Free Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan Page A

it had a lovely inner courtyard and a small rock garden. She registered five-year-old Olga in a Montessori school, and then set about resuming her creative life. She wanted to write another book, but she found herself unable to work. Her days grew empty. She would drive Olga to school, to her music lessons, to her dancing and swimming classes. Waiting to pick her up, she would sit in the parked car at the edge of the beach and watch the breakers for hours. Under the multiple pressures she’d endured, Svetlana was slowly falling apart.
    In July, she wrote to Joan Kennan that since her separationfrom Wes, she’d been breaking down, both physically and mentally, and she was truly frightened. “I’ve had something really like a nervous ‘fit’ (or ‘break-down’)…. My increasing habit of drinking alone (at the cocktail hours—so to say), brought me to the verge of absolutely uncontrolled—and totally unbalanced—emotions, which started to rule me instead. Joanie, I know only too well, how this sort of thing could develop. It killed my own brother at age 41.” 4 She explained that her sudden escape from Princeton had been an effort to change her environment completely.
    It seemed that the only thing she could manage to do was to keep moving. In the next sixteen months in California, she moved from Oceanside to Carlsbad to La Jolla, buying and selling two houses. Her explanation to herself and others was that she was searching for a good school for Olga, but truly, she was lost.
    In November, she wrote a long, devastating note to Jamie (Donald Jameson). She began with her usual optimism, telling him she was trying to write a book. It would be about the United States and the USSR, a dialogue that could illuminate both countries for ordinary people. But she could find no one she could trust to work with, and she’d lost her courage.
    And then her letter took a deeply unnerving tone.
    Since I came to Taliesin—and left it, to my own great unhappiness—I have had a strange feeling of being hypnotized, influenced, directed, or whatever you wish to call that. Very often—since then—I have NOT BEEN MYSELF…. I have had moments of utmost despair, such that I did not know what to do with myself…. When such a depression comes upon me, I cannot think about anything, Jamie, [but] that some Soviet secret experimentators [ sic ] are, probably,testing on ME their secret, newest, psychological weapons. Para-psychological weapons, if that makes any sense …
    Somebody has been trying—desperately—to reach MY CONSCIOUSNESS…. The result—on this end—was my extreme nervousness / without any visible reason/ and above all, the constant desire TO MOVE, TO CHANGE PLACE, to go somewhere else, where those WAVES could not reach me….
    Sometimes—at night—I have terrible fear about Olga, that she might be kidnapped, and I would NOT be able to pay the ransom. This IS my worst nightmare of all. Myself, I do not care about what might happen to ME…. But—most of all—I DREAD THE SITUATION when I could be OK, but SHE could get into the hands of some political speculators….
    It is easy to notice, if my behaviour becomes disordered…. IT IS disordered, Jamie—you could see it even from this very letter. I have lost some controls, and I am not able to pull it all back into my hands. Jamie, I need help sometimes—because I am afraid to be alone, with this dear child.
    In the envelope, she enclosed a clipping from the Christian Science Monitor , dated November 22, 1976, and titled “DIA Cites Soviet Microwave Research.”
    A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report says extensive Soviet research into microwaves might lead to methods of causing disoriented human behavior, nerve disorders, or heart attacks.
    “Soviet scientists are fully aware of the biological effects of low-level microwave radiation, which might have offensive weapons applications,” says the report, based on an analysis of experiments on