Only One Year

After her dramatic defection, Svetlana settles into her new life in America. She’s an overnight millionaire, trading communism for capitalism — a bestselling author with the attention of the world. But everyone from her translator to the KBG to a new lover is driving her nuts!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Here's the story that should have happened. Spent Lana alle
Lujeva flees the Soviet Union memoir and toe launches a
mad cap multi country defection, negotiates a record breaking book
deal that gets her to America, and arrives with fanfair
at JFK. Triumphant music plays, everybody cheers, and we fade

(00:31):
to black credits roll. But I hate to break it
to you. This happiness is not going to last, and
the chaotic journey that follows her triumph and arrival is
the one we're gonna go on. Just a few days
after landing speed, Lana gives a press conference at the

(00:52):
Plaza Hotel, with four hundred reporters crammed into the chandeliered
colonnaded terrace room, eager to learn every detail of her
wild defection. It needs the longest explanation, and I hope
you will read my book this autumn and many things

(01:13):
you will find there. My only plan is to leave
without any political activities here and to do my work,
which is writing, which I am happy finally to be
able to do peace quiet writing well. St that Lana
finally get the life she's been yearning for, or will

(01:37):
she be tormented endlessly by an American media that turns
against her, by the silence of her children who she
left behind, and by the rejection of a new lover,
which leaves her devastated beyond belief, such that this mild mannered,
middle aged woman ends up standing outside in the middle
of the night, in the middle of New Jersey, bashing
her fist through a window, shattering the glass and screaming

(02:00):
at the top of her lungs covered in blood. My
name is Dan Katrocer, and this is spent Lana. Sped Lana.
You wake up in the morning, you live your day,
and then you do it tomorrow, and over and over again,

(02:31):
and over again, and over and over again. Act one,
lost in translation. After the high of her insane escape

(02:52):
wears off, sped Lana is left to grapple with a
stark new reality. She's a former princess in a new country,
on her own for the first time in her life,
without her friends and most painfully, without her children. They
knew nothing about my plans. We lived very good life.
We were attached to each other. It was quite difficult

(03:17):
for me to decide to leave them. I hope that
they will understand me spent. Lana writes to her one
year old son Joseph and sixteen year old daughter Yakatarina.
She desperately hopes they'll understand why she had to leave.
After she's landed in America, Joseph sends back a letter
that essentially says funck off, or as he puts it,

(03:40):
I hope from now on we shall be allowed to
arrange our own lives ourselves. Sorry, if I sound like
a Soviet lesbian, look I get it. If my mother
fled the uss Are and left me and my sister behind,
I'd say, Diane, what the hell were you doing in Russia?
And I have a sister. But what must that have

(04:01):
felt like to have your own children disown you, even
if you're the one who left them? Making matters worse
back in Russia. The kgbc's as personal items from St.
Lana's apartment. Heavily surveils her closest friends and pushes her
children to publicly denounce her. She is inadvertently hurting the
people she loves. Most things in America aren't going much

(04:26):
better speed Lana signing documents and publishing contracts. She doesn't
understand she's told she can't work with her translator of
choice because she might end up in bed with him.
Here she is talking with biographer Meryl Seacrest on the
world's tiniest microphone. It is part of her psychic imbalance

(04:48):
that after every man and so, I mean that is
very but it's would you want to insult it? Oh?
I was? I was madly hill, spent Lana begrudgingly agrees
to work with her publisher's translator of choice, an American
named Priscilla Johnson McMillan. Spent Lana doesn't yet have a

(05:10):
permanent place to stay, so they can live and work
together for a few weeks at Priscilla's father's house on
Long Island. So who is Priscilla Johnson McMillan. Well, she's
an American journalist, translator, and historian who spent a lot
of time covering Soviet politics, and according to The New

(05:32):
York Times, she is also the only known person to
have a quote conversed extensively with both JFK and his assassin,
Lee Harvey Oswald. Seems like a pretty cool person, right,
I bet spent Lana had a great time with her.
Stupid woman who was my fain in the neck? Priscilla Johnson.
Priscilla Johnson, who was not qualified. I say, I've heard

(05:59):
that still in speent Lana's time together wasn't exactly peach.
So wouldn't it be cool if I spoke to Priscilla
to paint a picture of the time they spent translating
spent Lana's book. Wouldn't it be fabulous for me as
a writer to get insight from another writer's process of
editing and translating my protagonista, especially if they sparred well.

