- 24 Apr 2010 23:36
#13377586
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -town.html
Still running from Stalin: Tyrant's daughter, 84, tells of tragic life escaping his legacy from new home in sleepy U.S. farming town
Towns don’t get much more out of-the-way than Richland Center, Wisconsin, a sleepy little dairy farming community on an arrow-straight road that pierces the rolling green vastness of the American Midwest.
In these days of the all-seeing internet it is damnably difficult to vanish off the face of the earth.
But if you’re seeking oblivion with a few modest creature-comforts then this lonely outpost, where news travels slower than the meandering cows, is as good a place as any.
Lana Peters, or Svetlana Stalin as she was known before marriage removed the stain of her surname, hides here for just that reason (though it helps that Richland Center is more generous than most U.S. towns when it comes to handing out welfare benefits, she tells me).
As the only surviving child of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — the most murderous tyrant of the 21st century — Lana has spent more than half of her 84 years trying to escape the dark shadows of her past.
Since famously defecting to the West via India in 1967, after being granted a two-week visa to scatter a friend’s ashes, she has lived the life of a perpetual fugitive.
Frequently changing addresses at short notice and adept at dodging her neighbours’ prying questions, she moved first to Switzerland then scuttled between America and Britain, where I last tracked her down 14 years ago to a small town in Cornwall.
Not a soul there knew her true identity. Though I kept my promise not to reveal her whereabouts, however, writing only that she was living somewhere in the West Country, shortly afterwards she packed her battered old suitcase.
This time she decamped to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to be near her beloved daughter, Olga, now aged 39, whose late father, William Peters (Lana’s third husband) lived there as an apprentice to the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
However, amid an extraordinary row about a new documentary film about her life, which was screened for the first time in America this week, she felt compelled to move on again.
Lana was found by an intrepid young Russian-American film-maker, Lana Parshina, who won her over with a touching story about how she had read her book, Twenty Letters To A Friend, when she was ten years old.
Telling Lana she had been profoundly affected by the book, and remarking on the coincidences that seemed to have drawn them together (they share the same first name, and Peters was granted U.S. citizenship in 1978, the year Parshina was born) she persuaded Stalin’s daughter to talk on camera for the first time in decades.
Last weekend, however, when the resulting 44-minute documentary, Svetlana About Svetlana, was screened at the Madison Film Festival, in Wisconsin, its star was notably absent.
For though the film broadly portrays her in a favourable light — well-read, astute and amusing, if somewhat self-absorbed — she claims she was duped into participating.
‘This girl (Parshina) told me she was a college film student and she had to present something different,’ snorts Lana, who speaks BBC World Service English with a Russian accent.
‘She was young, and I always like to help young people, so I let her in. But she only came to see me twice and she didn’t say she was making a film about my father.
‘She just said it was going to be about the way I live now. I wish I didn’t do it. I won’t even make any money out of it. She will make all the money.’
Lana is even under the impression that the film-maker was helped by Russian intelligence. ‘She came with a laptop computer with all my family portraits on it. They’ve only got those in Russia, in the state files, so I was suspicious that she had them. They wouldn’t just give them to anybody, you know.’
Parshina, for her part, seems incredulous at the suggestion that her film was part of a plot. She is saddened, too, that her first film-making venture has ended in acrimony.
She will gladly pay Lana half of any profits from the low-budget documentary, she says, claiming her subject willingly signed a form sanctioning the film’s release.
Whatever the truth, the film set the furtive Lana running again. But this week I found her living in Richland Center, a 30-minute drive from her former home, in an old people’s subsidised housing complex with the Stars and Stripes fluttering outside.
I buzz an intercom marked simply ‘L Peters’, and after a few moments a familiarly stern voice answers. She claims she cannot remember our last meeting, but as I have come so far she agrees to talk to me in the lobby.
Seeing her for the first time in 14 years is quite a shock. In Cornwall she strode for miles every day along the cliffs, but now she is bent over a stick and can barely hobble.
