Svetlana Alliluyeva: Stalin’s daughter was in Switzerland

March 1967: In Geneva, world powers fight for the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which is supposed to make the world a little safer. But the attention of the international press quickly shifted from Geneva to a small village in the Bernese Oberland. Indeed, it is at the Jungfraublick Hotel in Beatenberg that Svetlana Stalin, the daughter of the Soviet dictator who died in 1953, is staying.

Geneva filmmaker Gabriel Tejedor shows in his new documentary, “Born Svetlana Stalin”, how Stalin’s daughter arrived in the Bernese Oberland and what happened afterwards.

The international press finds Svetlana Stalin in the Bernese Oberland

In March 1967, Svetlana escaped from her Soviet secret service (KGB) supervisors during a visit to India and took refuge in the American embassy. She wanted to emigrate to the United States, but in this period of thaw and disarmament negotiations, American President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to avoid conflict with Moscow. Washington therefore requested help from Bern and the eminent refugee was thus able to stay in Switzerland for a maximum period of three months.

After the death of her father, Svetlana took her mother’s last name: Alliluyeva. She introduced herself at the hotel in Beatenberg under the name “Frau Staehelin”. As the world press quickly discovered who was hiding behind this pseudonym, she had to be transferred to a convent near Fribourg. Until she was allowed to leave for the United States on April 21, 1967.

Svetlana Allilouïeva’s stay in Switzerland was documented in detail in 2018 by Geneva journalist Jean-Christophe Emmenegger in the book “Operation Svetlana”. For filmmaker Gabriel Tejedor, it was the starting point for his research, which he was able to deepen during the forced break due to the pandemic. This is how he managed to get his hands on previously unknown video footage, showing Svetlana with a French journalist outside a villa in the hills near Fribourg. In the recording, Svetlana is seen wearing a fashionable brown jacket and a knee-length skirt. She smiles at the camera, seems relaxed, cheerful. The sequence comes from the owner of the house, a bourgeois of Russian origin. He did not wish to be named in the film and is now deceased.

The brief stay in Switzerland is just one of the many episodes in Gabriel Tejedor’s documentary. Previously, the Genevan had already looked several times at the Soviet Union and the legacy of the communist dictatorship in his films. In “The Trace”, his camera accompanies the Friborg artist André Sugnaux on his journey to the remains of a gulag in the far north of Russia. In “Kombinat,” he portrayed people living in the town of Magnitogorsk, founded around a steelworks.

Today, Gabriel Tejedor, 46, documents the life of a woman who grew up sheltered and isolated from reality as a “Kremlin princess,” but who, after the death of her father, became aware of the true cruelty of the regime and wanted to escape, even at the cost of leaving his two children in Moscow with no news of his escape.

His friends and relatives disappeared in the gulag

During his research, Gabriel Tejedor says he encountered an unexpected problem: “There are many films of Svetlana dating from the time of her flight and her years in the United States. But there is almost nothing about his years in the Soviet Union.” Gabriel Tejedor therefore worked with animations accompanied by audio quotes, taken from Svetlana’s book, “20 Letters to a Friend”, as well as from his other autobiographical works.

Stalin’s Daughter describes a warm father who could not refuse his daughter any wish. But also how his friends and even family members suddenly disappeared from his life. She only realized later that they had been sent to the gulag or murdered. Stalin even had Svetlana’s first great love sent to a labor camp, because the young man’s Jewish origin did not suit him.

Svetlana carried her memories with her when she arrived in Switzerland. Western publishing houses rushed to buy the manuscript. It was predictable that the publication would be a success. This is also how the sequence showing Svetlana in Switzerland was created, which Gabriel Tejedor was now able to show for the first time. Because the French journalist with whom she jokes in front of the Friborg villa was less interested in her than in her manuscript. What he didn’t know was that at the time she had already sold her writings in the United States for millions.

Gabriel Tejedor also encountered limits in his research: in Russia, he says, no one would have wanted to talk to him, apart from an old historian. The director says he contacted at least 15 experts on the Stalinist era: “All of them refused. Most claimed they didn’t have time. Some also said they were not competent enough.” These were probably excuses to avoid the risk of saying something false.

Under Vladimir Putin, the dictator was rehabilitated. Stalin is considered a great statesman and is celebrated as the victor of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the executions and deportations to the gulag as well as the deliberately started famine in Ukraine, which cost the lives of at least 20 million people in total, are taboo. Soviet secret service documents from that era are still secret. A comprehensive examination of the crimes of Stalinism has not taken place, neither in the Soviet Union nor in the Slavic, Central Asian and Caucasian states that succeeded it. On the contrary, the Russian Memorial organization, which worked to shed light on Soviet crimes, was dissolved under Putin because it was allegedly financed from abroad.

In the United States, Svetlana Alliluyeva remarried and had another daughter. However, she was not happy, as shown in Gabriel Tejedor’s film. She was disturbed by the materialism and superficiality of people, and she pined for her older children: a son and a daughter whom she had left behind in Russia.

A restless life between Moscow, Tbilisi and London

In the mid-1980s, Stalin’s daughter returned to Moscow. There, it was presented by the Soviet power as proof of the superiority of the socialist system. At the same time, she saw that this system could no longer feed people. The fall was already in the air. And Svetlana Alliluyeva faced the repercussions of her flight: her daughter refused to meet her, her son had become an alcoholic. Director Gabriel Tejedor shows images from the last years of his life in his film. She seems disoriented. Isolated.

She lived for a time in her father’s native Georgia, then moved to Britain and finally back to the United States. At age 85, she died in November 2011 in a Wisconsin nursing home. Shortly before her death, she complained in an interview with a local newspaper: “I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.”

Bernhard drove away is a journalist with the Tamedia investigation unit. He studied Slavic languages ​​and cultures. Until 2017 he was the Austria and Eastern Europe correspondent for the Tages-Anzeiger.More info

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