A few days later, her anger turned against me: "I am outraged with the photo — as any woman would be — from that angle even Liz Taylor would look ugly. But you are telling me that the picture is nice. Please, stop talking to me as if I am a little girl...Thank you for letting me get some of my views to the public. But together with this [the photo], the public got the wrong impression of my supposed loneliness — and now ladies and gents are pushing to be friends. How sickening. It always impresses me how secure, protected, hidden and above it all YOU media people are: you know how to guard yourselves from any possible distortions...You do not understand. Freedom is inside...you do not understand that because your talk was all about democracy, Gulag, cliché things."

So our relationship deteriorated. This process had already started when, just before the interview was published, I had declined an invitation to visit her in Cambridge — I was too busy at the time. But I always liked her. Though her experiences in America had clearly warped her judgment about life in the West, it is difficult to imagine that anyone else would have reacted very differently. Of course she was volatile and took offence easily, but she was at the same time honest and proud — she hated the thought that anyone might pity her. Her grievances about the photograph and even about the headline, and certainly about the media, were not unjustified. 

Also, she was generous-hearted. In her last letter to me she quotes a "special" friend in Moscow, someone who had gone through "all the circles of hell". He told her that he divided all human beings into two large categories: the harmless; and those who are harmful. Nothing else mattered. "You", she wrote, "certainly are among the harmless ones...I enjoyed knowing you. Making an interview with someone you've never met is always a difficult thing." She was a remarkable woman — all the more so, of course, when you consider her extraordinary and tragic background. 

Later that year, to the accompaniment of great fanfare from the Soviet authorities, Svetlana returned to Russia, taking her young daughter with her. It was a year before the beginnings of glasnost, but she had sensed its approach. Somewhere in the Soviet Union, she had told me, a person like Dubcek, "that brave Czech apparatchik", would emerge. She came back to America two years later.