The man protested, but she persuaded him. Then we started to walk away. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” the man called out. She trudged onward, without looking back. “People think that I have a German accent, and I usually say, ‘Yes, I had a German grandmother,’” she said, breaking into a laugh.
In the early eighteen-nineties, when Svetlana’s German grandmother, Olga, was a teen-ager, she climbed out of a window in her home in Georgia to elope. Olga’s daughter, Nadya Alliluyeva, when she was sixteen, ran off with Joseph Stalin, a thirty-eight-year-old seminarian, poet, and family friend who had become a revolutionary leader.
Stalin had a son, Yakov, from a previous marriage, and he and Alliluyeva had two more children, a boy named Vasily and Svetlana, who was Stalin’s favorite. Throughout her youth, they played a game in which she would send short letters to him, bossing him about: “I order you to take me to the theatre”; “I order you to let me go to the movies.” He would write back: “I obey,” “I submit,” or “It will be done.” He called her “my little housekeeper,” and signed off, “From Setanka-Housekeeper’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant.”
Nadya died when Svetlana was six—from appendicitis, she was told. But when Svetlana was fifteen she was home one day reading Western magazines to practice her English and came across an article about her father, which noted that Nadya had committed suicide. Olga confirmed it, and told Svetlana that she had warned Nadya not to marry Stalin. In “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” Svetlana wrote, “The whole thing nearly drove me out of my mind. Something in me was destroyed. I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father.”
The following year, Svetlana, too, fell in love with a thirty-eight-year-old man, a Jewish filmmaker and journalist named Aleksei Kapler. The romance began in the late fall of 1942, during the Nazi invasion of Russia. Kapler and Svetlana met at a film screening; the next time they saw each other, they danced the foxtrot and he asked her why she seemed sad. It was, she said, the tenth anniversary of her mother’s death. Kapler gave Svetlana a banned translation of “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and his annotated copy of “Russian Poetry of the Twentieth Century.” They watched the Disney movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” together.
“I think we need a border fence between Fantasy Land and Sexual-Fantasy Land.” Link copied
Svetlana had a premonition that the relationship would end badly. Her brother Vasily, she told me, had always been jealous of the attention she received from their father, and he now told Stalin that Kapler had introduced her to something more than just Hemingway. Stalin confronted Svetlana in her bedroom: “Take a look at yourself. Who’d want you? You fool!” He then yelled at Svetlana for having sex with Kapler while there was a war going on. The accusation was false, but Kapler was arrested and sent to the Vorkuta labor camp, in the Arctic Circle. It was the first time, Svetlana told me, that she realized that her father had the power to send someone to prison.
Svetlana enrolled at Moscow State University, where she met and then married a Jewish classmate named Grigory Morozov. It was the only way she could escape the Kremlin, she believed, and her father, preoccupied with the war, grudgingly approved. “Go and marry him, but I will never meet your Jew,” she told me that he said. Their first child, Iosif, was born just as the Nazis surrendered. Morozov wanted many more children, but Svetlana, who had literary ambitions, wanted to finish school. Iosif’s birth was followed by three abortions and a miscarriage. “I was a pale, sickly, green woman,” Svetlana told me. She divorced Morozov and then followed her two acts of romantic rebellion with one of obedience, marrying Yuri Zhdanov, the son of one of her father’s closest confidants. But, she said, “by the time I became a married adult, my father had lost all interest in me.” In 1950, just before the Korean War broke out, she gave birth to a girl named Yekaterina. Svetlana found her new husband cold and uninteresting, and she soon divorced him. She finished school, and she began a career lecturing and translating books from English into Russian.
In March, 1953, Stalin had a stroke. Svetlana wrote, “The death agony was horrible. He literally choked to death as we watched. At what seemed the very last moment, he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry, and full of the fear of death.”
His suffering, she wrote, came because “God grants an easy death only to the just.” But she still loved him. As his body was removed for autopsy, she wrote, “It was the first time I had seen my father naked. It was a beautiful body. It didn’t look old or as if he’d been sick at all.... I realized that the body that had given me life no longer had life or breath in it, yet I would go on living.”
