Svetlana Alliluyeva Quotes

You have only one friend in this world, yourself.

What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it?

Buried in the minds of those of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives.

Svetlana did not know how to be alone. Alone, she felt totally exposed. She thought she would be safe if only she could entwine her life in another, but then, once she had achieved this, she would feel suffocated, a pattern that would take her decades to break, if she ever succeeded.

When Rayle later submitted a mandatory report to the State Department on the defector’s “personality” and her “adaptability to different environments,” he described Svetlana as “the most completely cooperative defector I have ever met.” He said she’d remained cheerful and optimistic throughout the week as they waited in the safe house, even as she took in the shock that the Americans were refusing her asylum. As Rayle put it, “She recognizes that she cannot be considered a normal, ordinary human being and that her actions have political implications. . . . You’ll find her a warm, friendly person who responds to warmth and friendliness. I think you’ll find her genuinely likeable.” He added, “She is a very stable person.”21 But he warned that she seemed quite naive, as if she’d never lived “in any real world,” and would need help in finding her way in the West.

The truth was that Svetlana did not know what love was. Some deep part of her probably believed she couldn’t be loved. She was still looking for a romanticized, idealized substitute for love. In this she was not unlike many women, though perhaps her case was extreme. She felt she needed a man to invent her or complete her. Her desperation came from the terror of being alone, but who among the men she was drawn to would bind themselves to Stalin’s daughter and take on that darkness?

When they were finally alone, Brajesh told Svetlana, with a calm resignation that was both disconcerting and moving, “Sveta, I know that I will die today.” He said he had had a dream of a white bullock pulling a cart. In India when you have that dream, it means death is coming.22 She did not believe him. At seven a.m. that Monday, he pointed to his heart and then to his head and said that he could feel something throbbing. And then he died. Into her mind came the memory of her father’s death, the only other death she had witnessed. She recalled her father’s outrageous struggle, his fear in the face of death, his terrifying last gesture of accusation. Singh’s death was quick and peaceful, his last gesture toward his heart. She thought, Each man got the death he deserved. With Singh’s death, Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry.

interpuesto en su camino”, escribió.[13] Pero no era la historia verdadera. La historia verdadera era que había muchos participantes en el juego de ruleta política que Stalin había ganado, y después de su muerte, el Partido lo siguió jugando. Svetlana coincidía en que Khrushchov había izado “el estandarte de la liberación”, y lo recordarían por su esfuerzo “de llamar las cosas por sus verdaderos nombres. Los tímidos esfuerzos

featured prominently on Russian TV news

Her laconic humor helped. She could say, “I don’t any longer have the pleasant illusion that I can be free of the label ‘Stalin’s daughter.’ . . . You can’t regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”2

Svetlana’s responses to her mother would always swing, unresolved, between sentimental idealizations and bitter anger.

Theories percolate that the delay was a deliberate effort to deprive Stalin of necessary medical attention. It is just as likely that all those present, including Stalin’s colleagues, were too frightened to make any decisions. If Stalin regained consciousness, he might see the summoning of a doctor as a treasonous plot to seize power. Certainly it was not the most opportune time for Stalin to require the services of a doctor. When Stalin’s personal physician, Dr. Vladimir Vinogradov, had last examined him, he had diagnosed arteriosclerosis and recommended a rigid course of medical treatment. He also suggested that Stalin retire. Vinogradov was a principled doctor but an imprudent man. Outraged, Stalin ordered the destruction of his medical records. Vinogradov was arrested on November 4 in connection with the Doctors’ Plot.8 Any treatment was further hindered by the fact that a number of the country’s top specialists were now incarcerated.

On the evening of March 2, Dr. Yakov Rapoport was in his cell in Lefortovo Prison awaiting another torture session. He had been told that the hours for a “voluntary admission” of his guilt were running out. Stalin himself was following the course of his investigation, and was “displeased.” When his interrogator entered his cell, Rapoport was taken aback. He expected this was his end, but his torturer told him he needed his expert opinion. Would the doctor tell him what “Cheyne-Stokes respiration” was? Presumably Stalin’s doctors had ventured this as their diagnosis. Rapoport replied that it was “spasmodic, interrupted breathing,” found in infants and adults suffering “lesions of the respiratory centers in the brain . . . as in brain tumours, cerebral haemorrhages, uremia, or severe arteriosclerosis.” Could someone with such a condition recover? his interrogator asked. “In the majority of cases, death is inevitable,” Rapoport replied.11 He was asked to recommend a Moscow specialist to attend such a patient. He named eight specialists but said that, unfortunately, they were all in prison.

