Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...Senator recollects. Overpowered, Svetlana tried to persuade Peters to leave Taliesin West, where he had worked since 1932 as Wright's disciple and chosen successor. Peters temporized, and after 20 months of marriage, Svetlana stormed out, cursing Mrs. Wright and all that she represented with a wrath that recalled Stalin's. Taliesin West, "with all its horrible modern architecture," Svetlana said, should be burned to the ground...
...picked her up to comfort her. But her mother started smacking her on the bottom for falling down." Olga's upbringing was almost a case study of how some parents tend to reenact with their own offspring what they suffered as children. Svetlana's mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, whom Stalin married in 1919, had been a harsh disciplinarian. When Svetlana damaged a tablecloth with scissors, her mother hit her repeatedly on the hands. Nadezhda committed suicide when Svetlana was six, leaving her daughter's discipline to Stalin...
...Svetlana remembered her papochka, Stalin was tender with her in her early childhood, bestowing "loud moist kisses" and calling her "little sparrow." But as she reached adolescence, he became incensed by her independent spirit. He berated her for the "insolence" on her face. He made a scene when he found her wearing a tight sweater. He hated the sight of her in short skirts and made her wear hers much longer than other schoolgirls did. When he learned that she had a lover, he slapped her twice across the face...
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...