bitterly. As for Katya, her daughter, she refused to see her mother altogether. Katya was a die-hard Communist and viewed her mother as a traitor, among other things. Recall the statement that Svetlana had written while at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi. She said of her children, “I know they will not reject me and one day we shall meet—I will wait for that.” It did not work out as Svetlana had hoped.
She and Olga spent just two months in Moscow. Then they moved to Tbilisi, where the Stalin name was still strong. Svetlana spoke no Georgian; her American daughter spoke neither Georgian nor Russian. Both of the Peters women were miserable. There was little to eat or wear. People had no idea how to deal with them, and vice versa. And they got out as soon as they could. The new, and final, Number 1, Gorbachev, gave them permission to leave. They spent just 18 months in the Soviet Union.
Landing at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Svetlana said, “I had to leave for a while to realize, ‘Oh, my God, how wonderful it is’”—the “it” being America. All the things she had said against the West after her arrival in Moscow? She had been misquoted or mistranslated. She went up to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to stay with old friends.
But she kept moving around. Over the next 25 years, she went to England, France, America again, many places. She knew poverty. For a while, she was living in a charity home in West London—or so said reports. She also lived in Portland, Oregon, with Olga, who was managing a vintage-clothing store. Svetlana spent her last few years in a nursing home in Richland Center, Wisconsin (some 20 miles from Spring Green). She liked to sew and read books. Pictures show her a beautiful old lady, who had weathered a lot. She was born a Kremlin princess—the princess of the whole, vast USSR—in 1926. She died in that Wisconsin nursing home in 2011, age 85.
Her son Josef predeceased her: dying in 2008. Katya is a scientist, a vulcanologist, apparently living in rude conditions at the edge of a volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, in Russia’s far east. In 2005, she spoke of her mother to a British journalist, David Jones: “She is such a selfish, cruel woman. She didn’t seem to care whether she hurt me.”
Olga has for many years gone by the name of Chrese Evans. (The first name is pronounced “Chris.”) The 2012 interview I quoted earlier was published in Paris Match. Accompanying the article was a photo of its subject. What does she look like? The magazine described her as an American “au look rock’n’roll.” I would put it this way: Imagine that Stalin had a granddaughter who was a Pacific Northwest hipster, with all-black clothing and tattoos, one of which says (it appears) “Momma’s Girl.” That’s what she looks like. And she, like her mother, though different in appearance, is beautiful. She told Paris Match that she felt close to Buddhism.
Svetlana deserves to be remembered, not just as Stalin’s daughter, but as a writer, a memoirist. Her first two books ought to endure. She partially renounced them, in different moods, but they are true, brave, and beautiful. She ends Twenty Letters to a Friend with a tribute to her nanny, Alexandra Andreyevna. The nanny had been “dearer” to her than “anyone on earth.” “If it hadn’t been for the even, steady warmth given off by this large and kindly person, I might long ago have gone out of my mind.”
Her books are teeming with stories and observations. But she is more than a storyteller or observer. She is a Sovietologist (to use a word that now seems antique). Svetlana is enlightening—sometimes profound—on Stalin, the Soviet Union, and totalitarian society at large. She had great material, you might say, truthfully. But no one would have wished the life for himself, just to have the material. Svetlana occasionally said that she wished her mother had married a carpenter.
Her father was the great and haunting theme of her life. “Wherever I go,” she once said—it could be some remote Pacific island—“I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.” She could not escape “Stalin,” with “Alliluyeva,” “Peters,” or anything else. I met a Russian lady who accompanied Svetlana one day, during Svetlana’s 1984–86 stint in the Soviet Union. It seemed obvious to my friend that Svetlana wanted to be regarded as just a normal person. But my friend couldn’t help thinking, “This is Stalin’s daughter.” So it was with a great many.
About Stalin, Svetlana could be “conflicted,” to use modern psychological parlance. She once stayed at the home of David Pryce-Jones, the British historian and novelist (not to be confused with the earlier-mentioned David Jones), and his wife, Clarissa. In a memoir, Pryce-Jones tells us something important about his guest: “Having said point blank that she refused to talk about her father, she would come down from her room and talk exclusively about him, tormented that she couldn’t help loving a father who she knew was a monster.”
Bizarrely, cruelly, there were some people who blamed Svetlana for Stalin’s crimes—or who took out their anguish on her. Her daughter Chrese told David Jones, “There was a period when so many people held her responsible for [Stalin’s] actions that she actually started to think maybe it was true. It’s so unjust.” A friend of Svetlana’s was quoted in an American newspaper as saying, “She feels the world’s hatred of Stalin is on her shoulders.” In 1983, shortly before her return to the Soviet Union, Svetlana said, “My father would have shot me for what I have done.” That is true. Her father once accused her of making “anti-Soviet statements.” She had barely begun.
I believe that Svetlana did her best, considering the circumstances—the circumstances of her almost unimaginable life. Could anyone have done better? Could anyone have turned out more “normal,” less crazy, more productive? She made mistakes—Katya would surely agree—but she had a conscience. And that conscience broke through to see Stalin and the Soviet Union for what they were. That was no great achievement, you might argue: Anyone, even a daughter, could see that Stalin and the Soviet Union were monstrous! That takes no special morality or courage! Oh? Consider a few things.
In Twenty Letters, Svetlana writes that the other top men in the Soviet Union—Khrushchev, Bulganin, et al.—were “under the spell” of her father’s “extraordinary personality, which carried people away and was utterly impossible to resist. Many people knew this through their own experience—of these, some admit it, though others now deny it.”
Gulia Dzhugashvili, Svetlana’s niece, would always worship the memory of Stalin—this despite the fact that Stalin’s response to her father’s capture by the Nazis was to arrest and imprison her mother, who had a three-year-old child (Gulia). Moreover, Stalin had always treated her father, Yakov, abominably. Think of Yevgeny, Gulia’s half-brother, or alleged half-brother: He is as great a Stalin defender as there is.
Consider, too, Vladimir Alliluyev, a cousin of Svetlana’s. Stalin had his father killed. He sent his mother to the Gulag. In the 1990s, Alliluyev wrote a book advocating the return of Stalinism. In a letter to a Russian literary magazine, Svetlana wrote that the book had aroused in her “feelings of revulsion.” It was “a political tract whitewashing 70 years of Soviet history.”
Relatives who survived the Gulag could not bring themselves to blame Stalin for what happened to them—or to their loved ones who were killed. The guilty party must have been Beria or some other miscreant beyond the great man’s control. “Josef Vissarionovich,” as they called him, lovingly, could do no wrong.
This was the sort of effect that Stalin had on people, incomprehensible as it may be. But his lone daughter broke through the mesmerism, or “spell,” as she labeled it. Her conscience rose in rebellion against her father and his state. This makes her exceedingly rare among sons and daughters of dictators.
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