Opinion A sideshow that made headlines

This was because the Americans released news of the defection together with the gleeful revelation that the defecting individual,who had used her mother’s first name as her surname,was Stalin’s daughter. At the height of Cold War,the news had the power of a nuke. For several days,Alliluyeva shared the headlines until then hogged by Nehru’s daughter.

It is perhaps needless to say that the hugely embarrassed Soviet leadership was angry with India for having failed to prevent what was nothing less than a catastrophe for them. But New Delhi told Moscow that given the circumstances and the manner in which Alliluyeva had carried out her plan,there was nothing it could have done.

Let the story of this world-shaking event be begun from the beginning. There was a time when many Indian communists had made Moscow their permanent home,working in various institutions such as the World Peace Council or the magazine,Soviet Land,published in English and most major Indian languages. One of them was Brajesh Singh,an uncle of Dinesh Singh,a close associate of Indira Gandhi and later her foreign minister. At the time of Alliluyeva’s defection,he was minister of state for external affairs.

Alliluyeva went through three marriages to Russian husbands — including one to her father’s associate,Yuri Zhdanov,the only marriage Stalin approved of — but none of these worked. Eventually,she fell in love with Brajesh,and he was delicately described as her “common law husband”. In early 1967,Brajesh died. Alliluyeva decided to bring his ashes to India to consign them to the Ganga,and to spend some time first with Brajesh’s family in his village and then in Delhi. Soviet leaders tried to dissuade her. Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin even told her that Hindus often burnt brides with the remains of their husbands. But Alliluyeva was adamant,and the Soviet leadership could not say no to her.

In Delhi,she stayed at the Soviet embassy. After seven in the evening,one day before she was scheduled to return to Moscow,she took a taxi and drove straight to the US embassy,only a few hundred metres away. Of course,the embassy was shut for the day but the Marine guarding its entrance sent her to the duty officer,who was flabbergasted when he learnt who the visitor was and what she wanted. He rang up his ambassador,Chester Bowles,who then lived not in the Roosevelt House next door,but on 17,Amrita Shergil Marg,and asked him to come to the Chancery at once for reasons “I cannot mention on the phone”.

As he recorded much later,Bowles first asked Alliluyeva to write down why she wanted to defect and live in America. She did so very cogently and quickly because,as a translator by profession,she was fluent in English,French and German. According to Bowles’s account,he then wanted to make sure that she was really determined to defect. So he told her: “Are you sure you want to take this step? If not,nothing is lost. You can go back to the Soviet embassy and leave for home tomorrow.” Her reply to the US ambassador was stunning: “If you turn me away,I will go to the press tonight and announce that democratic India does not allow me to live here and democratic America is refusing to let me go there”.

It was then that Bowles composed an “Eyes Only” cable to the secretary of state,Dean Rusk,in which,after explaining the situation,he said that if he got no reply by midnight Indian time,he would give Alliluyeva a visa “on my own authority”. Bowles claims that the cable,after being decoded,was on Rusk’s desk “in eight minutes flat. But I never received a reply”. Consequently,Bowles did what he had said he would. Obviously,while questioning Alliluyeva,the US embassy had made all arrangements for her departure for Rome in an AlItalia flight leaving Delhi in the wee hours of the morning. Two seats were booked; the second

was for a CIA agent discreetly accompanying her.

In the midst of the hullabaloo about her,she showed no hurry to go to America,for she stayed on in Europe,particularly in Geneva,for quite a while. In order to assuage the displeased Soviet leaders,Indira Gandhi sent a senior Indian diplomat who had earlier served in the Soviet Union to Switzerland to persuade Alliluyeva to return to Moscow even at this late stage. This,everybody knew,was mission impossible.

With the passage of time,feelings faded on all sides and Stalin’s daughter settled in America,where she married an architect named William Peters and started calling herself Lana Peters. They had a daughter,in addition to the two children she had left behind in Russia. About 12 months after her defection she wrote an eminently readable book,Only One Year,in which she also reproduced the note she had written in the American embassy in Delhi on her decision to defect.

For reasons unknown,she returned to her motherland in 1987 and was immediately given Soviet citizenship and a job. During the chaos after the disintegration of the Soviet Union three years later,she acquired British citizenship but migrated to America,where she had the right of permanent citizenship. She died on November 22,2011. All through those years,she never revisited India.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator