Russians: Hello There, Everybody

She was not the usual sort of leggy glamour girl who is ordinarily greeted by photographers when landing at Kennedy Airport. Her hair was bobbed a trifle close, her figure was a trifle stout, and her face was round and beaming but she nonetheless had a special kind of glamour. As more than 100 news men and airport police surrounded her, a forest of microphones poking from their midst, Svetlana Stalina, 42, daughter of Joseph Stalin and by far the most prominent defector ever to pass through the Iron Curtain, gave her first greeting to the U.S. "Hello there, everybody," she said. "I am very happy to be here."

Svetlana flew in from Switzerland, where she had spent six weeks in secretive seclusion and "hard thinking" after having decided to remain in the West while on a visit to India (TIME, March 24). Although she entered the U.S. on a tourist visa that expires June 6, it was plain that the formalities of her entrance were unimportant and that she could stay in the U.S. as long as she wished. The process of getting her to the U.S. was a diplomatic nightmare. From the moment she appeared at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi seven weeks ago and asked to see the ambassador, Svetlana became a source of potential conflict between Russia and the U.S.

Her Own Doing. The concern of the State Department has been to convince the Kremlin that Svetlana's defection was entirely her own doing—a conviction that should come easier when it reads her extraordinary statement about why she left Russia (see box). To demonstrate its innocence of any foul play, Washington decided that Svetlana could not come directly to the U.S., instead found temporary refuge for her in Switzerland. Sensitive to Russian pressures, the Swiss granted her a visa only on the condition that she stay out of sight and do nothing that could be interpreted as a slam at the Soviet Union. Although Svetlana is not a political person ("I hate politics," she told an Indian friend), she obviously could not remain in that condition indefinitely. She decided to come to the U.S.

Despite her aversion to politics, Svetlana was the person closest to Stalin during the last decade of his rule. It was a strange relationship, for the two had little in common. In looks and tem perament, Svetlana took after her mother, Nadezhda Allilueva, who was shot to death in 1932 shortly after an argument with Stalin. Like her mother, Svetlana was a free soul in a society fettered by her father, and has even adopted her mother's maiden name (she calls herself Svetlana Allilueva). As Stalin's daughter, she was, as she put it last week, "a kind of state property."

Rather than take a high job in the Communist Party, she went to work as an English translator for a Moscow book publisher. "My interests were primarily literary," she said, "and my friends were drawn largely from the ranks of writers, artists and teachers." Like many of her friends, she had written a manuscript that she knew could not be published in the Soviet Union, and she brought it to India with her when she left. It was an 80,000-word account of her life with father.