Word: svetlana
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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...
Last October Svetlana returned to the Soviet Union, taking her American-born daughter Olga, 13, with her. Once again her action could be seen as symbolic, signifying, perhaps, some basic failure of Western values. She told a press conference in Moscow that she had not known "one single day" of freedom in the West. She declared that she had come back to the Soviet Union to rejoin the two children she had left behind in 1967. But her earlier denunciations of the Bolshevik revolution ("a fatal, tragic mistake"), her father ("a moral and spiritual monster"), the Soviet system ("profoundly corrupt...
What had gone wrong for Svetlana in the West? Why did she return to the country she had fled in abhorrence? The answers are multifaceted, even contradictory, like Svetlana's personality as it gradually and painfully revealed itself during her sojourn in the West...
Judging from interviews with many people who knew her in the U.S., where she lived from 1967 to 1982, and in Britain, where she spent the past two years, Svetlana was an often charming but restless, unhappy and quarrelsome woman. Her 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...
Whatever Stalin's daughter [WORLD, Nov. 12] may have said or done in the past, Svetlana's return to the U.S.S.R. is a case of giving up freedom for love of grandchildren...