Word: stalinize
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What went wrong for the little girl whose earlier "cloudless years were a fairy tale"? Svetlana has two explanations. One is the death of her mother, for which Stalin in rage and grief punished everyone she knew. Yet Svetlana concedes that Nadya could not have lived with Stalin through the years of terror that followed 1932. Svetlana's other explanation is still more doubtful. She finds a devil. His name is Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's last and most infamous secret policeman. "A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father's name...
...Details. It is on this point that Letters to a Friend stumbles, falls, and exposes Svetlana's limitations as a chronicler. Infinitely valuable as semi-history and a source for Stalin biographers, the book really dominates its reader as a psychological study of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Torn by unresolved feelings, she is divided between apologizing for Stalin and indicting him. "I spend all my time thinking over what's happened and trying to make sense of it all. It's the kind of thing that can drive you out of your mind." She selects details oddly, noting explicitly...
...child describing some monstrous crime accidentally observed and only half understood, the special fascination of domestic detail mixed with horror and history-for instance, the dining room table around which her father habitually gathered the Politburo. Svetlana's mother shot herself after a trivial quarrel with Stalin. Her mother's relatives and intimates were victims of her father's paranoid suspicions, and "the life of almost everyone was cut short in some tragic fashion" -prison, firing squad, madness. When the Germans captured Svetlana's half brother Yakov during the war, Stalin refused to exchange...
...isolation was brutal. Stalin sur rounded his "little housekeeper" with NKVD agents and made her a prisoner shifted between Kremlin and countryside. The description of her first love affair at 17 becomes an episode in the life of a girl who for the first time since her mother's death feels the pull of approval by another human being. The man was a 40-year-old film director, Alexei Kapler. When Stalin had the whole story-telephone transcriptions, letters, trysts-he ordered Kapler arrested as a British spy, had him sentenced to ten years of exile and prison...
Devil Found. Svetlana's first child, Josef, was three before Stalin saw him. Five of his eight grandchildren he never met at all. Barely noting Svetlana's existence, he lived like an ascetic misanthrope in his dacha at Kuntsevo, the walls covered with blown-up magazine pictures of anonymous children. It was, she recalls, "A house of gloom, a somber monument. Not for anything in the world would I go there now!" And she adds, with a characteristic touch of superstition, that Stalin's soul, "so restless everywhere else," may still haunt that gloomy refuge. Svetlana last...