costing her a lot of money—money she had earned from her books. She paid off her husband’s sizable debts, and was happy to do so. But the fellowship wanted money, too: more than she was willing to pay.
Wes cooled on her, according to her account. She was in a state of dismay over her marriage. “He married me because of my name; if I were Nina or Mary he would never have looked at me.” They separated when Olga was still a baby, and in short order divorced.
“I seemed to be re-living the strange disastrous pattern of my Russian life,” Svetlana writes. In other words, she was bringing up a small child after a divorce. This child would be an all-American girl, Svetlana determined. She would not teach Olga any Russian. And the past would be a foreign country, for as long as possible. In 2012, Olga gave an interview, with an arresting detail: She had always thought of her grandfather Stalin as one of the three men in the historic photographs, taken at Yalta—one of the mighty triumvirate, along with Churchill and Roosevelt. These were the men who beat the Nazis and won World War II. What granddaughter wouldn’t be proud of that? But one day her mother sat her down and explained about Stalin’s monstrous crimes. That must have been an awful conversation.
Svetlana was restless, moving from place to place. She would do this to the end of her days. She was also a seeker, trying or borrowing from many religions. Among these religions were Hinduism, Catholicism, Quakerism, and Christian Science. (She credits the last of these with freeing her from alcoholism, to which she had been succumbing. Her problem especially alarmed her in view of her brother Vasily’s death, and life.)
In 1982, she moved, with Olga, to England. Two years later, she came out with her third memoir, The Faraway Music. She got the title from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. Many people know the line about the different drummer: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” But the next words are these: “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” In her foreword, Svetlana says, “I have always managed to hear a different drummer.” Never, she says, “did I ‘keep pace’ with other Kremlin children” or with the Communist Party. “I kept marching under some individualistic music of my own.”
Her first two memoirs had been published by the powerful American firm of Harper & Row. The Faraway Music was published by an Indian outfit, Lancer. It made no splash and is virtually unfindable today. Svetlana means it to be the third installment of a trilogy. It is not comparable to the other two books, however, in beauty, depth, or polish. Yet it tells the (highly interesting) Peters saga, doesn’t it? It has other value as well.
When she wrote The Faraway Music, she was in a changed mood, politically and personally. She was no longer the ardent admirer of America and the ardent critic of the Soviet Union. She positioned herself in between, the representative of a “third way.” The USSR and the USA were morally equivalent, two “giants,” endangering the world with their arrogance and belligerence. The countries she now liked were gentle social democratic ones, such as Norway and Sweden (which could remain gentle and social democratic because they were protected by American military might).
America had disappointed Svetlana. The country’s “intellectual and artistic circles,” she writes, “never accepted me in their milieu.” After her early splash, she became a “housewife,” consumed with the quotidian chores of raising Olga. She sorely missed “those sophisticated intellectuals and artists I used to know in Moscow and Leningrad.” She longed to be “amidst such fine minds.”
In 1984—17 years after her defection—she went back to the Soviet Union. She had been talking with her son, Josef, on the phone, and this increased her longing. He was now a doctor—a cardiologist—and he was also an alcoholic. He had been hospitalized, and Svetlana thought that he needed her. So, she petitioned the Soviet embassy in London, successfully; yanked Olga out of school; and flew home, if home it was.
When she got there, she was quoted as saying she had never enjoyed “one single day” of freedom in the West. Anything she might
