Svetlana Alliluyeva: the difficult fate of Stalin's daughter in the USA

21 April 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Joseph Stalin, got off the plane Swissair at kennedy airport. She was 41 for a year, she spoke good English, the woman confessed to reporters at the time that she was very happy to be in the USA.

About her life in New York told the publication The New Yorker, the translation of the material published blog New Yorker Russia.

Svetlana immediately became the most famous emigrant of the Cold War. She was the only living child of Stalin and had never left the Soviet Union before.

Later, Svetlana wrote: "My first impressions of America are connected with the stunning Long Island Highways."

In the USA it was spacious, people smiled. After spending half his life under the Bolshevik regime, she felt that she could "fly like a bird."

She gave her first press conference at the hotel. Plaza400 reporters were present. One of them asked if she would apply for citizenship.

“Before you get married, you need to love. If I love this country, and the country loves me, then it will come to marriage,” Alliluyeva replied.

Former US Ambassador to the USSR George Kennan helped her settle in Princeton. In the fall of 1967, with Kennan's help, she wrote 20 Letters to a Friend, which chronicled her family's tragic history through a series of letters to physicist Fyodor Wolkenstein. Two years later, she published “Only One Year,” a memoir about the time before and after her decision to flee the USSR. The books sold well and made her rich.

However, her admiration for Svetlana did not last long, she began to postpone the interview, and the press gradually lost interest in her. She continued to write, but her work no longer found publishers in the United States.

Her life became lonely and unremarkable; in 1985, the magazine Time He published a story in which he described it as arrogant, overweight, vindictive and cruel. By the time the USSR collapsed, the American press had completely lost interest in Stalin’s daughter.

In the 2006 year, studying the history of Kennan and the Cold War for his book, Nicholas Thompson decided to write to Svetlana Alliluyeva and a week later received a thick envelope with 6 letter pages and marked “personally and confidentially.”

She was ready to discuss Kennan: “I’m happy to answer all your questions about Kennan - a truly great American. He was so generous, helped me in 1967. Then he wanted me to teach political modern history at Princeton University, but I refused. Political history is what my father would like to see my progress. ”

Alliluyeva admitted that she never fell in love with the United States: “Whatever they write about me and say, all this is a lie ... Soon there will be 40 years since I arrived in the USA. I started with 2 bestsellers, and ended up quietly living on a monthly social benefit ... Even after 40 years, I am a guest in the US — I could not feel at home here. ”

Thompson and Alliluyeva began a correspondence about Kennan, they exchanged letters on 2-3 once a month, gradually the writer began to take an interest in the life of the daughter of the Soviet dictator.

Svetlana, then 81, lived in a nursing home in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a town of 600 people. The woman lived in a one-room apartment on the second floor. The main piece of furniture was a desk by the window, on which stood a typewriter. There are old videos on the shelves National Geographic, maps of California, Hemingway novels and the Russian-English dictionary, which was used by her father.

Thompson well remembered their first meeting.

“Svetlana was very kind and spoke with the energy of a person who for a long time wanted to tell her story, but there was no one. After a few hours, she wanted to take a walk. I offered her my hand when we came to the stairs, but she refused. We went down the quiet street to the garage sale, where a man in a T-shirt Harley-Davidson I was selling a small cast iron bookshelf. Svetlana couldn’t buy it because she only had $25 before the first of the month, so she begged the man to hold the shelf for her. As we were leaving, he shouted in German, “Do you speak German?” She didn’t even turn around, but she told me that people think I have a German accent, but I usually say that my grandmother was German, and she laughed out loud,” Thompson says of the event.

At the beginning of 1890, the German grandmother of Svetlana Olga, as a teenager, was selected from the window of her house in Georgia to escape. Olga's daughter Nadia Alliluyeva fled with Joseph Stalin when she was 16. He was then 38.

Stalin had a son, Yakov, from a previous marriage, and Alliluyeva bore him 2 children - Vasily and Svetlana - Stalin's favorite. In childhood they played a game in which Svetlana sent him short notes with orders: “I order you to take me to the theater”, “I order you to let me go to the cinema”. Stalin wrote: "I obey," "I obey" or "It will be done."

