Word: svetlana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina was always the apple of her father's eye-but what an eye it was! Her dad was Iosif Stalin, and Svetlana was among the very few to whom he ever showed any real tenderness. In notes to her, full of fatherly affection, Stalin signed himself "Papochka" (little daddy). Even though he objected to her choice of a husband in 1951, the Soviet dictator staged a $500,000 czarist-style marriage feast that went on for two weeks, and was kept afloat by gallons of pink Crimean champagne, sweet Armenian brandy and vodka. But, after Stalin...
Before the week was out, the short, slightly dowdy defector, now 41, had become a major international incident. In Moscow, where Svetlana left a 21-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, Kremlin officials stewed angrily, kept any mention of the defection out of the official press and radio. In Washington, the State Department was just as embarrassed, fearing that the incident would jeopardize its chances for better relations with Russia and interfere with delicate discussions on Viet Nam and the pending treaties on nuclear proliferation and consular exchange...
Some Second Thoughts. The strange saga of Svetlana actually began in December when the Russians gave her permission to fly to New Delhi with the ashes of her late lover Brajesh Singh, a member of a distinguished Indian political family and a Communist who had worked at a Soviet publishing house. In India, Svetlana visited the Singh family, scattered her companion's remains on the waters of the Ganges. Then, one day last week, she quietly slipped into the American embassy and flabbergasted American officials by requesting asylum...
Without a word to the world, Svetlana received a U.S. visa and an air ticket. Traveling as "S. Allilueva"-her mother's maiden name-she flew on to Rome, accompanied by Embassy Second Secretary Robert Rayle. Then suddenly the story broke, and reporters and photographers turned out in force. Searching for Svetlana, they staked out the U.S. embassy, the airport, Rome's Cavalieri Hilton Hotel and the home of U.S. Ambassador G. Frederick Reinhardt. But Svetlana was nowhere to be found, and Washington, which was be ginning to have second thoughts about the whole affair, was keeping quiet...
...Light on History. As the person closest to Stalin during much of his brutal, 30-year reign, Svetlana could well shed much light on shrouded facets of Soviet political history. She was just a young girl when Stalin launched his bitter purge of the 1930s. Even after Stalin's death she was close to the men who ran the Kremlin-until the mid-1950s, when Khrushchev suddenly launched his destalinization program. It was possibly the Soviet's destalinization, in fact, that prompted Svetlana to defect. No one, of course, could be sure. Like almost everything connected with...