‘I was fine until I was 80, then I began to fall apart,’ she smiles, saying she has scoliosis — a condition which twists the
spine. ‘But look, I still have my red hair. I don’t even dye it. In England everyone thought I was Irish.’
Her clothes have changed markedly, too. When last we met she wore a beret and a heavy overcoat; now, in her sloppy grey tracksuit and pink blouse, she looks every inch the American retiree.
Well, she says, when I remark on her appearance, she has been here so long that she feels American.
She likes American food, particularly hamburgers, watches American films (though never TV), and prefers to speak her adopted language. She even thinks and dreams in it.
Contrast this with her contempt for Russia, and all things Russian.
‘I ran away from Russia because somehow they have two governments,’ she says with heavy irony.
‘There is the official government and then there is the secret police, which was started by Lenin and continued by everybody else. Even now we have a head of government who is a former spy: Mr Putin. I have no time for him.
‘I have had American citizenship for 30 years — and my daughter was born here — but they (the Russian authorities) still won’t recognise that. They still want to think of me as Russian.
‘And I hate them! I hate the Russian language! We aren’t Russian, you see. We are Georgian.’
Quite what her father would have made of this outburst, one shudders to imagine. As a girl, though, Lana was the muchindulged apple of Joseph Stalin’s eye.
She was born in 1926, when Stalin was just cementing his grip on the Soviet Union.
Eager to present himself as the much loved head of the perfect Bolshevik family, he would cuddle his daughter on his knee for propaganda photographs.
In truth, however, her upbringing was anything but idyllic. For her father created a climate of fear and suspicion inside the Kremlin that mirrored the Soviet empire at large, turning brother against sister, father against daughter, husband against wife.
When Lana was six years old, her mother, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, shot herself after a row over his philandering. Thereafter, Lana was raised by a beloved nanny.
But at least she survived. Lana’s older brother, Yakov, died in mysterious circumstances as a Nazi prisoner of war after his father declined Hitler’s offer to exchange him for a captured German general.
Her second brother, Vasily, an inept air force pilot, drank himself to death at 42 years old after being rejected as a failure by Stalin.
Many of the monster’s nine grandchildren also met tragic and premature ends. ‘Yes, there was a lot of tragedy in my family,’ she says, gazing at me bleakly, when I remark on the seeming curse on Stalin’s family. ‘It’s amazing. Terrible. My two uncles were arrested in 1938, during the Great Purge (Stalin’s brutal extermination of thousands of generals, politicians and intellectuals perceived as a threat to his position).
‘My beloved aunt was also arrested and never came back. We only learned about her relatives in the Sixties.’
And it was her father who did this, I say. This observation sparks off her legendary temper.
‘No! Not my father. It was Beria,’ she snaps, referring to Stalin’s sinister, round-spectacled secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, who was ordered to orchestrate the purge.
‘Beria was a terrible man. There is an English word for him. What do you call the man who chopped off the head of Mary, Queen of Scotland? An executioner! Yes, that’s it.
‘My mother would never allow Beria in our house. She knew what he was. But after she died, of course, things changed and he was promoted from the Caucasus to Moscow. He seemed to have some sort of hold on my father.'
So what about the systematic starvation of Ukrainian peasant farmers (the millions who were sent to the Gulag labour camps and never returned), the sudden, bloody purges. None of this was her father’s doing?
‘Oh yes, my father too,’ she says with a dismissive wave, as if the man who ruled the Soviet Union by terror for 30 years had played a mere bitpart in the slaughter of more than 20 million people.
‘My father had to give his permission to arrest his two brothers-in-law. But they were arrested because they didn’t like Beria. All this happened after my mother died, in 1932; after that my father was not the same.’
She declines to elaborate, but when I ask if she has forgiven Stalin she snaps: ‘I don’t forgive anything or anybody! If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and auntie, I will never forgive him. Never!’
In his determination to mould her into a daughter of the revolution, her father also wrecked her happiness. At 17, she fell in love for the first time, with a film-maker and writer 22 years her senior named Aleksei Kapler.
