The Red Daughter Read online

  I think it’s safe to say that, except maybe for the nanny who raised her, you and I were the only two people who ever really understood her.

  There were times I wanted to pity my mom, but she wouldn’t let me. She had such a deep heart, and so many wounds, and this crazy courage that never gave up or let go. She could be fierce. She loved her children—all of us, however it may have looked to the outside world. She survived her life, which under the circumstances is maybe sort of heroic. And she came to know, finally, what real love was. Yes, I believe she did.

  Thank you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jacob “Yasha” Evans

  Inside the same envelope as Jacob “Yasha” Evans’s letter was the original copy of the Last Will and Testament of his mother, Lana Evans, formerly known as Svetlana Alliluyeva; formerly known, before that, as Svetlana Stalina.

  The document was written in English on one of those generic forms that can be bought at certain stationery or copy stores or downloaded from the Internet for a few dollars, signed by her and witnessed by a notary public in Spring Green in the early autumn of 2011. It left Svetlana’s limited possessions and all her “private journals” to her son Jacob “Yasha” Evans. These journals were to be organized and “made into catalog” by her “appointed Literary Executor Peter Horvath, Esquire, of Princeton, New Jersey.” It was very like Svetlana, I thought, to consider her appointments firm and binding regardless of whether the appointee had ever been notified of his position.

  That was the end of her will; but it was not the end of the document, whose final page, I realized only as I came to it, was a letter, also written in English. I recognized Svetlana’s handwriting at once—the way the P of my name seemed to lean down over the letters that followed, as if not sure whether to scold or to embrace:

  My Dearest Peter,

  You will be surprised by all this. But you promised me, remember? On the plane from Zurich. You ordered vodka martinis from the stewardess for us both and I asked what is it and you said it’s only the greatest drink in world. All night and into the morning we drank, I was too frightened and excited to sleep, then finally out the blue window we saw your tiny island with its strange name: Block Island. My first sight of America. You said you had a summer house there. I must come and stay with you and your family. And I thought to myself, Americans, they are all like this? Come to my house, live with my family. Come inside, welcome. So that summer I stayed on Block Island with you. I saw your daughter, Jean, run naked on the rocks. Martha in her tennis skirt. We ate lobster over newspaper. You showed me American fishing. I took my first shower outdoors. You and I, we drank that evening on your porch. I know you remember.

  But here is the thing, Peter: my father’s cage turned out to be attached to me. It went where I went. Years passed and the bars turned from gold to brass, but never disappeared. I feel them still in my breast now as I write these private words that I have been writing ever since I first came to this country so many years ago—this country that you brought me to with your own hands and heart.

  Here they are, Peter. My other words, for what they are worth. I hope you know what to do with them. Since I do not.

  Do not regret me, Peter. You I will never regret. I would take that flight again if I could, your hand on my arm, wherever we land.

  Your loving

  Svetlana

  In all, there were twenty-eight identical school-ruled notebooks with cardboard covers. Every page of every book filled with her Russian. They sat in my study for several months—unread, obviously, since I have never learned the language.

  And then one day I received a reply to an ad I’d placed at the back of Princeton’s alumni magazine asking for a native-speaking Russian translator with experience. Vera Dubov is currently Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She worked tirelessly on this challenging project for the better part of a year, and I am indebted to her for bringing Svetlana’s private world to life with the tone, rhythms, and emotion that I recognize as true. Reading my dearest friend translated from her own Russian allowed me to realize for the first time, with a force that still takes me by surprise, that until now I had known her only in her second language, that is in English, which, while accomplished, could never possibly show the whole of her.

  Now that woman has been revealed to me. What else can I be but grateful? Yes, grateful and moved.

  What you are about to read, then, is a selection of Svetlana’s private journals, made by me, from those twenty-eight notebooks that she put in my trust after her death.

  I wish to emphasize that all “editorial notes” in this volume are mine alone. If in the end they strike the reader as more intimate and personal in nature than would be expected under such circumstances—giving my own story, as it were, mingled with hers—I make no apologies. I may call myself her editor, but that is not what I was.

  There are things I’m trying to understand while there is still time. She might be gone, but I am still here. I still have my feelings. I still want to know—sometimes I think I do know—who she really was, and what, in the end, we were together.

  PETER HORVATH

  Princeton, NJ

  April 2015

  THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA

  1967

  23 April

  Locust Valley, New York

  3:40 A.M.

  My father would have had me killed for what I’ve done. And then he never would have given me another thought.

  People believe that because my mother died how and when she did, and because my father became what he became, that he alone must be the mountain in my life—the immovable object that I can neither climb nor see around.

  Why I have made this choice to abandon my two children and my home to wake in this foreign darkness, in this strange country, in a stranger’s strange house.

  But people are wrong. They will always be wrong. My father is not the mountain.

  My father is the shadow on the mountain that keeps me from seeing the mountain.

  The mountain is my mother.

