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In the decade after Svetlana left Taliesin West, she tried to make a fresh start in several towns in California and New Jersey, only to rebuff the welcome she found. After deciding to break up a friendship with a distinguished intellectual, she wrote to him, "You are deaf, stupid. You are doomed. You are a failure. I pity you. I despise you." In other letters she wished people dead. Of an elderly lady who, Svetlana thought, had crossed her, she wrote, "I hope she will not be with us too long." To British Author Malcolm Muggeridge, a deeply religious man who had been her host during a brief visit to Britain, she wrote, "You are one of these obsessed, demoniac natures who ought to be avoided at all costs."
In her everyday dealings Svetlana behaved more reasonably, frequently disarming new acquaintances with a charm that was undeniably genuine. She touched people by the evident sincerity of her religious belief. "She could be warm, lovely and simple," says Margedant Hayakawa, Wes Peters' sister, who remained a supportive friend.
Svetlana certainly needed friends. When she left her husband, she took with her a new daughter, Olga Margedant Peters, born May 21, 1971. Svetlana, who would be granted U.S. citizenship only in 1978, felt alone in a strange country and seemed particularly vulnerable to the stresses of late motherhood. Having gained custody of Olga by the terms of her 1973 divorce from Peters, she refused to allow the child to visit her father at Taliesin West. Thus thwarted, the busy architect rarely went to see Olga and, though he corresponded with her, remained a more remote figure than Olga's aunt, Margedant. It was "Aunt Marge" who was to provide Olga with her strongest American roots. The child stayed with the Hayakawas in Washington, when her uncle was in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 1981, and visited them in California in 1983.
"Olga is the center of my existence," Svetlana often said. She lavished much warmth on the child, but all too often Svetlana's ungovernable temper got in the way of her loving intentions. Wherever mother and daughter lived in the U.S., people remember, Svetlana frequently struck Olga. When the child was five, an acquaintance in Carlsbad, Calif., recalls, "Olga had been playing next door with a friend, and Mrs. Peters was not particularly happy about it for some reason. When she called her home, Olga came running, fell, skinned her knee and cried. I picked her up to comfort her. But her mother started smacking her on the bottom for falling down." Olga's upbringing was almost a case study of how some parents tend to reenact with their own offspring what they suffered as children. Svetlana's mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, whom Stalin married in 1919, had been a harsh disciplinarian. When Svetlana damaged a tablecloth with scissors, her mother hit her repeatedly on the hands. Nadezhda committed suicide when Svetlana was six, leaving her daughter's discipline to Stalin.