But Stalin didn’t approve of Kapler, whom he dismissed as a ‘Bohemian artist’ and — to compound matters — a Jew, and banished him to Siberia for ten years.
Incensed that her unsuitable boyfriend had influenced her to apply for a university fine arts course, he also insisted she study history and become ‘an educated Marxist’.
‘He broke my life. I want to explain to you, he broke my life twice,’ Lana says.
‘He put to jail and then to labour camp the man I loved. I saw for the first time that my father could do that.’
By the same token, she remains convinced Stalin loved her in his own way, and this seems to please her.
‘I looked like his mother (and) I have freckles all over, like her,’ she says.
‘He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel. There was nothing in him that was complicated (he loved me and he wanted me to be with him.’
Maybe so, but the irony is, of course, that he drove her away, and 14 years after his death in 1953 she left Russia altogether.
Apart from a two-year spell in the Eighties when, disillusioned with the West, she accepted an invitation to return home — only to feel even more disillusioned with communism — she has never been back.
Her self-imposed exile has come at enormous price.
Her first son, Joseph, was born in 1945 after Lana married a fellow Moscow University student, Grigory Morozow.
Her father grudgingly allowed the union, but it ended in divorce in 1947. For virtually all his adult life she was estranged from Joseph, and he died two years ago.
Lana quickly entered another doomed marriage, this time to Russian academic Yuri Zhdanov, and bore him a daughter, Katya, but Lana hasn’t seen her since she was 15.
Now aged nearly 60, Katya is a forlorn figure.
Her husband shot himself with a hunting rifle, supposedly by accident, and she lives alone in the farthest reaches of Eastern Russia.
Five years ago, I journeyed there to talk to her. I found her in a hovel reeking of cats and stale cabbage soup.
She has made it her life’s work is to study the huge volcano beside which she lives, but no one seems remotely interested in her charts and photographs-taken on an antiquated Soviet-era camera. She told me her letters to her mother in America went unanswered and could not understand why she had been ‘abandoned’. When I mention this to Lana, she becomes animated. ‘You saw Katya?’ she mouths. ‘Did she mention a grandchild? Because I hear I’m a great-grandma now.’
However, she insists she has tried to contact her daughter several times over the years, and blames Katya for breaking off the correspondence.
So many conflicting stories, so much revised history.
Struggling to make sense of it all, I later call the person who knows Lana best, her second daughter Olga, who manages a clothes shop thousands of miles away from Wisconsin, in Portland, Oregon, and phones her mother daily and speaks of her with admirable loyalty.
She paints a picture of a great stoic who has striven admirably to come terms with a terrible heritage that is no fault of her own, but for which she is constantly called to account.
‘She has always wanted to move on but she has never been allowed to,’ Stalin’s 39-year-old grand-daughter told me (having spent ten years in Cambridge and London, she speaks with a surprising Estuary twang).
Her whole life has been about living this down and trying to lead a new life.
Of course she abhors what Stalin did. But there was a period when so many people held her responsible for his actions that she actually started to think maybe it was true.
‘She still receives hate mail and people write poisonous blogs, and this horrible film has started it all again.
‘It’s so unjust. How can she be held responsible for the sins of her father?
‘All she wants is to be left to live out her years — and hopefully she has many left — in peace and, at 84, I think she’s earned that right.’
Lana is said to have earned £1million from her books, but claims it all went towards supporting her third husband’s architectural projects.
In Cornwall she lived on welfare benefits, and she is still doing so, receiving about £400 a month plus her medical care and subsidised accommodation in Wisconsin.
When last I saw her there was talk of her becoming a nun.
But her old spiritual adviser in the Vatican has died and she says she rarely attends church these days.
At least she seems to have settled well among the dairy folk of Wisconsin.
She paints a little, and reads; wanders as far as her spine will allow along the nearby creek; swaps smalltalk with the baseball-hatted caretaker, who knows of her past but is far too polite to mention it.
Perhaps now it is time that she finally stopped running.
