Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nearly 18 years ago, Joseph Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West bearing an astonishing message. At a New York City press conference that was televised around the world, and later in two books, the child of one of modern history's most brutal tyrants repudiated her father and Communism, while affirming her faith in God and freedom. Svetlana's defection was more than a propaganda coup for the West: it was a symbolic event in the moral imagination of millions of people. The child of the man who stood accused of having killed more people than...
...feverish enthusiasm for people and places could quickly turn into disappointment and recrimination, as evidenced by a trail of broken friendships and angry words. In retrospect, it seems clear that her ultimate quarrel was with her father, whom she fatefully resembled. As she once said about the Soviet people, Stalin's "shadow still stands over all of us. It still dictates to us, and we very often obey." The story of Svetlana's life is the chronicle of her losing battle with the specter of her father...
...architect's widow perceived Stalin's daughter as a mystical representative, possibly even the reincarnation, of her own daughter, who had died in an auto accident in 1946. Mrs. Wright, a disciple of the Russian-born mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, was spellbound by some coincidences between the living and the dead. Her daughter, by an earlier marriage in Russia, had also been named Svetlana; moreover, she had been born in Georgia, the region from which Svetlana Alliluyeva's father hailed. Somehow it followed in Mrs. Wright's mind that Stalin's daughter should marry the first Svetlana's widower, William Wesley...
Hart's ruminations are impossible to consider serously, particularly because he paints liberals so monochromatically. They support Russia over the United States, minorities over whites, left-wing authoritarianism over capitalist democracy. They think that Stalin's murder of 30 million Soviet citizens was "unfortunate." They consider the Soviet Union not an "enemy" but an "alternative political system." Hart's portrayal of liberals doctrine is, like his description of the rallies, so skewed that any liberal men he knocks down are 100 percent straw-filled...
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin chose Ustinov, who was then 33 years old and the director of Leningrad's Bolshevik Arms Factory, to supervise the evacuation of the defense industry to the east of the Ural Mountains. Stalin later rewarded Ustinov, whom he called "the Red-head," with the Soviet Union's highest civilian honor: Hero of Socialist Labor...