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Perhaps unwittingly, Joseph kept his mother on the line for nine months, playing with her much as an angler does when hauling in a fighting fish. Judging from what Svetlana told acquaintances in Cambridge and London, she was reeled in stage by stage. First, just before Christmas 1983, a phone call came from Joseph in Moscow. As the excited Svetlana related it, she had scarcely heard from either of her children in the Soviet Union for 17 years. Joseph, now 38 and a physician, and Katya, 33 and a scientist, had been forbidden to communicate with their mother since her defection. The presents she sent them had come back marked REFUSED. Only an occasional card or telephone call had circumvented the ban. After Christmas 1983, though, Joseph called her regularly, and she could phone him.
Next Joseph told his mother, "It's time we got together." He said that he thought he would be allowed to meet her in Finland. Once the possibility of a reunion became fixed in Svetlana's mind, it could not be dislodged. For this desperate woman, seeing Joseph appeared to herald a new beginning. Joseph then told Svetlana that he had not been granted permission after all to travel to Finland. Svetlana was shattered. Some time in July he raised her hopes again by saying he might be able to come to Cambridge before Christmas, but in August she was told that he had fallen seriously ill and was in a Moscow hospital. She later said that this news was the turning point. On Sept. 10, 1984, she went to the Soviet embassy in London and asked to return. Apparently the authorities promised that Soviet citizenship would be restored to her and granted to Olga, as was later done.
Svetlana did not immediately tell Olga that she was going to take her to the Soviet Union. Instead, she attempted to cut the child's lifeline to the U.S.--perhaps her cruelest act. Wildly misconstruing a letter from Margedant Hayakawa, Svetlana sought to convince Olga that her aunt no longer cared for her. Olga then signed a typed letter that said she would stop writing to all members of the Peters family. At least one line of the letter sounded more like Svetlana than Olga: "All right, kill me, send me a letter bomb if you like." Says Olga's distraught father: "I can't believe Olga actually wrote that letter. She must know Marge and I love her and that we'd do anything for her."
On Oct. 19, 1984, when Olga came to Cambridge for a short vacation, Svetlana sprang the news that they were leaving for the Soviet Union. Whether she said they were going for a visit or for good is not known. What is certain is that Olga did not want to go. The Mansfields heard the yelling in the flat below. At first they thought it was another one of Svetlana's tirades. Then they realized it was Olga who was shouting. "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you consult with me?" Two days later mother and daughter were in Moscow. Said Svetlana's old friend Labedz when he heard the news: "She has gone back to her fatherland, or her father--to her they're the same."