  * * *

  —

  Instead of actual memories I’m left only with impressions, stolen from photographs or the odd letter, of a strong dark-haired young woman with a wide oval face, full mouth, and the saddest eyes I have ever seen. When she was angry or disappointed, it could be as if a translucent shutter had slid down over those eyes, a shutter not from outside but from within her; I remember feeling a terrible cold distance where I wished she had been. I remember her voice saying to my brother Vasily and me, The more time you have, the lazier you are. I remember her rapping my knuckles raw one day when she discovered that I’d cut up her new tablecloth with a pair of shears. I remember almost never being with her, yet sensing her firm committed presence everywhere I turned, an omnipresent shadow that I could see but not hold. I remember the scent of her French perfume—which my father hated, since it was a luxury, and which she wore anyway, fiercely protective of this one personal indulgence—still lingering on my pillow the mornings after those very rare nights when she would stay with me and stroke my head as I fell asleep.

  Nadezhda Alliluyeva met Josef Stalin when he was twenty-five and she was a toddler of two; he was a family friend, so the story went, and saved little Nadya from drowning. She wouldn’t see him again until she was sixteen; by then she was at least as devout a Communist as he was, as well as beautiful and fearless. And he was a hero to many. Yes, in those days of Civil War following the Bolshevik victory, when the fate of the Great Revolution was still uncertain, my father was in the throes of establishing himself as Lenin’s Man of Steel. He asked Nadya to accompany him to Tsaritsyn (soon to be Stalingrad) as his personal secretary, an offer she accepted without hesitation, since she was probably already in love with him.

  Two ye
ars later, in the thick of the growing cult of violence of which my father was the unquestioned conductor, they were married.

  I was six months old when she first tried to leave him. This was in 1926, and her disillusionment over what he was then becoming must have been profound. She and my nurse packed up five-year-old Vasily and me and piled us all onto a train to Leningrad, where we moved in with my grandparents. We would start new lives, free of his tyranny! Yet several days later, when my father telephoned, beside himself, enraged, beseeching, threatening to come fetch us himself, my mother quickly relented, all the while insisting that we would return by ourselves, without his bloody help, so as to save the cost to the State.

  * * *

  —

  Until I was sixteen, I was led to believe that her sudden death on the night of 8 November 1932, was caused by a ruptured appendix. I was not alone: the entire nation believed this.

  Then one day, ten years after the fact, I happened across an article in a British magazine that referred to my mother’s death as a suicide. Joseph Stalin’s second wife, I read, had shot herself in the heart in her bedroom, where she had gone after my father publicly humiliated her at a state dinner. And this had always been known by certain people in my father’s inner circle, it was reported, including my dear nurse, Alexandra Andreevna, who had raised me from the moment I was born.

  I went straight to my nurse and demanded that she tell me everything she knew about my mother’s death. Weeping from shame and grief, Alexandra Andreevna did as I asked. And so I learned not only that the magazine article was true but that my mother had left behind a suicide note for my father in which she called him a monster and a murderer. Those had been her exact words. She had cursed him and declared that she would never forgive him for destroying the soul of the Party and, with it, her hope for a better world for her and her children. Then she had shot herself and left her dead body for him to find.

  * * *

  —

  I am playing outside by myself one morning when my nurse approaches, kisses my forehead, says, Come, we must put on different clothes now. And in these different clothes I am driven in a state car to an official building in Moscow, a large hall with a ceiling like a reaper’s blade overhead, where many adults, some of them acquaintances and relatives I recognize, stand in hushed black poses. I am taken by the hand, led through ghoulish, whispering silhouettes to a long black box the length and width of a grown-up person. The box has a carved lid on hinges, propped open. I see blood-red silk, unfamiliar clothing, and my mother’s ghost-white face—

  I step back and begin to scream.

  Returning with my nurse to Zubalovo (our dacha in Usovo, less than thirty kilometers outside Moscow, which all my life had been the happiest of places), I discovered that my father had ordered the tree house that Mother designed for Vasily and me in the woods by the playground dismantled. The playground itself was gone too, nothing left but a patch of sand on the ground to suggest it ever existed.

  Within weeks men in Party work clothes were completely rebuilding parts of the house, painting and reconfiguring, one by one stripping the rooms she’d inhabited of their memories. It was all state property now, maintained at government expense; and the people who worked in our households were all employees of the secret police.

  The systematic process of my mother’s erasure had begun.

  It was the same in Moscow, where my father exchanged our former apartment for a new one on the first floor of the Senate building in the Kremlin. Not a true residence but a cold formal office structure posing as a dwelling for warm-blooded humans, the walls so thick that small voices attempting to reach from one room to the next often died before arriving. Other than a single large photograph of my mother in the dining room, the only mementos of her that remained were relegated to my bedroom. I spent much of my time reading and drawing in the company of these silent friends, while my nurse did her sewing in her room next door. My schoolwork I did at the dining table under the lonely gaze of the woman whose living face was already becoming, to my confused recollection, a kind of shade of itself.

