On April 21, 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin, bounded down the stairs of a Swissair plane at Kennedy Airport. She was forty-one years old and wore an elegant white double-breasted blazer. “Hello there, everybody!” she exclaimed to the crowd of reporters on the tarmac. “I am very happy to be here.”
Svetlana immediately became the Cold War’s most famous defector. She was the only living child of Stalin, who had died in 1953, and she had been known as “the little princess of the Kremlin.” Until a few months earlier, she had never left the Soviet Union. But, at Kennedy, she talked of the freedom and opportunity that she expected to find in America. She was coquettish and funny. She spoke fluent English. The Times published more than a dozen stories about her arrival. The C.I.A. official who first interviewed her noted in a memo that “our own preconceived notions of what Stalin’s daughter must be like—just didn’t let us believe that this nice, pleasant, attractive, middle-aged hausfrau could possibly be who she claimed to be.”
Svetlana later wrote, “My first impression of America was of the magnificent Long Island highways.” The land was vast, and the people smiled. After half a lifetime of Communism, she felt “able to fly out free, like a bird.” A few days after her arrival, she gave a press conference at the Plaza Hotel that was attended by four hundred reporters. One asked if she planned to apply for citizenship. “Before the marriage it should be love,” she responded. “So if I will love this country and this country will love me, then the marriage will be settled.”
My older son is turning 13 in a couple of weeks, and thanks to everything my husband and I experienced with our daughter, we now have a new ally in the house helping to teach my son about healthy. Read Out Loud A Prayer for My Daughter Daily for Results. If Your Daughter is not Born Again: 14:15). I’ve prayed Your Word from Ephesians 1 & 3. Satan, I bind you from my daughter’s life. You’ll not keep my child from receiving Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior! Jesus gave me.power to tread on.
George Kennan, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union and one of America’s foremost experts on Russia, had helped her to defect, and she settled in Princeton, where he lived. In the fall of 1967, with Kennan’s help she published “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” which described her family’s tragic history through a series of letters to the physicist Fyodor Volkenstein. The message of the book, it seemed, was that being one of Stalin’s relatives was nearly as terrible as being one of his subjects. Two years later, she published “Only One Year,” a memoir about the months before and after her decision to flee the Soviet Union. In The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson wrote breathlessly that it had “the boldness and the passion of ‘Doctor Zhivago.’ ” The books sold well, and they made her rich. The K.G.B. gave her the nickname Kukushka, which means “cuckoo bird.”
But the public’s fascination with Svetlana didn’t last long. She began to decline interviews, and the press started to lose interest in her: her defection was special, but her presence was not. She kept writing, but her work no longer found publishers in the United States. The fragments of information that emerged suggested that her life had become lonely and unpleasant. In 1985, Time published a story in which she was described as isolated, overweight, vindictive, imperious, and violent. “Her ultimate quarrel was with her father, whom she fatefully resembled,” the author wrote.
By the time the Cold War ended, Svetlana had almost completely disappeared from public view. In the next twenty years, the Times published only one story about her, a five-paragraph squib, in 1992, declaring that she “is living in obscurity in a charity hostel.”
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Copyright 1998 W. Bruce Cameron
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When I was in high school I used to be terrified of my girlfriend?s father, who I believe suspected me of wanting to place my hands on his daughter?s chest. He would open the door and immediately affect a good-naturedly murderous expression, holding out a handshake that, when gripped, felt like it could squeeze carbon into diamonds.
Now, years later, it is my turn to be the dad. Remembering how unfairly persecuted I felt when I would pick up my dates, I do my best to make my daughter?s suitors feel even worse. My motto: wilt them in the living room and they?ll stay wilted all night.
?So,? I?ll call out jovially. ?I see you have your nose pierced. Is that because you?re stupid, or did you merely want to APPEAR stupid??
As a dad, I have some basic rules, which I have carved into two stone tablets that I have on display in my living room.
Rule One:
If you pull into my driveway and honk you?d better be delivering a package, because you?re sure not picking anything up.
Rule Two:
You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter?s body, I will remove them.
Rule Three:
I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips. Please don?t take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue, so I propose this compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object. However, In order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.
Rule Four:
I?m sure you?ve been told that in today?s world, sex without utilizing a ?barrier method? of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.
Rule Five:
In order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports, politics, and other issues of the day. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need from you on this subject is ?early?
Rule Six:
I have no doubt you are a popular fellow, with many opportunities to date other girls. This is fine with me as long as it is okay with my daughter. Otherwise, once you have gone out with my little girl, you will continue to date no one but her until she is finished with you. If you make her cry, I will make you cry.
Rule Seven:
As you stand in my front hallway, waiting for my daughter to appear, and more than an hour goes by, do not sigh and fidget. If you want to be on time for the movie, you should not be dating. My daughter is putting on her makeup, a process that can take longer than painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of just standing there, why don?t you do something useful, like changing the oil in my car?
Rule Eight:
The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter:
- Places where there are beds, sofas, or anything softer than a wooden stool.
- Places where there are no parents, policemen, or nuns within eyesight.
- Places where there is darkness.
- Places where there is dancing, holding hands, or happiness.
- Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to induce my daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than overalls, a sweater, and a goose down parka zipped up to her throat.
- Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided; movies which feature chainsaws are okay.
- Hockey games are okay.
- Old folks homes are better.
Rule Nine:
Do not lie to me. I may appear to be a potbellied, balding, middle-aged, dimwitted has-been. But on issues relating to my daughter, I am the all-knowing, merciless god of your universe. If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God. I have a shotgun, a shovel, and five acres behind the house. Do not trifle with me.
Rule Ten:
Be afraid. Be very afraid. It takes very little for me to mistake the sound of your car in the driveway for a chopper coming in over a rice paddy outside of Hanoi. When my Agent Orange starts acting up, the voices in my head frequently tell me to clean the guns as I wait for you to bring my daughter home. As soon as you pull into the driveway you should exit your car with both hands in plain sight. Speak the perimeter password, announce in a clear voice that you have brought my daughter home safely and early, then return to your car-there is no need for you to come inside. The camouflaged face at the window is mine.