Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...scratch of a pen that grated Stalin could prove mortal to its author, and Ilya Ehrenburg set out to safeguard himself from an early, flowered grave. Survive he did, earning the epithet of panderer and opportunist from his detractors. Ehrenburg survived not only the Revolution (he published his first books of poems while the Czar was still on his throne) but all the turns and terrors of successive Soviet regimes...
...Loving Father." Readers may well wonder what the Soviets were worried about. Svetlana remembers Daddy as a "loving father who gave out tobacco-smelling kisses" and wrote kind letters promising his daughter pomegranates from the Black Sea coast. She tries to dispose of the old rumor that Stalin murdered her mother, who was his second wife. They had a little quarrel at a Kremlin banquet in honor of the 15th anniversary of the November revolution, Svetlana concedes, but she insists that her mother shot herself that evening. "The fact is," says Svetlana, "that Stalin himself never killed anything...
...said, because crowds would gather and applaud "with mouth open, the fools." He pouted when he saw wives of Soviet officials in foreign dress. He complained, "I can't breathe in here," when he smelled perfume in a room. After his eldest son, Yasha, bungled a suicide attempt, Stalin shouted: "Missed, you great fool!" He slapped Svetlana twice across the face when, at 17, she fell in love with a middle-aged Jewish dramatist. His spies trailed her when she wandered with boy friends through Moscow streets during World War II looking for a secluded place in which...
...Ghastly Death." Was Stalin, at 73, the victim of a doctors' plot, as some people still believe? Svetlana says no. In fact, she writes, he was so fearful of a conspiracy that, in 1953, in the last months of his life he banned doctors from the Kremlin and treated himself with doses of iodine. Svetlana was at her father's bedside in his final three days. In the last twelve hours, his breathing reflexes numbed by the spreading hemorrhage, he slowly, painfully choked to death. It was, writes Svetlana, a "ghastly death. I felt like a good...
That was the way Stalin's death was reported at the time. As for the rest of Svetlana's reminiscences about him, far more damaging facts have been freely published before...