Books: Witness to Evil

TWENTY LETTERS TO A FRIEND by Svef-lana Alliluyeva, translated from the Russian by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. 256 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

She lived in a castle and her father was a loving but stern king. Then her mother, like a beautiful young queen, suddenly died. All the jolly relatives disappeared. The nice servants left, and the new ones carried guns. Gradually she grew up, puzzled and estranged. The king turned into a distant ogre, the castle into a dungeon, and life into hell. Much later, no longer a princess but still a Little girl at the age of 37, she tried to remember what had happened. She wrote it all down in 35 days as a group of letters. And it was surely the darkest and most poignant princess story ever told. For never before was there a king like evil Joseph Stalin and a princess as sweet and troubled as Svetlana Alliluyeva.

“Maybe when I’ve written it all down,” Stalin’s only surviving child says, “an unbearable burden of some kind will fall from my shoulders at last and then my real life will begin.” What she has written down is a family chronicle of sorrowful revelations and pastoral reminiscences, a series of personal footnotes to a convulsion of history. Now 41 and living in the U.S., she will be remembered as one of the great witnesses to loneliness amidst power, to innocence amidst corruption.

Natural Eloquence. Despite the serialization and advance publicity that detailed much of Svetlana’s story, there is a cumulative impact in the book that compels renewed attention. It has the special effect of a child describing some monstrous crime accidentally observed and only half understood, the special fascination of domestic detail mixed with horror and history—for instance, the dining room table around which her father habitually gathered the Politburo. Svetlana’s mother shot herself after a trivial quarrel with Stalin. Her mother’s relatives and intimates were victims of her father’s paranoid suspicions, and “the life of almost everyone was cut short in some tragic fashion” —prison, firing squad, madness. When the Germans captured Svetlana’s half brother Yakov during the war, Stalin refused to exchange him for a Nazi general and Yakov was executed. Svetla na’s brother Vasily, an air force lieutenant general at 24, became an alcoholic and an embezzler and’ died a ruin. In telling all this, she shows a natural eloquence only occasionally marred by sentimentality.

Her isolation was brutal. Stalin sur rounded his “little housekeeper” with NKVD agents and made her a prisoner shifted between Kremlin and countryside. The description of her first love affair at 17 becomes an episode in the life of a girl who for the first time since her mother’s death feels the pull of approval by another human being. The man was a 40-year-old film director, Alexei Kapler. When Stalin had the whole story—telephone transcriptions, letters, trysts—he ordered Kapler arrested as a British spy, had him sentenced to ten years of exile and prison.

Devil Found. Svetlana’s first child, Josef, was three before Stalin saw him. Five of his eight grandchildren he never met at all. Barely noting Svetlana’s existence, he lived like an ascetic misanthrope in his dacha at Kuntsevo, the walls covered with blown-up magazine pictures of anonymous children. It was, she recalls, “A house of gloom, a somber monument. Not for anything in the world would I go there now!” And she adds, with a characteristic touch of superstition, that Stalin’s soul, “so restless everywhere else,” may still haunt that gloomy refuge. Svetlana last saw him two months before his death in March 1953. Trusting no doctors, he took quack remedies; he was to die of a massive stroke. As she records her fa ther’s death, the full meaning of her ambivalence toward him rises from the page: she felt her “heart breaking from grief and love”—this after having characterized Stalin’s “cruel and implacable nature.”

What went wrong for the little girl whose earlier “cloudless years were a fairy tale”? Svetlana has two explanations. One is the death of her mother, for which Stalin in rage and grief punished everyone she knew. Yet Svetlana concedes that Nadya could not have lived with Stalin through the years of terror that followed 1932. Svetlana’s other explanation is still more doubtful. She finds a devil. His name is Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s last and most infamous secret policeman. “A good deal that this monster did is now a blot on my father’s name,” she says. She admits that Stalin and Beria were often “guilty together,” but calls Stalin’s support of Beria “inexplicable,” due to Beria’s “cunning.” The truth must be that Stalin needed Beria to con solidate his rule of Russia during the trembling 1930s, and toward that end Beria murdered tens of thousands. Svet lana’s narrative coincides with the bloodiest reign in history. She almost misses it and remarks with startling naivete, “People shot themselves fairly often in those days . . . People were a lot more honest and emotional in those days. If they didn’t like life the way it was, they shot themselves.”

Odd Details. It is on this point that Letters to a Friend stumbles, falls, and exposes Svetlana’s limitations as a chronicler. Infinitely valuable as semi-history and a source for Stalin biographers, the book really dominates its reader as a psychological study of Svetlana Alliluyeva. Torn by unresolved feelings, she is divided between apologizing for Stalin and indicting him. “I spend all my time thinking over what’s happened and trying to make sense of it all. It’s the kind of thing that can drive you out of your mind.” She selects details oddly, noting explicitly that her mother’s gun was a Walther automatic but remarking about her first marriage only that it ended “for reasons of a personal nature.” Neither her exile nor her last husband, Brajesh Singh, whom she loved and mourned, are mentioned in the book. She says she “cannot live without God . . . the ultimate triumph of good over evil.” Yet her theology finds no object in her story.

Even so, judgment of Svetlana’s book, and of the personality that produced it, must carry a measure of admiration. The real wonder is that, given her heritage and surroundings, she was able to write it at all and face the horrifying truths it implies about her father.