Still running from Stalin: Tyrant's daughter, 84, tells of tragic life escaping his legacy from new home in sleepy U.S. farming town
Towns don’t get much more out of-the-way than Richland Center, Wisconsin, a sleepy little dairy farming community on an arrow-straight road that pierces the rolling green vastness of the American Midwest.
In these days of the all-seeing internet it is damnably difficult to vanish off the face of the earth.
But if you’re seeking oblivion with a few modest creature-comforts then this lonely outpost, where news travels slower than the meandering cows, is as good a place as any.
Lana Peters, or Svetlana Stalin as she was known before marriage removed the stain of her surname, hides here for just that reason (though it helps that Richland Center is more generous than most U.S. towns when it comes to handing out welfare benefits, she tells me).
As the only surviving child of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — the most murderous tyrant of the 21st century — Lana has spent more than half of her 84 years trying to escape the dark shadows of her past.
Since famously defecting to the West via India in 1967, after being granted a two-week visa to scatter a friend’s ashes, she has lived the life of a perpetual fugitive.
Frequently changing addresses at short notice and adept at dodging her neighbours’ prying questions, she moved first to Switzerland then scuttled between America and Britain, where I last tracked her down 14 years ago to a small town in Cornwall.
Not a soul there knew her true identity. Though I kept my promise not to reveal her whereabouts, however, writing only that she was living somewhere in the West Country, shortly afterwards she packed her battered old suitcase.
This time she decamped to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to be near her beloved daughter, Olga, now aged 39, whose late father, William Peters (Lana’s third husband) lived there as an apprentice to the great architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
However, amid an extraordinary row about a new documentary film about her life, which was screened for the first time in America this week, she felt compelled to move on again.
Lana was found by an intrepid young Russian-American film-maker, Lana Parshina, who won her over with a touching story about how she had read her book, Twenty Letters To A Friend, when she was ten years old.
Telling Lana she had been profoundly affected by the book, and remarking on the coincidences that seemed to have drawn them together (they share the same first name, and Peters was granted U.S. citizenship in 1978, the year Parshina was born) she persuaded Stalin’s daughter to talk on camera for the first time in decades.
Last weekend, however, when the resulting 44-minute documentary, Svetlana About Svetlana, was screened at the Madison Film Festival, in Wisconsin, its star was notably absent.
For though the film broadly portrays her in a favourable light — well-read, astute and amusing, if somewhat self-absorbed — she claims she was duped into participating.
‘This girl (Parshina) told me she was a college film student and she had to present something different,’ snorts Lana, who speaks BBC World Service English with a Russian accent.
‘She was young, and I always like to help young people, so I let her in. But she only came to see me twice and she didn’t say she was making a film about my father.
‘She just said it was going to be about the way I live now. I wish I didn’t do it. I won’t even make any money out of it. She will make all the money.’
Lana is even under the impression that the film-maker was helped by Russian intelligence. ‘She came with a laptop computer with all my family portraits on it. They’ve only got those in Russia, in the state files, so I was suspicious that she had them. They wouldn’t just give them to anybody, you know.’
Parshina, for her part, seems incredulous at the suggestion that her film was part of a plot. She is saddened, too, that her first film-making venture has ended in acrimony.
She will gladly pay Lana half of any profits from the low-budget documentary, she says, claiming her subject willingly signed a form sanctioning the film’s release.
Whatever the truth, the film set the furtive Lana running again. But this week I found her living in Richland Center, a 30-minute drive from her former home, in an old people’s subsidised housing complex with the Stars and Stripes fluttering outside.
I buzz an intercom marked simply ‘L Peters’, and after a few moments a familiarly stern voice answers. She claims she cannot remember our last meeting, but as I have come so far she agrees to talk to me in the lobby.
Seeing her for the first time in 14 years is quite a shock. In Cornwall she strode for miles every day along the cliffs, but now she is bent over a stick and can barely hobble.
‘I was fine until I was 80, then I began to fall apart,’ she smiles, saying she has scoliosis — a condition which twists the
spine. ‘But look, I still have my red hair. I don’t even dye it. In England everyone thought I was Irish.’