Hope died when Svetlana was 6 years old. The girl was told that from appendicitis. But when Svetlana turned 15, she once read Western magazines at home to check up on English and came across an article about her father. The article said that her mother committed suicide, later this information was confirmed to her by her grandmother.

“It almost drove me crazy. Something broke inside me. I could no longer obey the word and will of my father,” Svetlana wrote in “20 Letters to a Friend.”

The following year, Svetlana also fell in love with an 38-year-old man - a Jewish director and journalist named Alexey Kapler. Their romance began in the late autumn of 1942, during the Nazi invasion of Russia. Kapler presented Svetlana with the banned translation of the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and a copy of “Russian Poetry of the Twentieth Century” with its annotation.

Svetlana, in her words, had a premonition that their relationship would end badly. Her brother Vasily was always jealous of her father, so he told Stalin that Kapler showed Svetlana much more than Hemingway’s books.

Stalin shouted at her in her bedroom: “Look at yourself. Who wants you? You are a fool! ” Then he yelled at her for sleeping with Kapler. The charges were false, but Kapler was still arrested and sent to Vorkuta.

Svetlana entered Moscow State University, where she met and later married her Jewish classmate, Grigory Morozov. Only in this way could she escape from the Kremlin, and her father, occupied with the war, reluctantly, but agreed: "Marry him, but I never want to see your Jew."

Their first son, Joseph, was born after the end of the Second World War. Morozov wanted many children, but Svetlana wanted to finish her studies. After the birth of Joseph, Svetlana had a 3 abortion and a miscarriage.

She divorced Morozov and later married Yuri Zhdanov, the son of one of her father’s closest advisers. In 1950, she gave birth to a girl and called her Catherine. Soon Svetlana tired of her husband, and she divorced him. She completed her studies and began teaching and translating books from English to Russian.

In March, Stun 1953 had a stroke. She wrote that he suffered because “God grants easy death only to the just.” But she loved him anyway.

In June of the same year, Alexei Kapler returned from the gulag. A year later, they were with Svetlana at a writers' congress.

He turned gray, but she thought it was for him to face. Although Kapler was married, they soon became lovers, it was a miracle for her that he forgave her for the crimes of her father.

Svetlana wanted Kapler to be divorced, but a simple affair was enough for him. Svetlana, who never admitted defeat, specially arranged a meeting with Kapler's wife in the theater.

“This was the end of my second marriage, the end of the second part of my life with Sveta,” is how Kapler described this event.

The third part began in 1956, when Svetlana taught a course about a hero in Soviet novels at Moscow State University. That year, Nikita Khrushchev revealed Stalin’s crimes. After that, Kapler's third wife, poetess Julia Drunina, suggested that her husband call Svetlana to support her. The three of them attended several events. But Svetlana, who could not see Kapler with another woman, wrote him a terrible letter about his wife. He replied in anger, and they never saw each other again.

Through 52 of the year, while in the USA, Svetlana admitted that Kapler was her only true love in life.

In 1963, Svetlana was 37 years old, and she lived with her children in Moscow. Once in the hospital, she met a Hindu Brajesh Singh. He was a communist who arrived in Moscow for medical treatment.

Singh was the most peaceful man Svetlana had ever known. He did not even allow to kill the leeches with which he was treated.

They spent one month together in Sochi, and then Singh returned to India. After a year and a half, he came to Moscow again. They applied for marriage, but the next day Svetlana was summoned to the Kremlin. Chairman Alexei Kosygin told her that their marriage is immoral and impossible because “Indians mistreat women”

They kept dating. Singh was sick for a long time. When he died in 1966, Svetlana insisted that she be allowed to take his ashes back to India.

This was her first trip abroad and, as she said later, one of her happiest moments in life.

6 March 1967, 2 day before returning to the USSR, Svetlana packed up and went to the American embassy, ​​where she stated that she was Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter.

Robert Reil, a CIA spokesman in India, admitted that the agency did not know about its existence then, but the Americans decided to take her out of the country before the Russians realized that she was gone. That same night, Svetlana got on the nearest plane that flew to Europe, to Rome, a few days later she flew to Geneva, and then to the USA.