That June, Aleksei Kapler returned from the Gulag. A year later, he and Svetlana happened to attend the same writers’ conference. “There was very bright light in the foyer,” Svetlana told me, smiling and closing her eyes, as she often did when retreating into memory. “We just walked into each other.”
His hair had turned white, but she thought this only made him more handsome. Although Kapler was married, they soon became lovers. “It’s a miracle that I can call you,” he would say. To her, it was a miracle that he had forgiven her for her father’s crimes. Svetlana wanted Kapler to divorce his wife, but he wanted only an affair. Never one to concede defeat, Svetlana confronted Kapler’s wife one night at a theatre. “That was the end of my second marriage, the end of that second part of my life with Sveta,” Kapler later told the writer Enzo Biagi.
The third part started in 1956, when Svetlana was at Moscow State University, teaching a course on the hero in the Soviet novel. That year, Nikita Khrushchev delivered the so-called “secret speech,” a four-hour lecture in which he detailed Stalin’s crimes. After the speech, Kapler’s third wife—the poet Yulia Drunina, whose work Svetlana described to me as “mediocre”—suggested that he give her a sympathetic call. Svetlana and the couple exchanged visits and attended parties together. But Svetlana, who couldn’t bear to see Kapler with another woman, sent him a nasty letter about his wife. He replied in anger, and they never saw each other again. Fifty-two years later, Svetlana told me that Kapler remained the one true love of her life.
In 1963, Svetlana was thirty-seven years old and living with her children in Moscow. The family she’d grown up with was gone: her older half brother, Yakov, had died in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and Vasily had recently drunk himself to death. She had changed her last name to Alliluyeva, because she could not tolerate the sound of “Stalin.” In October, she had her tonsils taken out and was recovering in a Moscow hospital when she met Brajesh Singh, a short Indian man, who had just had nasal polyps removed. He was a Communist who had come to Moscow for medical treatment. The two convalescents began to talk about a book by Rabindranath Tagore that Svetlana had found in the hospital’s library.
Singh was the most peaceful man Svetlana had ever known. He protested when the hospital wanted to kill the leeches they had used in his treatment, and he opened windows to let flies escape. When she told him who her father was, he exclaimed “Oh!” and never mentioned it again.
They spent a month together in Sochi, by the Black Sea, before Singh had to return to India. A year and a half later, after delays from the Soviet and the Indian bureaucracies, Singh returned to Moscow. He and Svetlana filed papers to get married, but the next day she was summoned to her father’s old office in the Kremlin to meet with Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Premier. The marriage was immoral and impossible, Svetlana recalled him saying: “Hindus treat women badly.”
Singh had long suffered from respiratory problems. When he died, in 1966, Svetlana insisted that she be allowed to take his ashes back to India. It was her first trip outside the Soviet Union and, she said later, the one moment in her life when she felt blissful. When I visited her in Wisconsin, she pulled out some black-and-white photographs and laid them on her cluttered glass coffee table: Singh’s family’s large white house, surrounded by cacti the height of trees; a sparse bedroom with large windows, flowing drapes, and a wooden bed; a man on a camel on the banks of the Ganges. “India had really tremendous impact on me—on my thinking, on my everything,” she told me.
On March 6, 1967, two days before Svetlana’s return flight to the U.S.S.R., she packed her suitcase and sneaked over to the American Embassy, where she announced that she was Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter. “The Stalin?” one of the diplomats asked. Robert Rayle, the C.I.A. official in India who handled her case, told me that the agency had no record of her existence, but the Americans decided to spirit her out of the country before the Soviets realized that she was missing. That night, Svetlana took the first available flight, which happened to be heading to Rome. A few days later, she was flown to Geneva. “She is the most completely coöperative defector I have ever met,” Rayle wired to Washington. At one point, Rayle told me, the C.I.A. administered an I.Q. test; Svetlana’s score was “off the charts.”