She was shocked by the complexity of her own emotions, alternately love and relief: It’s a strange thing, but during those days of illness when he was nothing but a body out of which the soul had flown and later, during the days of leave-taking in the Hall of Columns, I loved my father more tenderly than I ever had before. . . . During those days, when he found peace at last on his deathbed and his face became beautiful and serene, I felt my heart breaking from grief and love. Neither before nor since have I felt such a powerful welling up of strong, contradictory emotions.14 Perhaps she saw the face of the man he might have been had he not, as she felt, subsumed all his humanity to an idea—the idea of Stalin, the symbol of Soviet power. And strangely, she felt guilt—she had not been a good daughter. “I’d been more like a stranger than a daughter, and had never been a help to this lonely spirit, this sick old man, when he was left all alone on his Olympus.”15

Svetlana had little real influence over her father. Her fantasy that she might have saved him required an enemy who had corrupted him. She watched Beria scuttling around Stalin’s bed, leaning in obsequiously to assure the leader of his loyalty when Stalin opened his eyes and they thought he might regain consciousness, then assuming the dominant role of paramount leader and ordering the others around when he was sure Stalin would die. She decided Lavrenty Beria was that enemy. He was the “artful courtier” who had succeeded in deceiving her father, his Iago, who had “used his cunning to trick” her father into many of his crimes.16 This was absurd, a willful blindness that many in the family colluded in rather than face the evil that Stalin, a man whom they had loved and who had professed love for them, had perpetrated against them. They wanted to believe that Beria had fed Stalin’s vindictiveness until it became paranoia.

At what seemed like 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 and the unfamiliar faces of the doctors bent over him. The glance swept over everyone in a second. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened that to this day I can’t forget and don’t understand. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was incomprehensible and full of menace, and no one could say to whom or at what it might be directed. The next moment, after a final effort, the spirit wrenched itself free of the flesh.18 Khrushchev, too, noted the gesture. He thought it simply the final reflex of a dying organism.

All of them knew me, too. They knew that I had been a bad daughter and that my father had been a bad father, but that he had loved me all the same, as I loved him.”21 This was the one fact she had to hold on to, as if, were she to let go of this belief, she would disappear. Once she said, “It was as though my father were at the center of a black circle and anyone who ventured inside vanished or was destroyed in one way or another.

By 1918 Nadya’s letters hint that she has fallen in love with Stalin. Svetlana explains that Nadya “had only begun to grow when the Revolution broke out, whereas he [Stalin] was already a man nearly forty, an age of hardened scepticism and cold calculation and all the other qualities important in a politician.

Svetlana looked at her father’s dacha with loathing. His rooms were ugly. In cheap frames on his walls he had huge photographs cut out from the magazine Ogonyok: a little girl with a calf, some children sitting on a bridge. Strangers’ children. Not a single photograph of his own grandchildren. The unchanging rooms—a couch, a table, chairs; a couch, a table, chairs—frightened her. The little party went off well, but Svetlana felt her father’s response to her daughter was indifference. He took one look at Katya and burst out laughing. Svetlana wondered if her father would have liked to be a family again. When she had fantasies of herself and her children living under the same roof with him, she realized that he was accustomed to the freedom of his solitude, which he claimed to have come to appreciate during his long Siberian exiles. “We could never have created a single household, the semblance of a family, a shared existence, even if we both wanted to. He really didn’t want to, I guess.”37

There was the Boss lying on the floor holding up his right hand. I was petrified. My hands and legs wouldn’t obey me. . . . He couldn’t speak. . . . I hurried up to him and said: “Comrade Stalin, what’s wrong?” He’d wet himself while he was lying there. . . . I said, “Shall I call the doctor, maybe?” He made some incoherent noise—like Dz—dz . . . all he could do was keep on “dz”-ing. His pocket watch and a copy of Pravda were lying on the floor. . . . [The watch] showed 6:30, so 6:30 was when it must have happened. . . . I raised the receiver of the house phone.5

If Svetlana’s version of herself was that she was passive and vulnerable, this was not always how others saw her. Her cousin Vladimir called her character “harsh and unbalanced,” though she was “courageous and independent, with her own principles, in line with the traditions of Alliluyevs,” as he put it.3 Her friend Stepan Mikoyan felt her shyness was half camouflage. “Svetlana was very shy and quiet when everything was quiet; and when she was against something, she was very strong.

