(6 of 8)
Increasingly during her last year in the West, Svetlana suffered from bouts of depression. She was haunted by her mother's suicide; as a child, she had evidently perceived it as a punishment. "My mother shot herself on the night of Nov. 8/9," she wrote to a friend in Britain, "and as the time comes close to that date, I begin to feel utterly bad and angry at the world." She spoke of conspiracies against her, much as Stalin had done in his time. "Something is around me, a 'bad aura,' fears, gossip, talk, two governments plotting to get rid of me simultaneously," she complained in the same letter. She stunned an elderly Russian woman, an emigre, by writing to her, "You are a KGB agent. You are a double and triple agent." As Svetlana well knew, it was the kind of denunciation that was made against tens of thousands of innocent people during Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s. Says the recipient of the letter: "She would have executed me had she possessed the power."
Though Svetlana was manifestly troubled, there was little to indicate that she might be tempted to return to the Soviet Union. Her loathing for the regime was undiminished. In 1984, she published in India a sharply anti-Soviet volume of memoirs titled The Faraway Music. "Svetlana's hatred for Soviet Russia was in her bones," says a Russian emigre who knew her well. "If she heard Russian spoken by someone who had been brought up in the U.S.S.R., she would become enraged." Svetlana said on the BBC, "Only when I came to America and heard all the emigres, then I heard real, good, beautiful Russian." She was adamant that Olga should never learn a word of the language.
Svetlana's politics lay on the far right. She declared the conservative National Review to be her favorite publication and sent Editor William F. Buckley a $500 donation in 1981. Last August Donald Denman, a retired Cambridge University professor, invited her to visit the House of Commons to see British democracy at work. As they strolled through Westminster, Denman offered to introduce Svetlana to some Members of Parliament. A look of horror passed over her face. "I don't want to meet any Socialists," she said. "Only Tories!"
Still, one significant change had taken place in her. Sovietologist Leopold Labedz, who met her in 1968, first noticed it in 1981: "She was getting soft on papochka." Once she had acknowledged Stalin's personal responsibility for the death of millions; now she called him a prisoner of Communist ideology. Her new book contained hardly any criticism of her father. She probably felt she had betrayed him. "My father would have shot me for what I have done," she often said during her final year in Britain.
Meanwhile, a partial rehabilitation of Stalin was under way in the Soviet Union as the country prepared to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. For the first time since 1956, Stalin was being praised as a strategic genius and a superb wartime commander in chief. Says Stalin Biographer Robert C. Tucker: "The Soviet authorities evidently thought it was a good time for Stalin's daughter to come home." No doubt they were aware of her emotional turmoil. Anticipating that an official emissary from Moscow would be rebuffed by Svetlana, they apparently decided to use her son Joseph, Stalin's namesake, as their intermediary.