Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...less an authority on the Russian psyche than Leo Tolstoy wrote: "All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Last week the nation was witness to a touching insight into the happiness and unhappiness of one Russian family - that of Dictator Joseph Stalin, whose only daughter, third and last child and sole surviving offsprinig, Svetlana Allilueva Stalina, 42, recently dissociated herself from both Communism and the chance catastrophe of her birth...
...said Svetlana in her clumsy but barely accented English, "because he was also for me the authority which could not be-well. I loved him, I respected him, and when he was gone I have lost maybe a lot of faith." She lost a lot more as well: after Stalin's death in 1953 and his denunciation before the 20th Party Congress of 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev, Svetlana became an extension of the Stalin era and thus a liability to the Soviet leadership. "I had perhaps something what can be named as a privileged life," she said wryly...
Would you believe: That during World War II the Allies were warned weeks in advance of the blitzkrieg invasions of Poland, Holland, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway and Denmark? That Stalin received a verbatim plan of "Operation Barbarossa"-the crushing German push into Russia-more than a month before it happened? And that nobody in Moscow or The Hague or Whitehall or Washington did anything about those warnings...
Despite her aversion to politics, Svetlana was the person closest to Stalin during the last decade of his rule. It was a strange relationship, for the two had little in common. In looks and tem perament, Svetlana took after her mother, Nadezhda Allilueva, who was shot to death in 1932 shortly after an argument with Stalin. Like her mother, Svetlana was a free soul in a society fettered by her father, and has even adopted her mother's maiden name (she calls herself Svetlana Allilueva). As Stalin's daughter, she was, as she put it last week...
...Svetlana turned the manuscript over to the U.S. State Department. State passed it on to former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow George Kennan, a Russian scholar who is at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. Kennan was impressed. Svetlana's memoirs, he found, are not an expose of Stalin's sins but a "literary and philosophical document" of human reaction to the Stalin era. He telephoned Washington to offer his services to Svetlana as a private citizen. He also called his neighbor in Princeton, Edward S. Greenbaum, 77, a literary lawyer whose most celebrated recent victory had been...