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In a matter of days after her return, Svetlana had quarreled with Joseph; Katya, who lives in the Soviet Far East, did not come to Moscow to see her mother. When U.S. television cameramen spotted Svetlana looking grim and angry on the streets of the capital, she went out of control, showering them with obscenities in English. Dissatisfied by the cool official welcome she received, she has several times displayed her temper to the Soviet authorities. Olga, who, like her mother, still retains her U.S. citizenship, refused to wear the regulation uniform at a Moscow school. She came to class with a cross hanging around her neck.
Last month the authorities moved Svetlana out of Moscow, in an apparent effort to insulate her from contact with diplomats and other foreigners to whom she might complain. Mother and daughter were dispatched 1,000 miles south to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, not far from Stalin's birthplace. Svetlana was given a modest apartment but no car, dacha or any of the other perquisites that families of the Soviet elite enjoy.
No open arms awaited Svetlana in the U.S.S.R. She must have known that, yet she returned, drawn to a specter she could not elude. "It was as though my father was at the center of a black circle," she wrote in 1963. "Anyone who ventured inside vanished or perished or was destroyed in one way or another." The question is whether, three decades after Stalin's death, the circle will close around his daughter and granddaughter.