Svetlana Returns to Her "Prison"

By Patricia Blake

Seventeen years ago, Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva took a taxi in New Delhi to the U.S. embassy, where she asked American officials for asylum. The Soviets had allowed her to visit India in order to take home the ashes of her common-law husband, who had died of a respiratory disease. After asylum was granted, she flew to New York, where she greeted reporters at the airport with "Hello there, everybody." She explained her electrifying defection by declaring that in the U.S. she would seek "the self-expression that has been denied me so long in Russia."

Last week word came that Svetlana, now 58, had ended her long flirtation with the West and returned to the Soviet Union. On Oct. 23, utterly unnoticed by the world, she and her American-born daughter Olga Peters, 13, boarded an Aeroflot flight in London bound for Moscow. Once she was back in her homeland, the Soviet press agency TASS announced that the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had granted Svetlana's request that her citizenship be restored and that Soviet citizenship be granted to Olga. Both had been American citizens.

Though Kremlin leaders no doubt welcomed the return of the dictator's daughter as a propaganda victory, there would be no dancing in Red Square. Since her 1967 defection, Svetlana had frequently denounced the Soviet regime in books and interviews. She called the Bolshevik revolution a tragedy for Russia and characterized Stalin as "a moral and spiritual monster." Repudiating her Soviet citizenship, she ritually burned her passport.

Her worst nightmare, she declared, was of returning to the Soviet Union. "When I now see Moscow in my dreams, I wake up in horror," she wrote. "It's as if one were dreaming of a prison from which one had escaped." She vowed, "I shall never return to that prison." For their part, the Soviets branded her a "morally unstable person" who had betrayed her country and abandoned her two children. She was stripped of her Soviet citizenship in 1969.

Friends of Svetlana's expressed surprise and concern at her redefection. She had moved from Princeton, N.J., to Cambridge, England, two years ago, had placed Olga in a boarding school and bought an apartment in the university town. Said her former Cambridge landlord, Professor Donald Denman: "I cannot believe she has asked for Russian citizenship or is requiring her daughter to give up her American citizenship." Olga, a bright and popular girl who speaks no Russian, was unhappy in Britain. "She was pining for the U.S.," said Denman. "I don't know how she will manage in Russia."

Writer Malcolm Muggeridge, who worked with Svetlana on a BBC film about her life, called her return hazardous. She has taken "a very big chance" and will be "quite defenseless," he said. "I feel deeply sorry for her." Most shocked was Svetlana's former husband and Olga's father, U.S. Architect William Wesley Peters, 72, whom she married in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 1970 and divorced in 1973. He is extremely worried about Olga's future. "Her mother was lonely and distraught. She may have left for the U.S.S.R. impulsively, or possibly under constraint," he said.

Still, there had long been signs of distress in Svetlana's life. Given to bouts of depression and heavy drinking, she had become increasingly reclusive and angry at the world. She told interviewers that she regarded the U.S. and the Soviet Union as equal menaces to world peace. In the U.S., she said, she felt she had moved "from one cage to another." She complained that she had not met the "kind of intellectual, highly educated people" who had been her friends in Moscow.

Worst of all she was tortured by longing for the children she had left behind, Joseph, now 38, and Yekaterina, 32.

Last March she told a British journalist, "I don't believe in regretting my fate, but it is sometimes very hard. I have not seen my son and daughter for 17 years, and I have a grandson and granddaughter whom I have never seen." Svetlana's telling final cry: "Sometimes it's an almost superhuman effort not to drop everything and to run and get a ticket to go and see them. Sometimes I don't care what the regime is. I just want to see my grandchildren."

--By Patricia Blake. Reported by Bonnie Angelo and Mary Cronin/ London

With reporting by Bonnie Angelo, Mary Cronin/London