A DICTATOR’S DAUGHTER

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31542, 2 December 1967, Page 4

A DICTATOR’S DAUGHTER

Twenty Letter* To A Friend. By Svetlana Alliluyeva. 24S pp.

Family chronicles contain the stuff of which history is made, says Stalin’s daughter in her long-awaited book—and there is no doubt that these beautifully written recollections will show a terrible and ruthless epoch in Russia’s history in a new light Gentle, modest and unassuming, Svetlana Alliluyeva brings to her writing a refreshing impression of truthfulness and sincerity with,

here and there, glimpses of an author with a mind and will of steel. It will be a varied and untidy tale, she warns us, and it will pour out unexpectedly, for this was what her life was like. The reader (the letters were originally written to a friend in Moscow and later smuggled out to India) is invited into the lonely country dacha where she sits writing, as hikers from the Russian capital pass by her window seeking fresh air and the beauty of the forest; and as she sits there amongst her snapshots from the past, from her pen flows a kaleidoscope of memories, rich in personalities who surrounded the key figure in a historic era.

The first letter recalls , Stalin on hit deathbed with , Svetlana loving her father more tenderly than ever before, regretting her lapses as a daughter for, she recalls, he had done his best to love her and she owed him for good things as well as bad. Malenkov, Bulganin and Khrushchev are among those in tears and the servants take their leave of their master, showing genuine grief and emotion, for she says, in little thing*, he was not hard to please—on the contrary he was courteous, unassuming and direct with those who waited on him. None had bullying or harshness to complain of and none bad ever been refused help when it was sought “They loved and respected him for the most ordinary human qualities, those qualities of which servants are the best judges of all.” A* Svetlana look* back on 27 year* with her father, there are revealing glimpses of the dictator in his home surroundings as few ever saw him. We see him wandering through the grounds of one of his many dachas, taking a pair of shears and pruning a twig or two—this is the extent of bis gardening but he loves to see fruits and blossoms in abundance. We find Stalin hunting hares from a ear at night?—he had a sharp eye for night shooting but did not swim or like sitting in the sun; the one thing he did enjoy was to go walking in the shade of the woods; but even this quickly bored him and he preferred stretching out in a deck chair in a . favourite spot with a book 1 and his official paper* or the newspapers.

And then there is Stalin sitting at table, long after the meal is over, talking with guests by the hour—he did not eat much himself but insisted on an abundance on the table for he liked to sit and watch others eat We hear of his hatred of perfume: the only fragranee that was becoming to a

woman was her own freshness and cleanliness.

Although her mother died when she was six, Svetlana looks back on these very early years as the happiest of her life, with her mother exerting a loving and gentle influence over the whole household. “Papa” was the one who spoiled her, with her mother firm and aloof, rarely at home but anxious that her children should be well educated and their time well filled. Svetlana recalls her sixth birthday party when she and her Kremlin playmates recited verse* in Russian and German and satirical couplets about shock-workers and political double dealers. Yet the overall picture of her mother is of a beautiful, kind, tender person, the power of good in the family and it is her mother’s name which Svetlana ha* now taken as her own.

With her mother's death this carefree life, full of gaiety and games and useful pastime*, fell apart Gradually over the years, all the people connected with Stalin’s wife vanished—all mementoes of her disappeared from the Kremlin apartment and suddenly Stalin seemed very remote from the circle of family and friends. The death of his wife was a crushing blow and destroyed his faith in his friends and people in general He regarded Nadya’s suicide as a betrayal, a stab in the back. Svetlana gives some vivacious pen portraits of the relations and friends who made up the household, but a terrible destiny awaits each one of this boisterous, happy family. Fortunately, she has her beloved nurse to cushion her against all the arrests and disappearances, protecting her with love, gentleness and kindness from the world outside. “We weren’t even aware that everything around us was being shattered,” she says. These years too have left Svetlana with a memory that her father loved her and tried to be a father to her and bring her up the best he knew how. Every evening she would leave her studies to sit on her father’s right at the dinner table and listen to the grown-ups talking, often later accompanying them all to the films and the theatre. Svetlana has memories of her father tiptoeing into her room to kiss her goodnight as she lay sleeping. Svetlana recalls that after the outbreak of war, Stalin became irritable and busy, with no time for her and they became alienated and drifted apart But it was not until she learned from a foreign magazine that her mother had actually taken her own life that her attitude to her father changed and she had the first doubts as to whether he was

always right. Her friendship with the writer Kapler ended with Kapler’s imprisonment and resulted in estrangement from her father. He did not protest when she married a Jewish- fellow-student, Grigory Moroeov, and wa< affectionate with his grandson, but was pleased- when there was a divorce and his attitude towards her softened for a little while, but not for long—“I was a source of irritation to him and hadn't turned out. th* way he hoped at all.”

A holiday together at Sochi was not a success, a* Svetlana could not adjust to her father's timetable of sleeping half the day, having'a meal at three in the afternoon, and dinner at ten in the* evening and then sitting up half, the night at the dinner table with Iris colleagues; and also father add daughter seemed to have nothing to say to each other. Svetlana observed that he had aged, and soon after she sense* hi* loneliness, for on learning of her projected marriage to Andrei Zhanov, it seemed a* if Stalin wanted them to go and Bve with him. “He was so isolated from everyone by this time, so elevated, that he seemed to be living in a vacuum. He hadn’t a soul he could talk, to." And then at the end of 1948 there were new arrests and Svetlana’s two much-loved aunts were put in prison—“He saw enemies everywhere. It had reached the point of being pathological, of persecution mania, and it was all a result of being lonely and desolate." Svetlana knew that her father’s opinion of people could be manipulated and observes how astonishingly helpless he was in the face of the infamous Berta’s machinations. “All-powerful as he was, he was impotent in the face of the frightful system that had grown up around him like a huge honeycomb and he was helpless to destroy it or bring it under control.” However, she insists that neither she, nor anyone else living, has the right to judge him and appeals for the judging to be done by future Russian generations—she predicts that they will turn over this page In their country’s history with a feeling of pain, contrition and bewilderment, but points out that good was hidden where no-one thought to look for it and that it never died out or disappeared completely. After all the drama of her defection to the United States, the publicity surrounding her book and the ensuing copyright battles, Svetlana Alliluyeva has given the world a unique masterpiece, written with quality and depth. The translation, by Priscilla Johnson, appears to be excellent and there Is a useful section of translator’s notes.