Coming Home

Two American television crews were lying in wait outside the exclusive Sovietskaya Hotel last week, when the frumpy woman in fur hat and buttoned-up coat appeared in the company of a burly escort. Since Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, 58, returned to Moscow last month after 17 years in exile in the West, she has been playing hide-and-seek with Western reporters. She reacted in anger to the latest ambush. "I am not going to talk to you, not one word," she snapped. "You have no right. You are uncivilized people. You are savages." When asked about Olga Peters, her 13-year-old American-born daughter, she responded with a string of obscenities.

Last Friday, Svetlana abruptly paid the price of her return ticket to the U.S.S.R. when she appeared before 25 Soviet and Western journalists at the Moscow headquarters of the Committee of Soviet Women. Reading from a prepared text, she said that she had returned to Moscow of her own free will. "I could no longer stand this family separation," she explained, referring to the two children by former marriages, Josef Morozov, now 38, and Yekaterina Zhdanova, 32, she had left behind in Moscow. She said she had been naive about life in the U.S. and had be come a "favorite pet" of the CIA. Said Svetlana: "Having found myself in the so-called free world, I was not free for a single day."

At the request of Svetlana's former husband, American Architect William Wesley Peters, the U.S. embassy in Moscow has pressed the Soviets for assurances that the couple's daughter Olga willingly went to Moscow with her mother. Svetlana dismissed the inquiry, noting that "as long as she is a schoolgirl, she will act according to my wishes." Olga speaks no Russian, and reportedly her mother wants to enroll her in a special English-language school.

Two other Soviet defectors decided to return home last week. Igor Rykhov, 22, and Oleg Khlan, 21, who had deserted from their military unit in Afghani stan and found their way to Britain, turned themselves in to the Soviet embassy in London, and two days later were back in Moscow. British officials said that they had grown home sick after receiving letters from their families.