LITMIR.BIZ

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that she not involve herself in politics in any way. And that was unacceptable to her. “To remain silent for another forty years could have been achieved just as well in the U.S.S.R.,” she writes. She wanted to explain, to one and all, “why I was cutting myself off forever from the Communist world.” On April 21, six weeks after she entered the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, she landed at Kennedy Airport in New York. Upon bounding down the steps from her plane, she said, “Hello! I’m happy to be here!”

      But wait a second: Didn’t she have two children back in the Soviet Union? She did. This weighed on her mind before she went to the embassy, and it would weigh on her for many years afterward. As on other subjects, she said different things at different times. Often, she reasoned (or rationalized) as follows: Josef was 21, and married. Katya was 16, and more or less grown up. They could take care of each other, and their fathers loved them. I had done all I could for them. They did not need me in order to succeed. At other times, she thought she had committed a “sin” against her children.

      There in the embassy—the American embassy in Delhi—she had written a statement about her life and intentions. It ended with these lines: “My children are in Moscow and I do understand that now I might not see them for years. But I know they will understand me. . . . Let God help them. I know they will not reject me and one day we shall meet—I will wait for that.”

      When she arrived in New York, she said, “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia.” And she had not come empty-handed. She carried a manuscript: Twenty Letters to a Friend, which she had composed in the summer of 1963. She wrote the book at great speed: in just 35 days. It is all about her life, an outpouring of memories and thoughts, a testament. “The free letter form,” she writes in an author’s note, “enabled me to be completely candid.” Published in America, the book became a bestseller.

      Authorities in the Soviet Union were not pleased with “the defector Alliluyeva,” as the state media had it. Kosygin came to the United States in June 1967—two months after Svetlana’s arrival—for the Glassboro Summit in New Jersey (with President Lyndon Johnson). He found time to denounce the defector to the worldwide press: “Alliluyeva is a morally unstable person and she’s a sick person and we can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aim or for any aim of discrediting the Soviet state.” Kosygin must have kicked himself for letting Stalin’s daughter out to spread those ashes—the ashes of the man whom he had forbidden her to marry.

      Night and day, the Soviet propaganda machine worked against Svetlana. Stung, fuming, she held a little ceremony at a charcoal grill. She announced to those present, “I am burning my Soviet passport in answer to lies and calumny.” When the passport had been reduced to ashes, she took those ashes and blew on them. Away they went on the wind.

      In 1969, she had another memoir published, Only One Year. This memoir, she wrote in America. Its title was not a good one, as she would admit in her third memoir. The title had worked better as she had conceived it in Russian. What the author meant was, “Look what has happened to me, in just one year!” In any case, the second memoir was a bestseller, like the first. It covered the tumultuously eventful year she had from the time she left the Soviet Union. Its dedication: “To all new friends, to whom I owe my life in freedom.”

      During that first year outside the Soviet Union, she talked on the phone with a Russian who had been in America for a long time: Alexander Kerensky, the prime minister whom the Bolsheviks overthrew exactly 50 years earlier, in 1917. He had read Twenty Letters and liked it. In due course, Svetlana became a U.S. citizen and registered with the Republican Party. Her favorite magazine was National Review, she said—the conservative, anti-Communist journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. She donated $500 to the magazine.

      A very strange episode, in a life of very strange episodes, took place in the first few years of the 1970s. The widow of Frank Lloyd Wright, the great architect, repeatedly invited Svetlana to visit her at Taliesin West, near Scottsdale, Arizona. I will have to take a little time to explain Taliesin West. Mrs. Wright will take some explaining, too.

      There are two Taliesins: the one near Scottsdale and one near Spring Green, Wisconsin. At these places, the architect established his home and studio and school. Wisconsin was for the summer, and Arizona was for the winter, generally speaking. Also, Taliesin (at either location) was a commune, or “fellowship.” After the architect’s death, his widow, Olgivanna, became the mistress of Taliesin.

      Once, she had a daughter named Svetlana. In the 1940s, this Svetlana was a young mother, and pregnant with another child. She was killed in a car crash. Her two-year-old son was killed along with her. Many years later, Mrs. Wright began reading and hearing about a new Svetlana—the famous one, who had defected from Russia. She felt a connection to her. And, as I’ve mentioned, she repeatedly invited her to come visit her in Arizona. Intrigued, Svetlana finally accepted.

      Mrs. Wright was keen for her to meet Wesley Peters, the senior apprentice to her late husband. He was also her son-in-law—the widower of the late Svetlana, and the father of those children. Peters still lived in the Taliesin fellowship, as he always would. Svetlana Alliluyeva was immediately drawn to him. He had “an Abraham Lincoln face,” she writes, meaning that it was dignified, sad, and kind. (This portrait comes from Svetlana’s aforementioned third memoir.) Mrs. Wright had been hoping she would have a special liking for Peters. She did. They were married three weeks after her arrival in Arizona. Mrs. Wright was introducing her as “my daughter Svetlana.”

      Stalin’s daughter now styled herself “Lana Peters.” In 1971, the year after they were married, she and Wes had a baby, Olga. Svetlana was 45 years old; she had had her first child, Josef, at 19.

      Initially, Svetlana enjoyed her life with Wes Peters. But she soon disliked life in the fellowship, a “queer institution,” she writes. Mrs. Wright ran it autocratically. And Wes had no desire to buck her. Svetlana found Taliesin stultifying and oppressive. It reminded her of a previous life: “After my first three blessed years of American freedom of choice, informality and friendliness, I felt as though I were back in my forbidding Soviet Russia.” In addition, the marriage was costing her a lot of money—money she had earned from her books. She paid off her husband’s sizable debts, and was happy to do so. But the fellowship wanted money, too: more than she was willing to pay.

      Wes cooled on her, according to her account. She was in a state of dismay over her marriage. “He married me because of my name; if I were Nina or Mary he would never have looked at me.” They separated when Olga was still a baby, and in short order divorced.

      “I seemed to be re-living the strange disastrous pattern of my Russian life,” Svetlana writes. In other words, she was bringing up a small child after a divorce. This child would be an all-American girl, Svetlana determined. She would not teach Olga any Russian. And the past would be a foreign country, for as long as possible. In 2012, Olga gave an interview, with an arresting detail: She had always thought of her grandfather Stalin as one of the three men in the historic photographs, taken at Yalta—one of the mighty triumvirate, along with Churchill and Roosevelt. These were the men who beat the Nazis and won World War II. What granddaughter wouldn’t be proud of that? But one day her mother sat her down and explained about Stalin’s monstrous crimes. That must have been an awful conversation.

      Svetlana was restless, moving from place to place. She would do this to the end of her days. She was also a seeker, trying or borrowing from many religions. Among these religions were Hinduism, Catholicism, Quakerism, and Christian Science. (She credits the last of these with freeing her from alcoholism, to which she had been succumbing. Her problem especially alarmed her in view of her brother Vasily’s death, and life.)

      In 1982, she moved, with Olga, to England. Two years later, she came out with her third memoir, The Faraway Music. She got the title from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. Many people know the line about the different drummer: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” But the next words are these: “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” In her foreword, Svetlana says, “I have always managed to hear a different drummer.” Never, she

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