Svetlana in Wonderland

Dhiren Bhagat

In 1967, when she defected to the West, Svetlana Allilueva was in New Delhi, a guest of Raja Dinesh Singh, a minister of state who had his eye on the Foreign Minister's job. He was close to Mrs Gan- dhi, Mrs Gandhi was getting closer and closer to the Russians and the Russians did not want a controversial defection to spoil the celebrations they had been plan- ning to mark the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. So Svetlana was naturally suspicious when the solicitous host tried to sound her out. 'I don't think the Americans could help you,' he said. And then, referring to the manuscript of her book Twenty Letters to a Friend: 'Of course, they would publish your book, make a movie out of it. You would become a sort of movie star. But all that hullabaloo is not for you. As far as I know, all you want is a quiet life, with no reporters and TV cameras."Yes, yes,' she hurriedly agreed. 'That's not for me.'

This account appeared in her second book, Only One Year (1969), and at that time she did not appear to award Dinesh

Singh any marks for judgment. I reminded her of the incident. 'He was perfectly right. He was a well-travelled man, he had been to America before he said that. I had not been anywhere. You must understand, I belonged to that generation of Russians who never travelled. And when you sit 40 years in the same town where you were born, you certainly idealise everything. I came to America with big eyes, you know, I liked everything and I thought, people are smiling.'

Earlier this year Svetlana published an account of her adventures in America in her third book, The Faraway Music (Lan- cer Books, Delhi). It was this book that took me to her. The editor of an Indian magazine wanted me to interview her about the book; I spoke to her on the telephone and eventually on 16 October met her in her little Cambridge flat, where we spoke for two hours.

Why didn't she publish the book in the West? 'Publishers don't want to publish it. They want me to rewrite everything. English publishers and American pub- lishers, they want me to write something else. They want me to write about the Kremlin and all that again, and about my father again. They are telling me what to write. Well, I cannot do that way.' Even the publisher she found in India did not prove very satisfactory. And she says that every story about the book in the Indian press was misleading.

Svetlana has always had a curious rela- tionship with publicity. She is a private person who for the past 17 years has lived in the public eye. 'I do not want any more television interviews, or interviews of any kind,' she had written in 1969. 'The best way of conversing with the public — and the way that suits me best — is being a writer.' And yet only weeks before that book was released she was on television again, on Meet the Press with Larry Spivak, doing what was required to flog the book, sustaining interest in its celebrity author.

'Every writer has to do publicity,' she said to me, reflecting on those days, 'but not to such an extent. That was handled by the lawyers, the agents and all those people.' The story of her lawyers is the most intriguing one. Soon after she put herself in the hands of the Americans in New Delhi she was flown to Rome, and then Switzerland. Then the Americans seem to have changed their minds. Perhaps the Russians had got in touch with the State Department by then and asked them to play down her 'defection', perhaps it was because of the militant Birchers who had begun to protest, saying they did not want Stalin's daughter to set foot on

