20 Letters To A Friend

Personal Politics

20 Messages to a Friend.
by Svetlana Alliluyeva.
Translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. Harper & Row. 246 pp. $5.95.

Svetlana Alliluyeva is the last, and least talented, of the Brontë sisters, and the just way to read Twenty Messages to a Friend is not equally history simply equally a romantic novel. The clue is in the opening phrase, "It is placidity here." (Wuthering Heights?) The time is the summer of 1963, the place is Zukovska, and at thirty-7 "this is where I belong—not in the city or the Kremlin." She belongs, that is to say, outside the modern system which her father imposed on Russian federation after her female parent's expiry, destroying in the process what she later refers to equally the "early knights of the Revolution." Even as she writes, Svetlana thinks fondly of the abode less than a mile away from Zukovska in the town of Usolvo where her female parent presided before her suicide in 1931. Romantic landscape, a expressionless mother, the "old party people," especially of the Alliluyeva family—these are with us from the beginning, along, of course, with God, as alternatives to the world from which she has chosen to absent herself: "Moscow, breathing burn like a human being volcano with its smoldering lava of passion, appetite, and politics, its hurly burly of meetings and entertainment, Moscow is less than twenty miles away."

Sensing vaguely that this romantic mist has a strangely political odor, nosotros move to the commencement letter. It concerns the expiry of Stalin, and it's a bit surprising to run across so early on, from a author of such avowed simplicity, one of the artful disruptions of chronology which necessitates the many slow recapitulations whenever she does decide to work for a bit along the chronological track. Letter One finds her being hastened from French form at the University (Villette?) to a horridly prolonged, medically barbaric death scene. "It's a strange thing," she tells united states, "but during those days of disease when he was null but body out of which the soul had flown and later, during the days of leave-taking in the Hall of Columns, I loved my father more than tenderly than I ever had before." (Jane Eyre reunited finally with a shattered and at terminal junior Rochester?) With her are leading members of the Soviet regime, simply, along with nearly anybody else in this book, they are treated like then many uninteresting neighbors. Her failure to imagine very much near any of them, and her insistence that we shouldn't look on her life "equally anything special," does, however, confirm something I've ever suspected: that the Soviet authorities, like any totalitarian grouping, precisely to the degree that it doesn't appeal to any constituency outside itself, degenerates into a kind of neighborhood of relatives and friends, all working for the aforementioned company, all living in and around the company boondocks. Most like a less automatic Wilmington, Delaware, or Grosse Pointe. That's the social price for being at the pinnacle in a dictatorship, along with having to synchronize your sleeping and eating schedules with the erratic behavior of the town squire cum bossman. (Stalin, for example, liked to sleep until about two in the afternoon, and y'all can imagine what that did to everybody's schedule.)

Anyway, at that place they were at the sofa on which he slept, located in a bedroom that was also the dining-and meeting room, Stalin's domestic appointments being less those of a petit bourgeois like Hitler than of a sloppy and eccentric retainer holed up in some corner of the estate. Gathered round were his old associates, appetite far to the rear of their tear-filled eyes, portly folk like Khrushchev and Bulganin, all anxious to commiserate with the sole surviving fellow member of the family unit. All except one, of course, the Villain. Lavrenty Beria by name, he'southward ready, even before "the spirit wrenched itself gratis of the flesh," to be cruel to his benefactor's kid. Watching from backside his glistening pince nez for the last breath and the main chance, and knowing that the moment isn't far off, Beria "caught sight of me and ordered: 'Take Svetlana away!' Those who were standing nearby stared but nobody moved. Afterward he darted into the hallway alee of anybody else. The silence of the room where anybody was gathered around the death bed was shattered by the sound of his loud vocalism, the ring of triumph unconcealed, as he shouted, 'Khrustalyov! My machine!'" Off he speeds, "the apotheosis of Oriental perfidy, flattery, and hypocrisy," a "monster" whose vileness, we are told in the first few pages, "is a blot on my father's proper name."

