Word: fatherness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...daughter of a Baptist minister, she was raised by a widowed seamstress when the burden of nine children became too much for her father. After a teen-age marriage and divorce, she determined to seek a higher education. She worked her way through all-black Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., as a dishwasher and laundress, and financed her law studies at the University of Wisconsin with jobs as a library assistant and nurse's aide. In 1952 and 1953 she studied international law at London University...
Only two years ago she reminisced tenderly about her father, who called her his "little sparrow" when she was young and showered her with baby-talking letters. He was "courteous, unassuming and direct" to his underlings. His servants "loved and respected him for the most ordinary human qualities." Many of the misdeeds that had been committed in his time were due to the intrigues of others...
Such was the astonishing portrait of Joseph Stalin conveyed by his daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, in her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Svetlana has since had some second thoughts. In her latest book, Only One Year, published this week by Harper & Row, she pictures her father as a despot who brought about a bloody terror that destroyed millions of people-in sum, "a moral and spiritual monster...
...semidigested form throughout her new chapter on Stalin. No doubt it took courage for Svetlana to accept Trotsky's verdict that Stalin had created "an infernal hive of intrigues, forgeries, falsifications, surreptitious poisonings and murders." That is especially true since she had so recently regarded her father as a "victim" of the atrocities committed during his 25-year rule rather than their "author and perpetrator...
Svetlana also provides some revealing new vignettes about her father. At the grisly gatherings he organized at his dachas, he loved to play practical jokes on his cronies and toadies, like putting a tomato on the chair of Anastas Mikoyan. Beria, mocked by Stalin as "the Prosecutor," was a favorite butt. Stalin used to goad the police chief into getting so drunk that he often had to be carried away insensible, sometimes after vomiting in the bathroom...