American soil. Funk set in and the State Department decided. she should stay in Switzerland for a few months before theY could let her in on a six-month 'tourist' visa. The only condition the Swiss insisted on was: no interviews. While she was in Switzerland the State Department men- tioned her book to a reputable firm of New York lawyers who specialised in literary work, Greenbaum, Wolff and Ernest. Eddie Greenbaum flew down to Switzer- land to meet her. It was a strange confer' ence they had. 'He was barking out sonic words, swallowing others, and he was also very deaf. Since I cannot speak loudly ours was a most unfortunate communica- tion. . . I did not understand half of what he said; he never heard what I tried to ask.' The difficulties were not just aural. The English she had learnt in Moscow was wholly unlike the English Eddie 'the General' Greenbaum spoke. He was tallc; ing money and contracts. He then adviser' her of the necessity of making a wilt, a suggestion that struck her as being rather, gloomy. The next day, in the presence o' five lawyers she signed four documents the General had drawn up. There were two powers of attorney, a will and an assign" ment of rights, the last piece of paper being a contract by which she sold all her rights le her forthcoming book (Twenty Letters lo a Friend) for $1.5 million to a corporation called Copex, registered in Lichtenstein, presumably to beat the US tax laws. An attaché case filled with dollars was shown to her, and then taken away. (Fle„r lawyers later put the amount in trus" created for her, of which they were the trustees.) 'Is that advance money from the publishers?' she asked. There was a Pause; then a Swiss lawyer laughed. 'Well, Yt)" may consider it to be so.' What is disturb-, ing about this episode is the question cn how much Copex eventually made /Nal her book. If the figure was not much incite than what they paid for the book, her, lawyers gave her a good deal, a tax sheitel at a reasonable price. B'ut if Copex made° whopping profit it would appear to be 3 case of a rather ignoble conflict of interest' Did she have any idea how much Coll raked in? 'I don't know. I don't know. If were more a business type I would as: them: "Tell me now how much my 1)0,07 has made and tell me this minute." Web, don't talk to people like this. It is not irlY, style. I assume a substantial amount 0' money was made.' Whether they made a lot or little, tile, way things stood the lawyers had a direei financial interest in the promotion of the, book. Besides, they represented just aboil,i everyone who was concerned. 'New )1°114 Times was their client, Life magazine wa.s their client, Harper and Row was their client. In England it is impossible like that. If they represent me they shouldn't repre- sent all those people. In America, everrt thing happens, you know.' And the-lot go together to make her entry into America the story of the year. 'My entry int° America was absolutely . . . it couldn't be More vulgar. It was like a celebrity thing, and the talk about money all the time. I was doing all those things because I was told to. I was told: "Now we are going to meet such and such people from Channel 13." I couldn't say no, because I thought that is what . . . that is what they do in America.' And then she laughs; but it has taken her years to be able to laugh about it. Almost as soon as she settled in America an organisation called the Celebrities Club put her name on their list. This outfit admits only names of recent prominence, organising vast luxury dinners in cities like New York and Los Angeles where these Chosen people pay to meet each other. The Club must have given up on her finally for She did not attend any of their dinners. 'I wanted to be with intellectuals. My com- plaint is not that I did not get my money but the way I was presented to the public, some kind of wrong image. The public thought: she came to America to have the good life, to make her money, she did it so Why does she complain? I didn't come to have the good life because I always had the good life. I was not a pauper, you see. I wanted to have a car — so what? I had a ear in Russia, it was not some kind of a top of a dream for me. I wanted to live amongst intellectuals. I never got to them. Creative people, intellectuals, shun vul- garity.' Fleeing the publicity in the East Coast and the manipulation by lawyers, Svetlana got herself involved in a disastrous mar- riage. Frank Lloyd Wright's widow, a Georgian, was among the many Americans Who invited Svetlana to their homes. By this time Mrs Wright ran a Gurdjieff- insPired community of architects who claimed to carry on the Wright tradition in Taliesin, Arizona. (Wright, Svetlana feels, would have been appalled by this pseudo- Tibetan mysticism: he was a Unitarian of :Welsh descent.) The architecture was im- itative and soulless. (F.L.W. was a short Man, hence the ceilings in the community quarters were low even though many of the residents were tall and kept bumping their heads.) 'If we were to announce that the Widow of Leo Tolstoy with a group of People continues to write novels like his, everybody would laugh.' Wrightooking back at it Svetlana thinks Mrs w used her, manipulating her to !Ilan), Wes Peters, the architect who inher- ited Frank Lloyd Wright's grey scarf in ,I959 and whose taste ran to blue evening dress and chunky gold rings. 'When I got Married I hoped I could escape now into a quiet life, the privacy of home. . . but they Wanted publicity.' Mrs Wright figured that Publicity might do the business some good the only contracts they seemed to get were from Iranian princesses, in America they had become passe) and so the wedding was duly trumpeted, the couple appearing on a

Chat show.

'Mrs Wright handled the wedding, she _handled the publicity.' What about the _husband, the man who, when their daugh- ter was born, authorised television crews to enter her hospital room? 'Well,' she smiles, 'he enjoyed it. At the time I thought it was inevitable. But this is not so. There are people who live quite decent lives in America.'