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One affair is certain, nobody liked Beria. Svetlana'south mother every bit early on as 1929, when he'd come from Georgia for a visit, told Stalin that "that man must not exist immune to set foot in our firm." (Stalin asked for facts, and when she produced none told her to become to hell.) And physically he was, well—"plump, greenish, stake," co-ordinate to Djilas in his Conversations with Stalin. Djilas, by the way, on the basis of a few dinners, has more telling impressions to share with us about these people than does Mrs. Alliluyeva after twoscore years of it. Of course there were plenty of reasons to hate Beria, especially if you thought he'd managed to dispose of over one-half of your and your father's relatives fifty-fifty without your begetter'southward encouragement. But in projecting her understandable detestations, these opening scenes are suspect not merely because they're rather too literary and, given the cast, comically theatrical. They also manage to be political, in a shrewd, coy fashion. The politics is carried subliminally, as it were, under the gossip, under the guise of simplicity, under the melodrama of deaths and entrances. For good reason, then, the death scene had to come at the beginning: not merely to catch the reader'due south interest but fifty-fifty more than to take hold of him politically off guard. Who'd suspect any such maneuvering in a book past Little Me out here where it's placidity, a book non even intended for publication when it was written? To believe that Beria'due south comport at this moment and his appearance ("his face, repulsive plenty at the best of times, now was twisted by his passions—by ambition, cruelty, cunning, and a lust for power and more power still"), to advise this every bit the expression of "triumph," is a way covertly of asking united states to believe that Stalin was somehow in Beria's way, that Stalin opposed rather than abetted and initiated Beria's activities. More probable Beria was but scared out of his wits as he watched his sole promoter and protector slowly strangle to decease. No wonder he got out of there before anyone else—back to headquarters, where he could be as light-green as he wanted to be with his trusties guarding the door. Stalin died in March, by June Beria was in prison, by December he was shot. And so much for his "triumph" at the moment of Stalin'due south death, so much for his sources of ability contained of Stalin, and for the effectiveness of his political plotting when it wasn't in the service of Stalin.

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This is a strangely hard book to read not but because the style is at one time lurid and vague, but more because it's impossible to tell whether or not Svetlana Alliluyeva is politically illiterate out of emotional commitments or disingenuous out of political shrewdness. She probably doesn't know herself, and it seems obvious from what we can learn about Stalin in this volume and in Isaac Deutscher's Stalin, that Stalin was of a similarly curious mix. Like father, like girl—with 1 important difference: political genius is precisely such confusion released from conscience, which is non to say that that's the only reason why Svetlana is not a political or any other kind of genius.

The Beria of this book, so, is assuredly not the Beria of history, who in fact didn't even get to Moscow from Georgia, where he may well have bumped off a few people at his master's behest, until after the bloodiest years of Stalin's reign, from 1934 to 1938. When he did replace Yezhof at NKVD his job was non to accelerate the purges but to put the brakes on them. Having acknowledged at several points that Stalin did non like Jews, Svetlana has of course some trouble assigning to Beria what were to be the ancestry of another purge, this time with the characteristics of a pogrom—the instance of the Kremlin doctors in 1952. Nonetheless she assures us that Stalin "was extremely distressed at the plow events took," and that he didn't believe the doctors were "dishonest."

It'south been argued that one virtue of this book is that it really is not very useful as history. Because it wasn't written from hindsight, after Svetlana learned what was going on, we exercise get an authentic picture, and so this argument goes, of what it was similar to live around Stalin in kittenish innocence and amore. Just the childlike function adopted past Mrs. Alliluyeva in these letters has enough of the event of political stratagem to make the passages I've been discussing seem, in placement and phrasing, zippo less than a product of calculated hindsight and whitewashing. But how does Mrs. Alliluyeva expect us to respond to her introductory promise that "maybe when I've written it all down, an unbearable brunt of some kind will fall from my shoulders at last then my real life will begin"? Why "of some kind," unless the burden is up for grabs? Leaving bated the romantic fantasy that "real life" is a procedure of disencumbering oneself, information technology's impossible to find in this book the shape or weight of any detail "burden" much less any evidence that it has proved "unbearable." Any reader tin of course imagine a "brunt" for the daughter of Stalin, but at issue is what she imagines information technology to exist. When Beria isn't the pack equus caballus for Stalin, and therefore to a bully extent for herself, it turns out to be "the system of which [Stalin] himself was a prisoner." Loyal daughter and defector, she has establish a way to do something which, and so far as I know, is wholly original, an invention which it is to be hoped will remain uniquely her own—she has managed to use anti-Communism to exonerate Josef Stalin, even while suggesting, in her quite unconvincing evocations of Mother, that Stalin betrayed the revolution.

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If the virtues of this book tin can scarcely exist called historical, and if its perspectives are too muddled ever to be considered innocent, can i at least, following the lead of several of the more than enamored reviewers, call information technology mettlesome? It has been compared, for instance, to a volume that really is courageous, Evgenia Ginsburg's Into the Whirlwind, an account of the author's eighteen years of labor-campsite imprisonment and suffering from which she returned still able to clarify her loyalty to Communism and the USSR. One pregnant of courage surely is that yous let yourself sympathize what has happened to you, and that kind of courage isn't hither at all. Backbone can besides mean that if some things haven't happened to you lot, even though you lot were continually in the way of them, then y'all confront the possibility that y'all are someone to whom certain kinds of feel are impossible, to whom a range of impressions only isn't available. Perhaps you are a person of no detail fourth dimension or identify, with vague and dislocated feelings derived less from the things you've encountered than from the things you haven't found. To acknowledge that you are such a person takes an enormous amount of courage, I would suppose. And it's this kind of courage that Svetlana Alliluyeva and this book desperately ask for.

