Excerpt from Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Though outwardly cool, Rayle himself was deeply anxious. He was convinced that, as soon as they discovered her missing, the Soviets would definitely insist that she be handed over. If she was discovered at the airport, the Indian police would arrest her, and there would be nothing he could do. He felt the consequences for her would be grave. Execution would have been the old Stalinist style, but her father had been dead fourteen years. Still, the current Soviet government took a hard line on defectors, and imprisonment was always a possibility. When the classical dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961, he was sentenced in absentia to seven years' hard labor. In Rayle's mind must also have been the recent trials of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. In 1966 they'd been sentenced to labor camps for their "anti-Soviet" writings, and they were still languishing there. The Kremlin would not risk a public trial of Svetlana, but she might disappear into the dark reaches of some psychiatric institution. Svetlana, too, must have had this in mind. Sinyavsky was an intimate friend. At least she knew that, were she apprehended, she would never be allowed out of the Soviet Union again.

The Qantas flight to Rome landed punctually, but Rayle's relief soon turned to dread as he heard the announcement that the flight would be delayed. The plane had developed mechanical difficulties. The two sat in the departure lounge waiting as minutes turned to hours. Rayle looked at Svetlana. She, too, had begun to be agitated. To cope with the mounting tension, Rayle got up periodically to check the arrivals desks. He knew that the regular Aeroflot flight from Moscow arrived at 5:00 a.m. and a large delegation from the Soviet Embassy always came to greet the diplomatic couriers and the various dignitaries arriving or departing. Members of the Aeroflot staff were already beginning to open their booth. Finally, the departure for Rome was announced. At 2:45 a.m. the Qantas flight for Rome was airborne at last.

As they were in midair, a cable about the defector arrived at the American Embassy in New Delhi. In Washington Donald Jameson, who served as CIA liaison officer to the State Department, had informed Deputy Undersecretary of State Foy Kohler of the situation. Kohler's reaction was stunning—he exploded: "Tell them to throw that woman out of the embassy. Don't give her any help at all." Kohler had recently served as American ambassador to the USSR and believed that he had personally initiated a thaw in relations with the Soviets. He didn't want the defection of Stalin's daughter, especially coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, muddying the waters. When the embassy staff read the flash cable rejecting Svetlana's appeal for asylum, they replied, "You're too late. They've gone. They're on their way to Rome."

The staff failed to check the status of the Qantas flight. Had they discovered that Svetlana and Rayle were sitting for almost two hours in the airport lounge and could have been recalled, Svetlana would have been driven back to the embassy and "kicked out." The whole course of her life would have gone very differently. But Svetlana's life always seemed to dangle on a thread, and chance or fate sent her one way rather than another. She would come to call herself a gypsy. Stalin's daughter, always living in the shadow of her father's name, would never find a safe place to land.

From Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan Copyright © 2015 by Rosemary Sullivan. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.