Nearly 18 years ago, Joseph Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West bearing an astonishing message. At a New York City press conference that was televised around the world, and later in two books, the child of one of modern history's most brutal tyrants repudiated her father and Communism, while affirming her faith in God and freedom. Svetlana's defection was more than a propaganda coup for the West: it was a symbolic event in the moral imagination of millions of people. The child of the man who stood accused of having killed more people than Adolf Hitler had escaped with her humanity intact.
Last October Svetlana returned to the Soviet Union, taking her American-born daughter Olga, 13, with her. Once again her action could be seen as symbolic, signifying, perhaps, some basic failure of Western values. She told a press conference in Moscow that she had not known "one single day" of freedom in the West. She declared that she had come back to the Soviet Union to rejoin the two children she had left behind in 1967. But her earlier denunciations of the Bolshevik revolution ("a fatal, tragic mistake"), her father ("a moral and spiritual monster"), the Soviet system ("profoundly corrupt") and the KGB (like "the German Gestapo") suggested that her return may have been a desperate, in a sense almost a suicidal act.
What had gone wrong for Svetlana in the West? Why did she return to the country she had fled in abhorrence? The answers are multifaceted, even contradictory, like Svetlana's personality as it gradually and painfully revealed itself during her sojourn in the West.
Judging from interviews with many people who knew her in the U.S., where she lived from 1967 to 1982, and in Britain, where she spent the past two years, Svetlana was an often charming but restless, unhappy and quarrelsome woman. Her feverish enthusiasm for people and places could quickly turn into disappointment and recrimination, as evidenced by a trail of broken friendships and angry words. In retrospect, it seems clear that her ultimate quarrel was with her father, whom she fatefully resembled. As she once said about the Soviet people, Stalin's "shadow still stands over all of us. It still dictates to us, and we very often obey." The story of Svetlana's life is the chronicle of her losing battle with the specter of her father.
In 1967, when Svetlana arrived in the U.S. following her defection during a visit to India, little of her inner conflict was visible. The face she turned on a mesmerized U.S. public was alight with happiness. A handsome, vibrant woman of 41, with crisp, coppery curls, ruddy cheeks, shy blue eyes and a winning smile, she exuded sweetness and candor. She seemed pleased by her celebrity--and by the $1.5 million she earned from her first book of memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Well-wishers kept the house she rented in Princeton, N.J., filled with flowers. Fan letters, presents, even proposals of marriage arrived. Academic and society people lionized her. Amid such warm attention, she did not appear to worry unduly about her children in Moscow. Joseph, 22, and Yekaterina ("Katya"), 17, were already grown up, she explained. "The life of my children will not be changed."