(06:22):
I called Priscilla to ask her to be in my podcast.
As a playwright who had never done anything like this,
I was incredibly nervous when she picked up. I hadn't
hit record yet, and she asked if I was a woman.
I am a man, and I have to tell you, Um,
I have a very high voice. Um, it doesn't matter

(06:45):
at all. Well, we spoke pleasantries for a while and
she agreed to be interviewed. But I didn't want to
dive in just yet. She really is a worthy subject
and uh, I know you'll do it justice. Well, they
you so much, and I look forward to our next conversation.
I really do. When we get to talking about spet Lana,

(07:06):
I get nervous. I talk about some far off distant
time when we'd actually get into all the nitty gritty details.
And to what extent she just propel catapulted. I don't
know the word. Oh my god, Priscilla, I am so
excited to interview you. You have no idea. You have

(07:30):
no idea. So in summary, if you, like me, are
actually afraid of podcasting, just tell your sources to save
it for the formal interview. Yeah. So worse, we're confirming
or in the process of confirming a time. She is.
So there. I was with hours of phone calls and

(07:53):
dozens of scheduling emails and nothing really to show for it.
But I knew the next time we talked, Yes, the
very next time, I'd finally get the goods. And then
historian Priscilla McMillan died July seven, just short of her
ninety third birthday. Fuck. When I heard the news, I

(08:14):
was sitting in my apartment in Portland, Oregon. Of course,
I was sad that this lovely and seemingly beloved woman
I've been corresponding with for months had died, but also
the overriding feeling I had at that moment was shame.
I didn't get the scoop. I'm not a podcaster, I'm
not a journalist, I'm no biographer. Sped Lana ultimately didn't

(08:36):
think Priscilla was qualified to tell her story, but to
be fair, I doubt I would have done a better job.
I don't even speak Russian. When the translation is finished,
Priscilla and sped Lana part ways. Sped Lana leaves Long
Island to spend the summer on a secluded farm in
western Pennsylvania, where she can try again to grasp that peaceful, quiet,

(08:58):
writerly life. The farm is owned by George Kennon, a
major American diplomat credited with being the architect of the
Cold War. He was also the key fixer in getting
sped Lana to the States. Speed Lana is ready to
get off the map and hang out with Kennon's daughters,
Grace and Joan. Unfortunately for us, these two women are

(09:22):
one hundred percent alive. Here's Joan. She enjoyed being out
in the country. She's so enjoyed not being harassed by people.
Joan and spent Lana became close that summer. Joan's sister,
Grace on the other hand, says she ended up tending
to speed Lana's every need and resenting her for it.
Of course, I had very little time to talk to

(09:45):
speed Lana. My dream of she and I were going
to have these long, wonderful I had brought a notebook.
I was going to write in it every night. Well,
need will say that remained empty and spent. Lana was
quite a demanding I was guest. She was a vegetarian
and wanted pair brandy and if she didn't get what

(10:05):
she wanted, And much as she liked to disconnect herself
from her father, she had some similarities. This is a
recurring theme and part of why it finds that Lana
so fascinating. She can leave people with wildly different tastes
in their mouths, like a Soviet cilantro. That summer, while

(10:25):
Grace was playing Cinderella downstairs, Speed Lana would disappear up
to her bedroom the whole third floor, to herself, sweltering
in the summer heat, as she worked on her writing.
When she'd emerged, she and Joan would simp tea on
the porch and pick vegetables in the garden, and as
Jones's kids played, Speed Lana would talk about how she

(10:46):
missed her own children terribly back in Russia. I mean,
that has to be the guilt of having left your children.
But at the same time she felt strongly she'd done
the right thing for her. But even though she has
to the Kennon Farm to privately ready her memoir for
the world and grieve her kids in peace, do you
think the American media leaves her alone. They do not.

