Word: svetlana
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such was the astonishing portrait of Joseph Stalin conveyed by his daughter, Svetlana Allilueva, in her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Svetlana has since had some second thoughts. In her latest book, Only One Year, published this week by Harper & Row, she pictures her father as a despot who brought about a bloody terror that destroyed millions of people-in sum, "a moral and spiritual monster...
...Svetlana has obviously done some reading, notably Leon Trotsky's biography of Stalin. Trotsky's devastating observations crop up in semidigested form throughout her new chapter on Stalin. No doubt it took courage for Svetlana to accept Trotsky's verdict that Stalin had created "an infernal hive of intrigues, forgeries, falsifications, surreptitious poisonings and murders." That is especially true since she had so recently regarded her father as a "victim" of the atrocities committed during his 25-year rule rather than their "author and perpetrator...
...example, it dispels the myriad rumors about the fate of Stalin's infamous secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria. One persistent story has it that he was shot or strangled by his colleagues at a meeting of the Politburo right after Stalin's death. Setting the record straight, Svetlana repeats that General A. A. Vishnevsky, chief surgeon of the Soviet Army, told her that Beria was summarily tried in 1953, held for a few days in the basement of the General Staff building in Moscow and shot there ten minutes after being sentenced...
...Svetlana also provides some revealing new vignettes about her father. At the grisly gatherings he organized at his dachas, he loved to play practical jokes on his cronies and toadies, like putting a tomato on the chair of Anastas Mikoyan. Beria, mocked by Stalin as "the Prosecutor," was a favorite butt. Stalin used to goad the police chief into getting so drunk that he often had to be carried away insensible, sometimes after vomiting in the bathroom...
Repressive Climate. Kuznetsov is the most important literary figure to defect from the Soviet Union since the end of World War II and the best known personality within Russia to flee since Svetlana Stalin left in 1967 and wrote her recollections in Twenty Letters to a Friend. Along with Yuri Kazakov and Vasily Aksenov, he ranks as one of the most widely read authors in Russia. Noted for his sparse, evocative style, he has written numerous short stories and four novels. His 1966 documentary novel, Babi Yar, which recounts the Nazi massacre of thousands of Russian Jews outside the author...