In the spring of 1967, a young New York lawyer named Alan U. Schwartz traveled to Switzerland under CIA cover to meet a Russian woman and escort her secretly into the United States. The woman, Svetlana Alliluyeva, was the only daughter and surviving child of Joseph Stalin, ruler of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953 and unquestionably among the most lethal, ruthless, and monstrous dictators the world has ever known. The young lawyer was my father.
On the wall of our house while I was growing up was a photograph of him standing beside Svetlana on the tarmac of John F. Kennedy Airport facing a forest of microphones. Svetlana spent most of that August (when I was two) with my family—the first of numerous such visits over the next several years. Then, after this relatively brief period, she fell out of our lives and my thoughts until the day in late November 2011 when I read about her death—and her haunted, nomadic, improbable life—on the front page of The New York Times. All of which is to say that, though the character of Peter Horvath could not be more different from my father in countless ways, and—for the record—my father and Svetlana never to any degree fell in love or had an affair, the roots of my interest in this story date back to my childhood.
My father could not have been more generous to me in my years of research. He opened his expansive “Svetlana” file to me, which included fascinating original material not only from her first few years in America, when he was her legal representative, friend, and trusted adviser but from the decades afterward, when occasionally she would write to him in her stridently emotional and (as she aged) increasingly aggrieved English about various problems of her life and heart. And he patiently answered my questions about his involvement in her defection and in her first turbulent, dislocating years in America. It was with no small amount of surprise that I learned, for example, that he had been Svetlana’s only representative at her sudden marriage to Frank Lloyd Wright’s son-in-law in 1970; had, in fact, given away the bride.
My love and thanks to my father, then, for his help with this book that has meant so much to me. The fact that he did so while harboring some understandable ambivalence about my literary project—a nagging feeling (perhaps not uncommon among the close relatives and friends of novelists) that I might be leaving colonizing footprints on aspects of his own personal narrative—only increases my sense of gratitude and admiration for his assistance.
Twenty Letters to a Friend—the manuscript that Svetlana Alliluyeva carried with her during her defection, and that was first published, in English, in 1967—was not her only memoir, but it was certainly her best. One can question the author’s perceptions about her life, times, and especially about her murderous father, with whom by most accounts she shared a loving and tender relationship until she was sixteen, but the book as a whole still rings true at its emotional core and in its very Russian expressiveness. Twenty Letters, however, takes Svetlana only up to 1963; it gives no hint of the seismic break with her past that she would enact only a few short years later. Her second memoir, Only One Year, published in 1968, was intended for that purpose. Yet where the first book was written in unhurried privacy in her home country, surrounded by her children and her living memories, the second book too often shows the stress cracks of rushed ruminations and the unsettled, confusing environment of American semi-celebrity in which she now found herself. Her final attempt at memoir, The Faraway Music, written in English not long before her disastrous decision to re-defect to the Soviet Union in 1982, and never published anywhere but in India, stands mostly as a long, fractious letter of disenchantment with the West at a particularly unhappy time in her life.
In addition to these three books, no current bibliography about Svetlana would be complete without Rosemary Sullivan’s very good 2015 biography, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Ms. Sullivan’s exhaustive research, smart use of primary sources, and the overall empathy she displayed toward her challenging subject’s contradictory nature and emotionally irreconcilable personal history all acted as a nurturing tributary to my own endeavor, while at the same time underscoring for me the fundamental differences between my novelistic intentions and those of a historian or biographer.
With such differences in mind, I think it bears repeating that The Red Daughter is a work of fiction. Its portrayals—from Svetlana and Peter Horvath on down—are products of my imagination. Within this fictional frame, however, I have in certain places used actual letters, or parts of them, between Svetlana and her parents and children; certain news items that were published at the time; and a section of the actual psychological profile of Svetlana done by the CIA at the American Embassy in Delhi in the days following her initial defection. The “private journals of Svetlana Alliluyeva 1967–2011” depicted in these pages are my own invention—to my knowledge, there were no such journals—as is the voice in which they are written.
There were other works too, to varying degrees and in various ways, which helped light my passage through the years of research: Simon Sebag Montefiore’s pair of vivid histories, Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar; Wendell Steavenson’s evocative and perspicacious book about her time living in Georgia, Stories I Stole; Harold Zellman and Roger Friedland’s tell-all account, The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship; Priscilla J. Henken’s far quieter Taliesin Diary: A Year with Frank Lloyd Wright; Adam Hochschild’s The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin; Francis Spufford’s historical novel Red Plenty; the great Belarussian investigative journalist and nonfiction prose writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets; and Nicholas Thompson’s March 2014 New Yorker article, “My Friend, Stalin’s Daughter.”
My thanks to all, and many more. One writes alone but never in a vacuum: my wife, Aleksandra, and son, Garrick (and my dog, Griffin, too) are my constant guarantors of this truth, for which I am forever grateful. Onward, with love.
J.B.S.
Brooklyn, New York