Word: stalinization
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...punishment. "My mother shot herself on the night of Nov. 8/9," she wrote to a friend in Britain, "and as the time comes close to that date, I begin to feel utterly bad and angry at the world." She spoke of conspiracies against her, much as Stalin had done in his time. "Something is around me, a 'bad aura,' fears, gossip, talk, two governments plotting to get rid of me simultaneously," she complained in the same letter. She stunned an elderly Russian woman, an emigre, by writing to her, "You are a KGB agent. You are a double and triple...
Still, one significant change had taken place in her. Sovietologist Leopold Labedz, who met her in 1968, first noticed it in 1981: "She was getting soft on papochka." Once she had acknowledged Stalin's personal responsibility for the death of millions; now she called him a prisoner of Communist ideology. Her new book contained hardly any criticism of her father. She probably felt she had betrayed him. "My father would have shot me for what I have done," she often said during her final year in Britain...
Meanwhile, a partial rehabilitation of Stalin was under way in the Soviet Union as the country prepared to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1945 victory over Nazi Germany. For the first time since 1956, Stalin was being praised as a strategic genius and a superb wartime commander in chief. Says Stalin Biographer Robert C. Tucker: "The Soviet authorities evidently thought it was a good time for Stalin's daughter to come home." No doubt they were aware of her emotional turmoil. Anticipating that an official emissary from Moscow would be rebuffed by Svetlana, they apparently decided...
Last month the authorities moved Svetlana out of Moscow, in an apparent effort to insulate her from contact with diplomats and other foreigners to whom she might complain. Mother and daughter were dispatched 1,000 miles south to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, not far from Stalin's birthplace. Svetlana was given a modest apartment but no car, dacha or any of the other perquisites that families of the Soviet elite enjoy...
...returned, drawn to a specter she could not elude. "It was as though my father was at the center of a black circle," she wrote in 1963. "Anyone who ventured inside vanished or perished or was destroyed in one way or another." The question is whether, three decades after Stalin's death, the circle will close around his daughter and granddaughter...