  Beneath that same heartbroken stare my father and his regular group of wine-swilling underlings dined most evenings, the meals always beginning at six or seven and lasting till midnight. At which point without fail the vozhd was driven—in one of three cars whose routes changed nightly for security reasons—to the new dacha he was having built, just for himself, in Kuntsevo, twenty minutes away.

  But merely a new residence could never be enough for a man seeking to dig the deepest possible moat between himself and the past. What was required was a house cleansed of all personal history. To this end he would have Kuntsevo rebuilt every summer for the rest of his life, keeping only one constant: the single large room on the ground level where he lived and worked. The dining table heaped with books, newspapers, documents was long enough to fit the entire Politburo, with a small clearing at one end for eating when alone. The large sofa doubled as his bed, with telephones on either side. The china cabinet was always stuffed with his various medications, which he insisted on picking out himself every morning and evening, because there was no doctor in all of Russia he believed he could trust…

  This was the room in which—perhaps he already knew—one day he would die.

  * * *

  —

  My father lived apart from us. That was his choice. By now in his fifties, his working hours increasingly strange and relentless. He could be remote, issuing detailed written instructions to his faithful bodyguard, Vlasik, on how not to spoil me.

  But he was not invisible. Sundays when the weather was good he would still come to Zubalovo. On his shoulders he would carry me off the walking paths, away from the shrouded yes-men who followed everywhere, and into the forest of tall ghostly birch trees that he preferred to most human company. Hidden there like two castaways, we would sit on the leaves and enjoy a picnic lunch together.

  At such times I noticed a change in him: his shoulders relaxed; his smile came more freely. Of course, I had known him to laugh once in a while when dining with his coterie of ministers—he was not without a sense of humor of his own kind, I suppose. But even as a little girl I would notice a jagged edge buried just beneath the surface of his public laughter, and how the sound of it put all those men in his presence on edge too. Alone with me, however, he seemed free of any need to prove or challenge, and consequently our infrequent visits together in those early years after my mother’s death always seemed to pass more quickly than I wanted.

  He still called me his Housekeeper then.

  And how is my Housekeeper? Is Housekeeper getting enough sleep and minding her nurse? Housekeeper, would you agree to pass your poor papa another piece of that good brown bread? Your poor tired papa is very hungry today, practically starving, don’t you see? Because he doesn’t have his little Housekeeper to take care of him nearly enough.

  * * *

  —

  Then he might be gone again for long stretches, sometimes whole summers, during which we communicated only by letter:

  Hello, Little Sparrow Hostess!

  I’m sending you pomegranates, tangerines, and some candied fruit. Eat and enjoy them! I report to you, Comrade Hostess, that I was in Tiflis for one day. I was at my mother’s and I gave her regards from you. She gives you a big kiss. Well, that’s all right now. I give you a kiss.

  From Svetanka-Sparrow-Hostess’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin.

  Hello, my dear Papochka,

  How do you live and how is your health? I arrived well except that my nanny got really sick on the road. But everything is well now. Papochka, don’t miss me but get some rest and I will try to study excellently for your happiness.

  Your Svetanka

  He created an imaginary friend for me named Lyolka. Or at least he insisted that she was my friend. Why wouldn’t she be? Ly
olka was perfect in every way. She was always doing the most extraordinary things—things, my father advised, that I would do well to imitate.

  Once he added a little drawing of my doppelgänger, saying it was amazing how alike we were. The girl in the drawing had braids and a snub nose and a large smiling mouth and freckles. She looked nothing like me.

  Lyolka became my secret enemy.

  To My Hostess Svetanka:

  You don’t write to your little papa. I think you’ve forgotten him. How is your health? You’re not sick, are you? What are you up to? Have you seen Lyolka? How are your dolls? I thought I’d be getting an order from you soon, but no. Too bad. You’re hurting your little papa’s feelings. Never mind. I kiss you. I am waiting to hear from you.

  Little Papa

  * * *

  —

  It is summer. Another letter: an invitation, finally, to join him in Sochi for a couple of weeks. Will Lyolka be there?

  * * *

  —

  Down by the barnacled rocks where the Black Sea never stops pounding, Papa plucks a sea urchin out of a tidal pool and turns it over to show me its gummy, feminine mouth. He says to be careful of the sharp spines but not to fear them. Remember, Little Sparrow, he instructs me, there is always a part of every creature that Nature fails to protect. To show what he means, hardly moving his arm, he grinds his thumb into the soft exposed flesh with such pressure that it breaches the glistening buttery muscle and, with a sickening crack, splits the spined shell on the other side.

  Papa, you’re bleeding! I cry out.

  He drops the ruined creature on the rocks, crushing and smearing it under his boot. Sucking blood from his fingers, he turns and walks away, knowing I will follow.