(11:10):
At one point they said she would have been committed
to an insane asylum. Spet Lana learns from the press
that she'd warned the diamonds of the Robanoffs. She didn't,
that her father had left her riches in a Swiss
bank he hadn't, that she had partaken and quote passionate
affairs with orgies never happened. The KGB gives stet Lana

(11:31):
the nickname of Kukushka, meaning cuckoo bird, and Soviet Premier
Alexei Kosekin declares her an enemy of the state at
a u N press conference in New York. Hallelujsva is
a morally unstable person, and she's a sick person. This
time period is incredibly unnerving for spet Lana, She's getting

(11:52):
a nasty taste of the real world, and she needs
to do something about it. One afternoon on the farm,
spet Lana asks lighter fluid and goes over to the barbecue. Then,
in front of a small crowd, she dramatically throws her
passport onto the flames, declaring, I am burning my Soviet
passport in answer to lies. Every day it seems she

(12:16):
is shedding more and more of her past life. Here's grace,
and she put on a white dress. She twirled around
in the garden with a little jar, collecting fireflies. She said,
I'm free. I'm free. Free as she may be steed,

(12:36):
Lana is not in charge of the narrative. She had
wanted to be the writer of her own story, but
now she's a character for others. Not only are rumors
spreading that she's mentally imbalanced, but The New York Times
starts serializing chapters of her forthcoming memoir with sensational headlines
like how my mother killed herself and my brother dies

(12:59):
in disc race. True, the best marketing move would be
a tell all about life inside of the House of
stalin suicide, murder, abuse. But that's not the books that
Lana is writing. It's called twenty Letters to a Friend.
It's an intimate love letter to Russia, to her childhood,
the subtle growing understanding that her father was the head

(13:21):
of a horrible state. Speed Lana had given up her
children to tell the story of her family. She got
her book out to the world, but so quickly she
lost control. Now she's houseless, isolated and alone. And if
you want to know what state that leaves her in,
I can answer it for you in two words, New

(13:43):
Jersey after the break Act too. I don't consider myself
a writer. In October of nine, spent Lana grants a
rare TV interview to promote the release of her book
on National Education Television. You plan to settle down into
the home of your own before long? Oh well maybe maybe?

(14:06):
What about your future personally? Do you expect to continue writing?
Do you have another book in mind? If you started
work on another book, I didn't begin to write it,
but I'm thinking about it because I still have many
things to say and many things to write about. Although
I don't consider myself a writer, girl, I've been there

(14:28):
for years. I shied away from calling myself a writer
when people would ask me what I did. I might
say I write, but then I'd be sure to qualify
it by the jobs I had that made money, bookstore clerk,
children's birthday party host, professional frog storyteller. That's right, that's right,
frog stroke. Do you want to know why I rolled

(14:49):
my heart? Why I go? This existential anxiety even made
its way into the play I wrote about spet Lana. Well,
technically it's a play, a out a playwright writing a
play about spent Lana. Here's me and my friend Cassie
rehearsing that scene. I don't water rights player. So many

(15:24):
of us ask permission to write. It took spent Lana
forty one years to ask the world to call her
a writer, and she still couldn't even say it herself.
But still, from her book advance, she gets a bunch
of money, and with that money, spent Lana decides to
finally settle down in a home of her own. After

(15:44):
bouncing around for months, she goes for a pre furnished
house in Princeton, New Jersey. It's a smart choice. Princeton
is its own academic enclave, reminding spent Lana of her
circle of friends back in Moscow. But Princeton can also
be a cold, stuffy classes place like Tucker Carlson's asshole