Her clothes have changed markedly, too. When last we met she wore a beret and a heavy overcoat; now, in her sloppy grey tracksuit and pink blouse, she looks every inch the American retiree.
Well, she says, when I remark on her appearance, she has been here so long that she feels American.
She likes American food, particularly hamburgers, watches American films (though never TV), and prefers to speak her adopted language. She even thinks and dreams in it.
Contrast this with her contempt for Russia, and all things Russian.
‘I ran away from Russia because somehow they have two governments,’ she says with heavy irony.
‘There is the official government and then there is the secret police, which was started by Lenin and continued by everybody else. Even now we have a head of government who is a former spy: Mr Putin. I have no time for him.
‘I have had American citizenship for 30 years — and my daughter was born here — but they (the Russian authorities) still won’t recognise that. They still want to think of me as Russian.
‘And I hate them! I hate the Russian language! We aren’t Russian, you see. We are Georgian.’
Quite what her father would have made of this outburst, one shudders to imagine. As a girl, though, Lana was the muchindulged apple of Joseph Stalin’s eye.
She was born in 1926, when Stalin was just cementing his grip on the Soviet Union.
Eager to present himself as the much loved head of the perfect Bolshevik family, he would cuddle his daughter on his knee for propaganda photographs.
In truth, however, her upbringing was anything but idyllic. For her father created a climate of fear and suspicion inside the Kremlin that mirrored the Soviet empire at large, turning brother against sister, father against daughter, husband against wife.
When Lana was six years old, her mother, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, shot herself after a row over his philandering. Thereafter, Lana was raised by a beloved nanny.
But at least she survived. Lana’s older brother, Yakov, died in mysterious circumstances as a Nazi prisoner of war after his father declined Hitler’s offer to exchange him for a captured German general.
Her second brother, Vasily, an inept air force pilot, drank himself to death at 42 years old after being rejected as a failure by Stalin.
Many of the monster’s nine grandchildren also met tragic and premature ends. ‘Yes, there was a lot of tragedy in my family,’ she says, gazing at me bleakly, when I remark on the seeming curse on Stalin’s family. ‘It’s amazing. Terrible. My two uncles were arrested in 1938, during the Great Purge (Stalin’s brutal extermination of thousands of generals, politicians and intellectuals perceived as a threat to his position).
‘My beloved aunt was also arrested and never came back. We only learned about her relatives in the Sixties.’
And it was her father who did this, I say. This observation sparks off her legendary temper.
‘No! Not my father. It was Beria,’ she snaps, referring to Stalin’s sinister, round-spectacled secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, who was ordered to orchestrate the purge.
‘Beria was a terrible man. There is an English word for him. What do you call the man who chopped off the head of Mary, Queen of Scotland? An executioner! Yes, that’s it.
‘My mother would never allow Beria in our house. She knew what he was. But after she died, of course, things changed and he was promoted from the Caucasus to Moscow. He seemed to have some sort of hold on my father.'
So what about the systematic starvation of Ukrainian peasant farmers (the millions who were sent to the Gulag labour camps and never returned), the sudden, bloody purges. None of this was her father’s doing?
‘Oh yes, my father too,’ she says with a dismissive wave, as if the man who ruled the Soviet Union by terror for 30 years had played a mere bitpart in the slaughter of more than 20 million people.
‘My father had to give his permission to arrest his two brothers-in-law. But they were arrested because they didn’t like Beria. All this happened after my mother died, in 1932; after that my father was not the same.’
She declines to elaborate, but when I ask if she has forgiven Stalin she snaps: ‘I don’t forgive anything or anybody! If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and auntie, I will never forgive him. Never!’
In his determination to mould her into a daughter of the revolution, her father also wrecked her happiness. At 17, she fell in love for the first time, with a film-maker and writer 22 years her senior named Aleksei Kapler.
But Stalin didn’t approve of Kapler, whom he dismissed as a ‘Bohemian artist’ and — to compound matters — a Jew, and banished him to Siberia for ten years.
