Second Thoughts from Svetlana

SOVIET UNION

Only two years ago she reminisced tenderly about her father, who called her his "little sparrow" when she was young and showered her with baby-talking letters. He was "courteous, unassuming and direct" to his underlings. His servants "loved and respected him for the most ordinary human qualities." Many of the misdeeds that had been committed in his time were due to the intrigues of others.

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."

Hard Information. Her new book contains some bits of hard information in what many will regard as a large (444 pages) and shapeless piece of sentimentalism. For 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.

Occasionally, Svetlana can still speak about Stalin with stupefying naivete: "Under no circumstances could one call him a neurotic; rather, powerful self-control was part of his nature." She argues that Lenin laid the foundation for terror and oppression in Russia, and that Stalin was merely the instrument of Leninism. She is no longer ready, however, to shift the bulk of the blame for her father's crimes to Beria. In 1941, Stalin railed to Svetlana about Beria, shouting obscenely, saying that he did not trust him; yet Beria remained in his post until Stalin's death. Moreover, she now asserts for the first time that the Bolshevik Revolution was "a tragic mistake." To reach such judgments in only one year surely requires a journey as long and as overwhelming as that between the Great Kremlin Palace and her current home in Princeton, NJ.

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