This was the way much of the Soviet intelligentsia, especially in Moscow, lived. Spies, informants, secret police were legion. It was never possible to understand what was going on behind the scenes; one only felt the impact. It was like living on a bed of quicksand and pretending that the ground was solid.
It was willful blindness that Svetlana, who placed the highest value on art and literature, should have followed her father’s directive and ended up in the Zhdanov household. As the enforcer of Zhdanovshchina, Yuri’s father had been the official most hated by artists and intellectuals. He’d suppressed the music of Prokofiev, Khachaturian, and Shostakovich as “alien to the Soviet people and its artistic taste” and had banned the work of many writers, including the poet Anna Akhmatova. Of Akhmatova he infamously said, “She is a half-nun, half-harlot or rather harlot-nun whose sin is mixed with prayer.”20
The Tretyakov Gallery, where Svetlana had once gone with her beloved Aleksei Kapler, mounted a show that winter of 1949 in honor of Stalin’s seventieth birthday (actually his seventy-first). Every canvas was a grotesque portrait of Stalin: the kindly grandfather, the war hero, the legendary knight. When she saw the exhibition, Svetlana was devastated. Art was being prostituted to gratify her father. But here she was in the Zhdanov family where Zhdanovshchina had originated. What did she expect?21
The whole marital exercise proved a disaster, another mistake. Even after Zhdanov’s death the previous year, the Zhdanov family kept up the rhetoric of partiinost (party-mindedness). The apartment was filled with war booty—vases, rugs, works of art—carted back from Germany after the war. “The most orthodox Party spirit reigned in the house I lived in, but . . . it was all hypocritical, a caricature purely for show.”22 Svetlana found that she detested her mother-in-law, who, she felt, had her son tied to her apron strings. Yuri called her “the wise old owl.”
Svetlana was soon pregnant again. Through the entire first winter of her marriage, she was very ill. She entered the hospital that spring of 1950 and remained there one and a half months. It turned out that Svetlana and her husband had incompatible blood types, which caused her to develop toxicosis affecting her kidneys. She almost died. Her baby daughter was delivered in May, two months premature, and after the delivery Svetlana spent another month in the hospital.23
Feeling alone and unloved, she turned to her father to pour out her woes, telling him about his new granddaughter, Yekaterina (Katya). He replied:
Dear SVETOCHKA!
I got your letter. I’m very glad you got off so lightly. Kidney trouble is a serious business. To say nothing of having a child. Where did you ever get the idea that I had abandoned you?! It’s the sort of thing people dream up. I advise you not to believe your dreams. Take care of yourself. Take care of your daughter, too. The state needs people, even those who are born prematurely. Be patient a little longer—we’ll see each other soon. I kiss my Svetochka.
YOUR LITTLE PAPA24
Though her father did not visit her in the hospital, she was pleased to get his letter. But there was always the barb—the state needed her premature baby, who was just then fighting for her life.
The marriage lasted another year, but it was obvious to both Svetlana and Yuri that it was doomed. Yuri’s mother and Svetlana could not stand each other. At the Science Section of the Central Committee, Yuri continued to feel the noose tightening. Instead of drawing together, both withdrew into their own woes. Svetlana complained:
He wasn’t home much. He came home late at night, it being the custom in those years to work till eleven at night. He had worries of his own and with his inborn lack of emotion wasn’t in the habit of paying much attention to my woes or state of mind. When he was at home, moreover, he was completely under his mother’s thumb. . . . [He] let himself be guided by her ways, her tastes and her opinions. I with my more easy-going upbringing soon found it impossible to breathe.25
It’s hard to think of Svetlana’s upbringing as easygoing. What she probably meant was that the home was full of emotional noise: Grandma Olga, Anna, and Zhenya all spoke their minds. And she, behind the docile public façade, was “vehement about everything.”26
But it was more complicated than facades. It was not possible for either her or her husband to go into the interior dark spaces where the fear and anger raged. It was not possible to engage real emotions in these families where nothing was said. Did she and Yuri discuss his father, her father, what was happening in the world beyond their walls? That seems impossible. Was what she called an “inborn lack of emotion” simply an inability to speak truthfully? And yet it was also true that in orthodox Bolshevik circles, certain kinds of emotion were seen as weakness or self-indulgence.27
Her old acquaintance, the actress Kyra Golovko, was passing the Kremlin one day. To avoid the crowded trolleys, she often walked to the Moscow Art Theater over the Stone Bridge, past the Kremlin. Once, as she passed the Borovitskie Gates, she heard a voice calling her name. She shuddered in fear, but then looked up to see Svetlana approaching her. They had lost touch, each consumed by her own worries.
Svetlana begged Kyra to walk with her. She needed to talk. Kyra remembered how upset she seemed, and recalled the conversation, particularly because this was the only heart-to-heart they managed to have. Svetlana had always been so private and restrained, and few dared to speak openly with her.
Svetlana told Kyra that she wanted to divorce Yuri. Kyra was shocked. To her, Yuri and Svetlana had seemed so much in love: those voice lessons, wearing low heels, “all was done for Yuri’s sake.” And there was her new daughter, Katya.
Kyra recalled Svetlana’s words:
“It’s Yuri’s mother. From the outset she was against my marrying him. And now we are all on the brink of disaster. It came to the point that I even rushed to my father.”
“And what did he say?” I asked.
“He said that marriage is an endless chain of mutual compromises and that if you give birth to a child, you must somehow save the family.”
“You told Yuri about this conversation?”
“Yes, but it had almost no effect. His mother thinks I ruined his talent as a scientist and as a pianist.”
By this time, the two women had reached the Moscow Theater, where they parted. Kyra remarked, “Thus ended my relatively close relationship with Svetlana.”28
Svetlana and Yuri separated. Knowing that they would not be allowed to divorce without Stalin’s permission, she wrote warily to her father, signing her letter “your anxious daughter”:
FEBRUARY 10 [NO YEAR]
Dear Papochka,
I would like to see you very much to let you know about how I live. I would like to tell you all of this in person—tête-à-tête. I tried several times and I didn’t want to bother you when you weren’t very well and you were very busy. . . .
In connection with Yuri Andreevich Zhdanov, we decided to finally separate even before the New Year’s . . . for two years, [we] have not been husband or wife to each other but have been something indescribable.
Especially after the fact that he proved to me—not with words but with actions—that I’m not dear to him, not one bit, and I’m not needed. And after that he repeated, for the second time, that I should leave my daughter with him. Absolutely not . . .
I’m done with this dry professor, heartless erudite, he can bury himself under all his books but family and wife are not needed by him at all. They are well replaced by his numerous relatives. . . .
So, Papochka, I hope that I will see you, and, you, please do not be angry with me that I informed you about these events post-factum. You were aware of this even before.
I kiss