(16:06):
with more bow tie. She wrote her first book in
secret in Soviet Russia. It was immediate and thrilling. Now
she's in the suburbs of New Jersey, free to do
anything she wants. It's a new kind of writer's block.
She has all the time and freedom and money that
she could ask for, but how on earth to begin? Well? Friends, Luckily,

(16:29):
there's nothing that unlocks those creative juices like fallen in love,
which is exactly what happens next. The man who captures
fet Lana's heart an American journalist named Louis Fisher. At
seventy one, Louis Fisher is thirty years older than sveet Lana.
He's written more than twenty books and rubbed elbows with

(16:51):
everyone from Ernest temming Way to Eleanor Roosevelt to Winston Churchill.
During Stalin's rise, he'd lived in Russia and worked as
a foreign correspondent. And when speed Lana meets him in Princeton,
he's coming off the high of winning a National Book
Award for the Life of Lenin. It's hardly surprising that

(17:12):
Fisher would go after speed Lana. The man was a
major Russophile, and it makes sense that speed Lana would
go after Fisher. He was, to quote Ron Burgundy, a
very big deal. In my humble opinion, Lewis and speed
Lana's relationship is bucked up and makes me mad. My
producer Alison found a bunch of speed Lana's letters to

(17:34):
Fisher at the Princeton Archives and got a little obsessed
with unpacking all of the well documented weirdness. All right, Alison,
why why are you obsessed with these letters? It feels
a little bit like walking into a room you're not
supposed to be in, Like they're very intimate. You'll see you,

(17:56):
We'll get into it. Spent Lana first meets Louis Fisher
at a dinner our party at the Kennon's Princeton home
in the fall of nineteen sixty seven. He shows her around,
takes her under his wing. He's intensely charming. It doesn't
take long for spet Lana to fall for him, and
within a few months things become pretty and dense. And
maybe we should start by just talking about the day

(18:19):
that everything changes, the day of Martin Luther King Jr's
This fassination April four, at the height of the Civil
rights movement. The Nobel Prize winning preacher was standing on
his hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was struck
by a bullet and murdered. It was the kind of
harrowing and tragic event that was violent and political and

(18:43):
deeply personal for so many, including spet Lana. And there
is a memorial in the Princeton Chapel. Louis Fisher takes
that Lana, and she writes how these big traumatic events
in life have the capacity to bondas forever in these
beautiful ways. She claims that it was like the union

(19:05):
of their souls, like that was them getting married. Here's
my friend Cassie again. She plays feed Lana in my
play and shall read speed Lana's words in this podcast.
Sitting there together, feeling together, listening to the immortal words
of old and the New Testament, I had a strange feeling.

(19:30):
It was like as if we were joined together as
never before. We were blessed in the chapel that day
by the priest Martin Luther King. It was our waiting,
the union of two souls to be always together, to

(19:51):
do only good to each other. Unfortunately, Louis Fisher does
not share it spelt Laana's intense affection. And I should
also mention Fisher had written a biography called The Life
and Death of Stalin, and now he's writing a book
about Soviet foreign relations. So is he actually interested in

(20:12):
speed Lana Alujeva or is he just using her speed?
Lana doesn't see the red blacks. She is swept up
in Louis Fisher's intellectual charm. What's more, he gives her
encouragement and validation as a writer. You have a long,
strong habit of writing for perps forty years or so.

(20:35):
That is as long as my whole life. I need help.
Your presence, even a silent one, these a great thing.
It helps in so many ways and so much. She
sees him as this mentor figure at this kind of
pivotal point in her career as a writer, and she

(20:58):
asks him for help. So she's really staking her claim
in two spots. She wants the boyfriend and she wants
the mentor. I know enough about set Lana to know
that that's not going to work out for her, because
she's been in this place looking for this combination of
affection and validation before and it didn't end well. Flashback Moscow.

