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Svetlana Alliluyeva as Witness of Stalin - Svetlana Alliluyeva, Dvadtsat’ pisem k drugu. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1967. Pages vii, 216. $8.50. - Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1967. Pages ix, 246. $5.95.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Robert C. Tucker
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Review Article
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Slavic Review , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , June 1968 , pp. 296 - 312
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1968

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References

1 The book was written in July and August 1963 at Zhukovka, near Moscow. After coming abroad, the author added a number of footnotes in the process of preparing the manuscript for the press. In a few instances I have rendered the text in my own translation, but all parenthetical page references are to the English-language edition.

2 Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (New York, 1960), p. 5.

3 A. S. Allilueva, Vospominaniia (Moscow, 1946). Nina Bam, mentioned in the book as the person responsible for the “literary editing,” is identified by Svetlana Alliluyeva as ghostwriter of the book. 4 The view that “indifference” or “being in complete control over one's feelings” is a Bolshevik character trait has been advanced by Nathan Leites on the basis of a content study of Bolshevik and other Russian writings, including a 1923 statement by Stalin, “I am a person who is not apt to be carried away.” Leites further hypothesized that “in the transition from a Lenin to a Stalin, and from a Stalin to a Malenkov, the completeness and ease of such indifference has probably sharply increased” (A Study of Bolshevism [Santa Monica, 1953], pp. 186, 187).

5 The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism: A Selection of Documents, edited by the Russian Institute, Columbia University (New York, 1956), pp. 57, 62.

6 “K voprosu o natsional'nostiakh ili ob ‘avtonomizatsii, ’ Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow, 1964), XLV, 357.

7 Deutscher, p. 240. Deutscher does add that “whatever his motives, the practical effects of his doings were the same as if he had acted from Russian chauvinism” (p. 241). But quite a few of Stalin's actions, particularly after the war, will be differently interpreted and explained depending on whether we see him simply as a centralizer or as a Russian nationalist. The issue of motive cannot be dismissed as insignificant.

8 Mrs. Alliluyeva suggests a different explanation: Iakov's “gentleness and composure were irritating to my father, who was quick-tempered and impetuous even in his later years” (p. 159). The feelings that drove Stalin to reject his first-born son may, of course, have been numerous as well as complex.

9 The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, pp. 40, 59.

10 Elsewhere in the book, commenting on a postwar conversation in which her father spoke with her frankly about her mother's suicide, Mrs. Alliluyeva writes that it made her feel “as though he had complete—well, not quite complete—trust in me” (p. 194). The qualification seems very significant.

11 She allows that there may have been political disagreements between Stalin and his brothers-in-law, but withholds judgment for lack of knowledge of the facts. By chance, one relevant fact has recently come out in the purge memoir of Galina Serebriakova, Smerch, which has been published in the West. There Serebriakova recalls a personal conversation at her dacha in 1936 with Alexander Svanidze, who said of Stalin: “I never really considered him a revolutionary, and I have told him this more than once to his face. Koba doesn't love the people; he despises them. His ambition may cost the party dear” (Novoe Russkoe Slovo, Dec. 8, 1967, p. 4).

12 The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, p. 69. Although no one could have visualized the concrete facts of the relation between Stalin and Beria without access to the kind of historical information that Mrs. Alliluyeva now provides, it is of interest that, at the time, at least one important Western observer grasped the situation in its essential contours. In a still unpublished paper written from the American Embassy in Moscow soon after the end of World War II, the then Minister-Counselor, George Kennan, pointed out Stalin's dependence upon members of his entourage and cautioned against a tendency to see all Soviet acts and decisions as emanating from him alone. The Kennan paper drew particular attention to Beria and Malenkov as the two individuals in Kremlin circles best able to make their influence felt in many areas of Soviet policy, including foreign relations. I am indebted to Professor Kennan for access to this paper, which will, I hope, be published in the near future.

13 Ordzhonikidze died on February 18, 1937. In Twenty Letters (where the date is given incorrectly) the account of it is otherwise basically consistent with Khrushchev's: “Aspersions were cast on him in an effort to make bad blood between him and my father. It was too much for him, and in February 1936 he shot himself (p. 139). On the same page Mrs. Alliluyeva expresses the suspicion that Ordzhonikidze's death resulted from machinations of Beria.

14 For Deutscher's view see Stalin: A Political Biography, pp. 355, 357. For Nicolaevsky's, as well as the Bukharin account in “Letter of an Old Bolshevik,” see Nicolaevsky, B. I., Power and the Soviet Elite (New York, 1965), Chaps. 1-2Google Scholar. Khrushchev's statements appear in The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, pp. 85-26, and XXII s“ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza 17-31 oktiabria 1961 goda: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1962), II, 583-84.

15 XVII s“ezd Vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (b) 36 ianvaria-10 fevralia 1934 g.: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1934), p. 652.

16 The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, pp. 84-85. The statement concerning Molotov's endangered position is consistent with Mrs. Alliluyeva's footnote comment that Molotov was “out of things” after his wife's arrest in 1949. She does not indicate that Mikoyan too was in special danger. Rather, she mentions him, along with Beria, Malenkov, and Bulganin, as the “usual people” at Stalin's dinner table toward the end, with Khrushchev appearing “from time to time.” However, Mikoyan himself, speaking to Louis Fischer at a Moscow diplomatic reception in 1956, said: “Only one escape was left to us—what Ordzhonikidze did when he committed suicide. I stood before the same decision. And at the end of Stalin's life I was about to be executed” (Louis Fischer, Russia Revisited [New York, 1957], p. 71).

17 The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism, p. 63. In a brief comment on the doctors’ affair based upon a conversation after Stalin's death with his longtime housekeeper, Valentina Istomina, Mrs. Alliluyeva says that Istomina recalled waiting on the table when the Timashuk letter was being discussed and overhearing Stalin express doubt of the doctors’ dishonesty, as Timashuk's denunciations were the only evidence against them. She adds that the housekeeper “is biased” and “doesn't want the least little shadow to fall on my father's name” (p. 207). This account of Stalin's reaction to the Timashuk letter is in contradiction to that given by Khrushchev in the secret speech. There are various reasons for taking his version as the correct one. It is difficult, in any event, to see how the letter could have been acted upon without Stalin's acquiescence.

18 For an interpretation of these political purposes, particularly the ones having to do with foreign policy, see “The Stalin Heritage in Soviet Policy,” in R. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind (New York, 1963), esp. pp. 27-31.