She does not convey the monumentality of the event—the vozhd is dying—but rather she recounts the death as a daughter would. “Who loves this lonely man?” she asks, watching his ministers ricocheting between fear and ambition, Beria scrambling for ascendency. Only his servants. When a comatose Stalin raises his arm in his last moments, she sees this as a gesture of rage against life itself. He had wished to dominate life, but life had finally defeated him.

Svetlana had reached one of those transformative moments that seemed to recur in her life. After the exhaustion and sorrows of the last three years, the intrusions and constraints on her private life, she had reached a limit. This would be a turning point, though where she would turn was not yet clear.

house nearby and was given the room where

I don’t know if she’d been summoned or if she came on her own. She found herself in the middle of a flock of people older than she, to put it mildly. As soon as this sober young woman arrived, Stalin made her dance. I could see she was tired. She hardly moved while dancing. She danced for a short time and tried to stop, but her father still insisted. She went over and stood next to the record player, leaning her shoulder against the wall. Stalin came over to her, and I joined them. We stood together. Stalin was lurching about. He said, “Well, go on, Svetlanka [sic], dance! You’re the hostess, so dance! She said, “I’ve already danced Papa, I’m tired.” With that, Stalin grabbed her by the forelock of her hair with his fist and pulled. I could see her face turning red and tears welling up in her eyes. . . . He pulled harder and dragged her back onto the dance floor.40

It was impossible to be with her father. He had sacrificed everything human in him to the pursuit of power. After seeing him, she always needed days to recover her equilibrium. “I had no feeling left for my father, and after every meeting I was in a hurry to get away.”42 This, however, was not entirely true. Svetlana could never wholly repudiate her father. His black shadow always remained over her, impossible to exorcise. There was the father to be pitied and there was the dictator. She would always believe that in some part of him, the father loved her.

In her private life, however, Svetlana continued to feel isolated. A friend at the time, Olga Kulikowsky, described her as “one of the loneliest women I have ever known.”37 Another friend, Tatiana Tess, said, “Her search for happiness was boundless.”38 A die-hard romantic, she longed to meet someone who wouldn’t think of her as Stalin’s daughter.

Svanidze had been “deranged” by his multiple imprisonments and was impossible to live with. According to Lily, he had become paranoid about his own Jewish origins and removed all his Jewish mother’s portraits from the walls. And he hated Svetlana’s son because Joseph was half Jewish.

Svetlana entered wholeheartedly into Indian life, wearing a sari and eating the family’s vegetarian food. She walked about the village and visited with Brajesh’s old friends, but she had no illusions about the complexities and compromises of life in India. She found the caste system, with its seemingly ineradicable rules, disturbing.

trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel opened on February 10, 1966. Despite the attempted intervention of organizations like PEN International, Daniel was sentenced to five years and Sinyavsky to seven years of hard labor in prison camps.14 Svetlana was appalled. This was grotesque, ugly, unconscionable. She came home each night to Singh with tales of the kind of meetings that were going on at the Gorky Institute, and he would ask, “But why? Why? . . . Seven years of prison for writing books? Just because a writer writes books?

Vasili was notorious for his pranks. A church had once stood beside Model School No. 25, and the mounds of graves in its abandoned graveyard were still visible. One of Vasili’s favorite escapades was to sneak into the graveyard with his buddies to dig up bones.

They were sitting on a small bench near the Kropotkin Gate when Svetlana mentioned the subject of suicide. Sinyavsky replied, “A suicide only thinks that he is killing himself. He is killing only his body, and the soul after that languishes, for God alone can take the soul.”3 Svetlana may have remembered Grandmother Olga’s words: “You will know your soul when it aches.

The irony was not lost on her that, because she was Stalin’s daughter—“state property,” as she bitterly called herself—she had been refused permission to accompany Singh to India while he was alive but had been granted a visa to carry his ashes back to his country after he was dead.

disposed

Svetlana always said that the notorious brutality of the Orthodox priests, who punished their students with solitary confinement for days in dungeonlike cells, had shaped her father’s penchant for cruelty.

You write that you feel bored. You know, my dear, it’s the same thing everywhere. I have nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes that looks even strange: in so many years not to develop close friendships, but that depends on character.