But once Svetlana became a victim of publicity she was trapped. In The Faraway Music, I was struck by the way in which she referred to Brajesh Singh (the Indian who in her earlier books is described as her third husband) as her 'intimate friend'. (In her own copy of Only One Year I noticed she had struck out on the first page the expression 'my late husband' and substi- tuted 'Indian friend'.) Was she too trying to rewrite history? `No, he was not my husband. He was my friend.' But why had she called him a husband in the earlier books? 'American press picked it up and everywhere he was described as my hus- band. And when it came to the book and all it became impossible to change.' In an interview with Kosygin she had referred to him as a husband. 'At the word husband an electric current seemed to shoot through the Premier' (Only One Year). Was that the word she had really used? 'Yes, in Russia because marriage is civil many people live together and call themselves husbands and wives, actually they don't bother to go and register. It is part of what I think Revolution has done.' She laughed: 'My parents lived like that and everybody else lives like that. I tried to register our marriage but we were not permitted. So I was making a point to Kosygin. But later

when I lived abroad I found. I . in a free world there is still a lot of influence of the church. Marriage really is marriage.'

Similarly her own name was misspelt in her first two books. Observing that the first two spelt it ALLILUYEVA and that the new one omitted the Y, I asked about the discrepancy. 'Oh that is because of the New York Times.' On the title page of her copy of Only One Year she had struck out the Y. 'Well I told them about it but they wouldn't change it.' Didn't that remind her of the Soviet Union? 'Oh New York Times is worse than the Soviet Union. Because they tell for the rest of the world what they want about you, what the Soviets say is only for there.' I think I understood what she meant.

'I was amazed how little Americans know, even supposedly educated ones, not some kind of illiterate labourers but businessmen and their wives, in Princeton where I live, they all went to colleges. They were educated in the American way and here was I, they were never interested to hear something about different countries, different cultures.' She paused. 'Amer- icans are so isolationist, they are basically isolationist. They like their own life, and their life is quite pleasant — for them- selves. I found it very boring. For them- selves, it is abundant, it is comfortable, it is relaxed — and everything that is out there, they don't want it. With all the freedom they have, what is it for?'

Could she ever go back to America? `No,' she whispered. 'Not in Reagan America. Not only because I don't like it but because the climate is so changed compared with the time I came to Amer- ica.' The political climate? 'The climate everywhere. My daughter would not be not quite welcome in schools. We never felt it ten years ago. But in 1982 when we were planning to come to Europe, even the Catholic nuns were bothered. They were bothered by the fact who she was, her background. They were becoming nervous about it. Here of course in Quaker school they don't pay any attention to that.'

Svetlana landed in England almost by accident. She had meant to migrate to Switzerland in 1982 but the Swiss wouldn't have her (`The Swiss like to import people who are very rich and very old; I was not too old and not rich'). So she came to England. 'I was looking for a quiet peaceful country without atom bombs and these things . . . so we arrived here, we live in East Anglia, and we have all these American airbases here.'

In 1967 while she was in Switzerland, a man called Isaak Don Levine had come over to see her. Since she did not know who he was, she did not see him. Years later they met and he told her why he had come. He

had foreseen that a Democratic administra- tion would like to play down her 'defec- tion' making her journey to America look more like 'tourism'. 'Come to southern California,' he now said to her, 'you will see a great difference. San Diego County is the seat of American conservatism, and you will not find there any Harrison Salisburys and George Kennans. . I am sorry that you missed us, that you missed me. Things could have been different for you, better for the American public and for yourself' (The Faraway Music, p.50).

Later Svetlana did go to Southern Cali- fornia and spent some time in San Diego County. I was intrigued by this. Did she think things would have been different for her had she met Levine in 1967 and not fallen into the hands of the East Coast liberals? She began thinking about it, as if for the first time ever. 'I can tell you. He probably would have managed to whisk me to the West Coast to his Conservative circles. . . .' Her tone now became less certain. 'What will follow? Er. . . . Well, I don't know.' Then she laughed. 'I probably will have another set of lawyers, and . . . I think it will be the same as the East Coast I agree. I agree. So after all, Dinesh Singh was right.'