(21:22):
Sixteen year old spet Lana was at a party in
the Kremlin when a successful thirty eight year old filmmaker
named Alexei Kapler asked her to dance. I wanted to
put my head on his shoulder and quietly close my eyes.
That evening we reached out to each other. We were
no longer strangers but friends, and thus began a covert,

(21:48):
chased affair between a schoolgirl and a much older artist,
exchanging forbidden books and movies, sharing their pain and loneliness,
depending on how you look at it. Kapler was set
Laana's first great love or her first great predator. Either way,
his impact on her was profound. He shaped my mind

(22:09):
as my father knew that man has stolen. He even
told me, I think you can write. In the end,
the newspapers got wind of their secret relationship, and Stalin
was apoplectic. For the first time ever, he smacked his

(22:31):
darling little sparrow. He called her a whore and a fool.
Kapler was sent to the Siberian Gulag and spent. Lana
was alone, ashamed and destroyed. So this was spent Lana's
formative early romance, one that surely colored her later relationships.
She seems to always find these types and fall for

(22:53):
them too fast. Brilliant older guys who encouraged her to
find her voice, but have their own agenda, and that
was certainly the case with Louis Fisher. I wanted to
know more about set Lana and Louis Fisher's relationship from
someone who'd seen it, so we tracked down Fisher's former assistant,
a woman by the name of Deirdre who lives in

(23:15):
the Pacific Northwest. I dialed her number and left a message.
A few days later, I got this voicemail back. Hello,
this is Deirdrew's returning your call about set Lana. I
didn't know her very well, but she was nutty as
a fruitcake, and you'd probably know from your research. Um,

(23:39):
this will probably be a very shad, painful conversation. I
hope you have time to bear with me. The whole
thing was just such a mess. Deirdre was right, this
whole thing was a mess. When we come back, it's
going to get bloody awful. Act three A pain in

(24:02):
the glass before I take us whitewater rafting down the
river of broken hearts. I want to be clear, I'm
telling you about this doomed love affair not just to gossip,
but because this episode is about spent Lana fighting to
manifest her long held dreams. In her pursuit of creativity
and authorship. Spent Lana look to mail mentors time and

(24:25):
again for guidance, and with the notable exception of her
husband Bridges Singh, who helped her smuggle or manuscript out
of Russia and into India, they always let her down.
All right back to Princeton, Spent Lana is falling hard
for her mentor slash lover, Louis Fisher, except that this
whole time Fisher is with spent Lana. The man is

(24:47):
one hundred percent married with children. And I can't say
for sure how many other women were in the picture,
but I will say that Louis Fisher seemed to collect
women like I collect troll dolls. In the nineties. I
had one dressed as a wizard. Here's Allison again, talking
about some of Fisher's raunchiest love letters. There's one letter

(25:10):
on Kama Sutra letterhead. One of my favorites is actually
quite elegant. I think the woman, and she says, come
over one afternoon and tell me how horrible you are.
Sometimes so Louis is evidently prolific, and while it seems
like everyone involved is clear eyed about what's going on,
it also seems like spet Lana really believes they have

(25:32):
something deeper, something unique in their own You do not me,
they mistress, forgive my vulgar words. Neither I ever looked
to find a lover. Were both need something else, warmth, friendship, understanding.

(25:54):
But as Fisher pulls away, spet Lana's letters get desperate, pleading.
She does don't want to see him. Wait, never mind,
she does, She's sorry, Actually no, she's not, caps lock,
exclamation points, chaotic scribbles in the margins. At one point,
things get so bad that spent Lana rights she can't
sleep without tranquilizers. All of this could lead some to

(26:17):
think that this is an unstable person, but spent Lana's
also living an unstable life. She's trying to make a
home as quickly as she can, desperate for anything that
would resemble a family. So maybe when her relationship falls apart,
it would make sense that she'd be well, a little senseless.
It's the kind of character I'm starting to understand, the

(26:39):
kind I want to write or rewrite because I'm undraft
like two and the play is supposed to go up
soon by the fall of night, things are tents. According
to Dear Droll. One evening, it all comes to a