The children of Svetlana, 21-year-old Joseph and 16-year-old Ekaterina, were waiting for their mother at the Moscow airport. Through 3 of the day, she sent them a long letter in which she admitted that she could no longer live in the USSR.

“We try to catch the moon with one hand, but at the same time we have to dig potatoes with the other - just as we did 100 years ago,” she wrote.

Joseph answered her in April: “But you understand that after what you did, your advice from afar is that we are brave, keep together, do not lose hope, and so that I will not leave Kate, it sounds at least strange ... I believe that by your action you cut yourself off from us. ”

After settling in Princeton, Svetlana began to receive letters from Olgivanna Lloyd Wright - the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright. In March 1970, Svetlana arrived at Wright’s estate, where she attended an official dinner. It turned out that Olgivanna considers Svetlana to be the personification of her daughter. She hoped that she would marry a widower to her daughter Wesley Peters.

Man Svetlana immediately liked. The next day they went to ride his Cadillac, and after 3 weeks they got married. For a time they lived in his apartment in Scottsdale, and then in Spring Green, Wisconsin, where the Wright brotherhood was based in the summer. Life in Taliesino meant complete obedience to Olgivanna. Residents flattered her, told her about their sins and never argued with her.

After 3 of the month, Svetlana wrote to Kennan: “I feel bad that again, as in my own cruel Russia, I have to force myself to shut up, force myself to be someone else, hide true thoughts, bow to lies. All this is pretty damn sad. But I will survive.

In 44, Svetlana became pregnant. Olgivanna was afraid that the children would interfere with her communication with the dead, so she demanded that Svetlana perform an abortion. She refused and in May 1971 gave birth to a girl whom Olga named after her mother’s grandmother.

Shortly after the birth of Olga, Svetlana left the estate. Wes loyalty to his work was stronger than his loyalty to his wife, so he stayed.

After Taliesina, Svetlana returned to Princeton. The men continued to pay attention to her, but her life was too unstable. She began to move constantly: from New Jersey to California and back. At the beginning of 80's, partly guided by the idea of ​​finding a good school for her daughter Olga, Svetlana moved to England.

Olga found out who her grandfather was when she was 11. Once at the school where she studied, the paparazzi appeared, and the teacher had to remove her secretly, hidden under a blanket. That evening her mother explained everything to her.

In 1980's son Svetlana Joseph began to periodically communicate with his mother, control in the USSR gradually weakened. Svetlana began to think about returning to the USSR to meet her grandchildren (both of her children at the time had one child).

In October 1984, she met with Joseph at a hotel in Moscow. But everything seemed strained and awkward. Svetlana saw a woman who seemed to her ugly and old, and then was surprised to find out that this was her son's wife. Joseph refused to communicate with his American half-sister.

Catherine worked in Kamchatka and did not come. A few months later, she wrote a one-page letter to her mother, stating that she “would never forgive”, “could not forgive” and “did not want to forgive”.

“And then I was accused of all mortal sins against my homeland,” Svetlana wrote.

The Soviet leaders boasted about Svetlana’s return, but she was uneasy. A month after her return, Svetlana dreamed of Georgia, where her parents were born. Soon she and Olga flew to Tbilisi.

There she was much calmer, but the image of her father still pursued her.

“The most difficult thing was that I had to say what a “great man” my father was - someone cried, someone hugged and kissed me. It was torture for me. I couldn’t tell them how difficult my thoughts were towards my father,” she admitted.

The attention was too intrusive, and a year later Svetlana realized that she wanted to leave the USSR. She asked Mikhail Gorbachev permission to fly, he agreed.

Over the years, the historian with Svetlana became very close, she gave him advice, discouraged flying to Russia, fearing the local special services.

Then they quarreled over political views, reconciled again.

A few months after their reconciliation, Nicholas learned that 85-year-old Svetlana was in the hospital with colon cancer. She wanted to talk, the journalist wrote to her, but never received an answer.

Realizing that Svetlana was on the verge of death, Olga wanted to visit her, but Svetlana did not want her daughter to see her die; she forbade her to look at her body. Olga said that all her life Svetlana pursued the image of her mother, lying in an open coffin.

Svetlana died in November 2011 of the year. She often said that November is the most difficult month for her. It gets colder in November, and in November her mother killed herself.

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