Another of her targets is Alexander Solzhenitsyn who, she writes, reminds her of the Ayatollah Khomeini. "He would like to arrive there [Russia] one day to be greeted by crowds: then to start ‘liquidating' his enemies right and left, banning every fresh influence from the ‘corrupt West', all that..."

 Of spies, she says: "To learn from a spy what politics ought to be, is like learning from Germaine Greer — she also changed sides — about motherhood." Nor does her American husband, W. W. Peters, come out well. He, with his adult son, went through such money as her publisher had allowed her in "only one year"; meanwhile "they were too lazy to read a book with this title" (her Only One Year). However, she ended up with a "bright, beautiful American daughter...quite a treasure to have. So I do not complain."

When I finally showed her the text of our interview (it was well over 3,000 words long) Svetlana wrote a charming, grateful letter. She was particularly pleased with the part about her mother, Nadya Alliluyeva, who killed herself when Svetlana was a child: "It was disappointment, profound disappointment in many things, not only in her husband, but in many things...Her suicide was immediately hushed up...She had left a letter which was deeply reproachful, a J'accuse kind of thing, which everyone around thought was so awful that it was destroyed immediately. Later the official version of her death was even worse — that she was somehow insane or unbalanced...I am now 58, and she died at 31, so that from this perspective she is a young beautiful woman, almost like my child, and I keep thinking about her...she grows in my eyes, with every year and every decade, into an absolutely heroic figure...I never admired my father in the same way."  

After the publication of the interview on March 25, however, Svetlana became increasingly agitated. For a start, she objected strongly to the photograph (by the Observer's well-known photographer Jane Bown) — "that pitiful (and ugly) photo" — and to the headline ("Between Two Worlds"): "poor old lady between the two worlds and all alone..." She also worried that she would be quoted out of context and be made to look like a peacenik or a CND supporter.