I keep trying to bring back what is gone, the sunny, bygone years of my childhood,” she would write over thirty years later, as if acknowledging the impossibility of this.40 From the child’s point of view, the world may have been undiluted sun, though with a child’s intuition, she must already have sensed the cracks in her paradise. From an adult perspective, it was a labyrinthine tangle of pain and

However, he did tell her about his release from the Gulag. After his case was reviewed, he was told he had been “rehabilitated”: “You can go home now.” He was given a telephone, but he could think of no one to call. He finally phoned his sister in Moscow and said, “Hello, I will be seeing you soon. Sit at home. I’m coming.” He walked slowly from the Lubyanka prison. It was summer, July. Suddenly he felt his feet could no longer carry him. He sat down on a bench. The children were playing in the park, the leaves were rustling in the sunlight, and he burst into tears. He told Svetlana, “I sat there and cried rivers of tears. Then I went to my sister’s. Thank God I cried it out before I got there.

Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry.

but he was pleasantly surprised by Svetlana’s tranquillity. She later said, “I had been trained not to make decisions for myself, to wait and to be patient, above all to remain well-mannered.

the Stalinist credo: “a respect for obedience, hierarchy and institutionalized authority; a belief in reason, optimism and progress; recognition of a possible transformation of nature, society, and human beings; and an acceptance of the necessity of violence.

Zinaida. As

She unequivocally rejected his crimes, yet he was the father who, in her childhood memory, was loving—until he wasn’t.

My husband’s death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave.

Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say good-bye.

There was a kerfuffle before Svetlana’s departure. Joseph’s wife, Elena, had grabbed Svetlana’s overnight bag to hand it to her. She’d shouted, “Don’t touch that!”26 Elena didn’t know that it contained the porcelain urn carrying Brajesh’s ashes. Joseph was angry at his mother’s sharpness, Elena looked offended, and Svetlana was distraught. She hadn’t had time to give more than a peck on the cheek to Katya. She had mismanaged her farewell.

Why did Americans smile so often? Was it out of politeness or because of a gay disposition?” Whatever it was, she, who had never been “spoiled with smiles,” found it pleasant!

Her reaction was in character. Svetlana was at heart a gambler. Throughout her life she would make a monumental decision entirely on impulse, and then ride the consequences with an almost giddy abandon. She always said her favorite story by Dostoyevsky was The Gambler.

Who can live without personal retrospect? We will always glance back to our childhood, for we are shaped deep in our core by the impress of our parents, and we will always wonder how that molding determined us. Svetlana willfully believed in her happy childhood, even as she gradually understood that it was secured by untold bloodshed. What was it about this strange childhood that she would always turn to it for solace?

She was thirty-five. It is not a comfortable age. If one is still alone, one believes one will stay alone. Her children, now sixteen and eleven, were at school. Katya had her compulsory Pioneer meetings, and Joseph had joined the Komsomol. Svetlana recalled, “I was melancholy, irritable, inclined towards hopeless pessimism; more than once I had contemplated suicide; I was afraid of dark rooms, of the dead, of thunderstorms; of uncouth men, of hooligans in the streets and drunks. My own life appeared to me very dark, dull, and without a future.”2 Beneath Svetlana’s carefully controlled exterior, there existed sorrows and suspicions, rages and frustrations, psychic wounds that she did not know how to face, let alone heal.

Of course, I asked him about it, very matter-of-factly. Yes, he fucked her once. So what?” Rozanova found it easy to blame Svetlana. She was “a hysterical woman—to have such a father.” Sinyavsky was just being a man. She recalled his famous joke. He used to say, “If I’m sitting in a train car with a woman, I have to make her an offer, as a polite human being.” Rozanova added that in a relationship, sexual fidelity “is not important. [This] is not what connects people. Without me he would not be able to work, nor live. To live—it is not the same as making soup.” But she would never forgive Svetlana. Svetlana didn’t seem to understand the sexual double standard that flourished everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the “sexually deranged” one, while the artist Sinyavsky was forgiven his sexual dalliance, necessary for his work, which had so raised her hopes. The women became rivals and enemies, while the husband stood blithely by. And Svetlana was far from unusual in believing that her only route to a creative life was adjacent to a man.

He said God loved me, even if I was Stalin’s daughter.”7 The remark suggests a depth of loneliness that is devastating.

Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I

Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I do hope and believe the people will not vote him into the Presidency—but, then of course elections always could be rigged. . . . The

With our one hand we try to catch the moon itself, but with another one we are obliged to dig out potatoes the same way it was done a hundred years ago.

can no longer accept a society in which you are told that there is only one point of view from which politics, and indeed life itself, must be judged.