Incensed that her unsuitable boyfriend had influenced her to apply for a university fine arts course, he also insisted she study history and become ‘an educated Marxist’.
‘He broke my life. I want to explain to you, he broke my life twice,’ Lana says.
‘He put to jail and then to labour camp the man I loved. I saw for the first time that my father could do that.’
By the same token, she remains convinced Stalin loved her in his own way, and this seems to please her.
‘I looked like his mother (and) I have freckles all over, like her,’ she says.
‘He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel. There was nothing in him that was complicated (he loved me and he wanted me to be with him.’
Maybe so, but the irony is, of course, that he drove her away, and 14 years after his death in 1953 she left Russia altogether.
Apart from a two-year spell in the Eighties when, disillusioned with the West, she accepted an invitation to return home — only to feel even more disillusioned with communism — she has never been back.
Her self-imposed exile has come at enormous price.
Her first son, Joseph, was born in 1945 after Lana married a fellow Moscow University student, Grigory Morozow.
Her father grudgingly allowed the union, but it ended in divorce in 1947. For virtually all his adult life she was estranged from Joseph, and he died two years ago.
Lana quickly entered another doomed marriage, this time to Russian academic Yuri Zhdanov, and bore him a daughter, Katya, but Lana hasn’t seen her since she was 15.
Now aged nearly 60, Katya is a forlorn figure.
Her husband shot himself with a hunting rifle, supposedly by accident, and she lives alone in the farthest reaches of Eastern Russia.
Five years ago, I journeyed there to talk to her. I found her in a hovel reeking of cats and stale cabbage soup.
She has made it her life’s work is to study the huge volcano beside which she lives, but no one seems remotely interested in her charts and photographs-taken on an antiquated Soviet-era camera. She told me her letters to her mother in America went unanswered and could not understand why she had been ‘abandoned’. When I mention this to Lana, she becomes animated. ‘You saw Katya?’ she mouths. ‘Did she mention a grandchild? Because I hear I’m a great-grandma now.’
However, she insists she has tried to contact her daughter several times over the years, and blames Katya for breaking off the correspondence.
So many conflicting stories, so much revised history.
Struggling to make sense of it all, I later call the person who knows Lana best, her second daughter Olga, who manages a clothes shop thousands of miles away from Wisconsin, in Portland, Oregon, and phones her mother daily and speaks of her with admirable loyalty.
She paints a picture of a great stoic who has striven admirably to come terms with a terrible heritage that is no fault of her own, but for which she is constantly called to account.
‘She has always wanted to move on but she has never been allowed to,’ Stalin’s 39-year-old grand-daughter told me (having spent ten years in Cambridge and London, she speaks with a surprising Estuary twang).
Her whole life has been about living this down and trying to lead a new life.
Of course she abhors what Stalin did. But there was a period when so many people held her responsible for his actions that she actually started to think maybe it was true.
‘She still receives hate mail and people write poisonous blogs, and this horrible film has started it all again.
‘It’s so unjust. How can she be held responsible for the sins of her father?
‘All she wants is to be left to live out her years — and hopefully she has many left — in peace and, at 84, I think she’s earned that right.’
Lana is said to have earned £1million from her books, but claims it all went towards supporting her third husband’s architectural projects.
In Cornwall she lived on welfare benefits, and she is still doing so, receiving about £400 a month plus her medical care and subsidised accommodation in Wisconsin.
When last I saw her there was talk of her becoming a nun.
But her old spiritual adviser in the Vatican has died and she says she rarely attends church these days.
At least she seems to have settled well among the dairy folk of Wisconsin.
She paints a little, and reads; wanders as far as her spine will allow along the nearby creek; swaps smalltalk with the baseball-hatted caretaker, who knows of her past but is far too polite to mention it.
Perhaps now it is time that she finally stopped running.
"Nations ... as an inherent political destiny, are a myth. Nationalism, which sometimes takes preexisting cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates preexisting cultures: that is a reality." - E. Gellner
- By Tainari88
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