I had a great deal of sympathy both with her independence of spirit and with her precarious position in England. I wrote back to say that I quite understood her reluctance to do an interview, but asked her to get in touch if she changed her mind again. I'm not sure what happened next — I seem to have lost some of her letters — but a few weeks later, in mid-February 1984, she came for lunch at my house to do the interview.

I felt very apprehensive before meeting Svetlana. The idea of a murderous tyrant's daughter coming to lunch at my home was bizarre in the extreme. In the event, I took to her as soon as she came through the front door. She was an attractive woman, neatly dressed, polite and forthright. She was also formidably intelligent and articulate, despite her imperfect English.

As she had indicated, she spent much of the interview talking about the threat of nuclear war and the irrelevance of the past. As far as she was concerned, "the tremendous influence, today, of the military, the way in which military concepts take over from everything else, means that you almost have a totalitarian regime in America too." When I asked her whether she didn't nevertheless find the West a freer place, she did concede that  "of course it is freer. You can do this, you can do that — especially if you have money. People can travel, they can have a house, they can have a car." What about political freedom? What about the KGB and the legacy of the Gulag? I asked. "Yes, many terrible things have happened in the Soviet Union, but so they have to some degree or other in most parts of the world."

Luckily, I did get her to talk about other things, her mother, her life in America and even a few words about Stalin: "Over me my father's shadow hovers, no matter what I do or say."