Russians: Hello There, Everybody

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On the way to Switzerland seven weeks ago, Svetlana turned the manuscript over to the U.S. State Department. State passed it on to former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow George Kennan, a Russian scholar who is at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Kennan was impressed. Svetlana's memoirs, he found, are not an expose of Stalin's sins but a "literary and philosophical document" of human reaction to the Stalin era. He telephoned Washington to offer his services to Svetlana as a private citizen. He also called his neighbor in Princeton, Edward S. Greenbaum, 77, a literary lawyer whose most celebrated recent victory had been on behalf of Author William Manchester's Death of a President. With the approval of the State Department, both men flew to Switzerland to talk to Svetlana at her secret retreat.

Car & Dog. They found Svetlana a receptive, if innocent, child. She had never had a bank account, had no idea that she would need a lawyer to protect her interests. All she hoped for from her manuscript was enough money to buy a car and a dog—a "gypsy" dog, she said, like her. Returning to New York, Greenbaum had no trouble landing her a contract with Harper & Row that would give her much more than car and dog: her book will be published in October, after serialization in LIFE and the New York Times, and Svetlana plans to donate some of the proceeds to charities in India. With the details worked out, she telephoned her children in Moscow, then started preparations to come to the U.S.

Before her arrival, however, Kennan had a few words to say. Svetlana Stalina, he said, is not a " 'defector' in the usual cold war sense." Rather, she is a person "whose interests are literary and humane. She loves her country and hopes, with her writing and her activity outside Russia, to bring benefit to it, and not harm."

Svetlana can hardly avoid becoming something of a celebrity in the U.S. Although elaborate security measures were taken to keep her hidden during her first few days in the U.S., it took newsmen less than a day to track her down. Svetlana was staying at the home of Long Island Socialite Stuart Johnson, whose daughter Priscilla is the translator of her book, and she apparently had no intention of staying out of sight entirely. Hardly had she arrived at the Johnson home when she set out on foot for a look around town.