(27:01):
head at Fisher's house. I was over at Mr Fisher's
house and it was kind enough to let me use
his bath tub. I hate showers, and it was a
big treat for me to be able to use the bathtub.
So sped Lana shows up to retrieve her letters and
other belongings, and she absolutely loses it, knocking and storming

(27:25):
on the door with sed Laana hysteric siscure. She wanted
the present's fact that she gave him. Apparently he tried
to bring it off with her, and she bust this
the door in the screen and Mr Fisher called the cops,
and I wasn't able to do much. I was in
the bathtub. Sped Lana had pounded on the front door

(27:52):
and then circled round the back and bashed in a
glass window. Her hands were covered in blood and the
cops came. The neighbors to call the cops. Great dog
in the station and booked her. And the whole thing
was just you know what, this woman could have his
duryod we buckets and the job of a cleanic I thought,

(28:17):
I thought, britt she was just so much. Talking with
Deardro was both exhilarating and uncomfortable. I wanted to know
all about set Lana's relationship with Fisher, and I think

(28:38):
I really got there. I listened to dear Drew as
she recounted this low point in set Lana's life. I
got the story. I felt like a real podcaster. I
felt proud, and now I feel guilty because it's easy
to paint set Lana as the fool her father once
accused her of being, because if you just took a

(28:59):
snapshot out of that moment sixty years ago, you'd find
a crazed Russian woman stammering, screaming at Louis Fisher, the
man who fucked her and then fucked her over. Maybe
he's feed Lana's rage is more than just for Fisher.
Maybe it comes from a lifetime of oppression, suppression, and betrayal.

(29:20):
Maybe when she bashed her fist through the window, it
was meant for all the people who encouraged her, who
helped her find her voice, and then violated her at
the same time. It's a cycle she seems to be
trapped in. But what I love about spet Lana, and
what I hope you'll love about her too, is that
she still seems to have the optimism, the openness, the

(29:43):
resilience to do it all over again. And despite everything,
she still describes these years as her happiest ones in America.
In the fall of nineteen sixte spent Lana publishes her
second book, only one year about her defection to an arca.
It's a major accomplishment, the first book she set out

(30:05):
to write with the intent to publish, the first book
to assert that she spent Lana is just as interesting
as her much beguiled father. She might be a character
in someone else's story, but damn it, she can also
write her own. She's getting what she came here for.
The world feels big and exciting. It's beckoning her no literally.

(30:32):
You see. While most of her fan mail was from normal,
ordinary Americans who were moved by the defecting daughter, there
was one admirer who was far from ordinary. It started
with one letter, then another, then another, then telegrams and

(30:52):
gifts and phone calls, all coming from a very strange,
very peculiar, very mysterious woman from the other side of
the country, a place full of wonder and majesty, a
place I like to call Scottsdale, Arizona, jess Hand. She
was calling me six months. I was course first by her.

(31:15):
I was in Princeton, and she was invitingly an invited
for six months. Finally chicolled on the telephone and I
heard her voice. We are all waiting for here on

(31:37):
the next episode of spent Lata sped Lata, sped Laana.
Sped Lana is a production of I Heard Podcasts and
the documentary group I'm Your Host Dan Controcer. The show
was written and produced by me Adam Weber, Alison Joy,
and Katherine Isaac. We also serve as executive producers at
the documentary group. Our executive producer is Job Silhouettes, with

(32:00):
production oversight by Stacy Cleeker and additional support from Tom
Yellen and Gabrielle Tennenbaum. Our I Heart team is supervising
producer Casey Pegram and executive producer Maya Howard. Editing assistants
for producers Christina Loranger and Joey Patt. Original music by
Ellen Isakov. Production counsel by Slaus eck House, Dasty Haynes Locko,

(32:22):
Clearance counsel by Ballard Spar, Back checking assistance by Megan Trout,
Research assistants by min J. Kim. Special thanks to my
husband Jordan's Siegel. Excerpts from Svetlana Aloujeva's book Twenty Letters
to a Friend are provided by Chris Evans and performed
by Cassie Greer