CIA Reading Room cia rdp88 01350r000200680002 8 pdf

CIA Reading Room cia rdp88 01350r000200680002 8

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The Wa hin.t?ton Post Book World Approved For Release 2005f 1 JP~ PRDF 01350R000200680002-8 Svetlana Alliluyeva’s Twenty Utters to a Friend (Avon, $1.25) sold 320,000 copies in ghardcovers, w uc ontho pre- sumpti n that each copy Was read by at least two persons,: means that 640,000 of us know: little more about Svetlana’s fa-I tt’ then, Joseph Stalin, than we f. knew before we read it. He was r distant, cold and cruel to his own family no less than to his . enslaved subjects. He drove Svetlana’s mother to suicide. When his eldest son attempted ; suicide and failed, Stalin laughed at his incompetence. He broke up Svetlana’s first romance. He jailed his son’s wife and jailed or shot nearly all of her relatives. Mrs. Alliluyeva expresses anger but she does not seem very thoroughly aroused. Perhaps her ‘-or her translator’s -banal vocabulary accounts for this; perhaps her sensibilities never fully developed; perhaps she simply didn’t know her father very well.

Once, when he trotted her out to show Winston Church ill that old Bolshevists were also loving parents, it was the first she had seen of him in months and it was months before she saw him again. “I leave the political analysis to others,” she writes and proves the wisdom of her decision with an exception, lay- ing the blame for Stalin on Beria, who knew her father’s, d fears and suspicions and ex-‘ ploited them. Her theory is too’ simple, and it fails to explain Beria’s bloody-handed p…,’tees-. sor, Yezhov. As history the book is pathetic, but in its pathos lies, whatever appeal it may have.. ;; Approved For Release 2005/01/13 : CIA-RDP88-0135OR006200680002-8

• Creator/s: CIA Reading Room
• Date: 9/22/1968
• Book Topics/Themes: CIA Reading Room

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