In important ways she was non a witness to the history of which she claims to have been a role. By which I don't mean that we wait any nighttime secrets about governments and personalities. Instead, I only hateful that she ought to requite some indication that she was alive to the times and places in which she lived or, if she wasn't, that she face that fact. Aside from some family gossip and some domestic notes, she brings null out to us, and even her account of her mother'due south suicide, when she discovered that it was ane some ten years later the consequence and had opportunity to question relatives and friends, is much less informative, much less passionately interested than the account in Deutscher'due south book. With no embarrassment, and confident of our uncritical sympathy, she reports at 30-vii that when she visited her father during the early and disaster-ridden months of the war he was "irritable and busy . . . I was terribly alone that winter. Perchance it was my age—sixteen, a time of dreams and doubts and seeking, different anything I've ever known before." It was at sixteen, likewise, we may remember, that her mother married Stalin, who was then thirty-eight, and obviously information technology wasn't easy for the daughter to be left with an crumbling, about wholly preoccupied male parent and with no female parent at all. Only is that all that was happening to her? Given what was going on, her self-assimilation, fifty-fifty for a quite special daughter her historic period, was extraordinary, and the uncritical reporting of this self-absorption by a adult female of xxx-7 is even more so. It indicates a personality that has remained nearly incapable of seeing annihilation across a radically foreshortened area of emotional need. If an historical calamity similar the war didn't get to her, neither, I'k afraid, did the vast undertakings, the epic developments of her own land, nor did the various personages with whom she claims to have spent interminable and boring dinners, like Kaganovich, Malenkov, Molotov, Mikoyan, and Khrushchev. She offers scarcely a phrase of label even though she saw some of them up to the fourth dimension of her revolt. Freed of the "burdens" of political inquisitiveness, must the book too be freed even of the historical anecdotes which should be the result of taking on the nearly coincidental burdens of other peoples' company and their manners?

The but times when adult experience has much interest for the author is when she is in the one function she can imagine for herself—the part of a child. Possibly what she means by the vague phrase "a burden of some kind," is simply the burden of age, of the sheer passage of time. She ways, that is, something largely non-historical, every bit ane might expect in so curiously romantic a novel as this ane. Nature and God are predictable successors to Mother and Stalin, and to the failed attempts at personal relationships subsequently her sixteenth year. She herself doesn't suggest that her marriages amounted to anything: the beginning in 1944 to Grigory Morozoff, a immature man who displeased Stalin by beingness Jewish and by managing somehow to stay out of the war; and the 2d, afterwards she divorced Morozoff ("for reasons of a personal nature," nosotros are advised, as if this distinguished it from other divorces) to the son of Andrei Zhdanov. Virtually the elderberry Zhdanov, presumably Stalin's heir apparent and probably no ameliorate than Beria, she offers not a word. And of the son, she says merely that her marriage to him was "a matter of hard mutual sense just without any special love or affection." Her near intense non-familial relationship, at least in the book, is with Alexei Kapler during the winter of 1942-43. She was a schoolgirl of seventeen, he a successful filmmaker of forty. Stalin broke up the matter by shipping Kapler to the Arctic Circle for v years charging that he was a British spy, and he berated his daughter in tones that became unfortunately typical of their domestic scenes at the Kremlin: "'Love!' screamed my father, with a hatred of the very give-and-take I can scarcely convey. And for the first time in his life he slapped me beyond the face, twice. 'Simply look, nurse, how depression she's sunk!' He could no longer restrain himself. 'Such a state of war going on, and she's busy the whole time—!' Unable to observe any other expression, he used the coarse peasant word." Pretty rough, only then it's hard to imagine any parent approval of such a human relationship. While what appear to be vacuities later on on are at this point perchance a function of youth, in that location is fifty-fifty here, especially, at a retrospective glance, a disturbing absence of any developed human relationship between Svetlana and people her own age, anyone who is not a parental reflection, a parental substitute, or a parental defiance, no one at schoolhouse, no friends from the other leading families.

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The "Brunt" of shut relationships, the burden of intense responsiveness, the burden of historical feeling or participation, none of these is had for the asking and none is proved by rhetoric. Above all, there is no literary evidence that such burdens have ever been accepted. Literary evidence would be mostly, I call up, in the effort to make ane mental attitude, one position, coherent or consistent with some other, in indications on one page that she has accepted the price of having said something on another folio to which, despite any inconvenience, she acknowledges at least some responsibleness. Instead, 1 of the marked peculiarities of this volume is in the variety of its inconsistencies, ranging all the way from small matters to the centrally important one of her parental preferences. Of her father'south dacha at Kutsevo, she says "I never liked it," and two pages later on launches into a description of "what I liked about the firm"; in one account, Stalin's working dinners "by and large started between 6 and seven in the evening and went on until xi or twelve," until we're told a dozen pages subsequently that they were "usually at table for two hours"; romantically lamenting at the beginning of Letter of the alphabet 16 that she and Kapler "saw each other only a few hours," she proceeds to tell us most meetings that stretched, without break, over v months, some of them in an "empty apartment" which she also tells united states of america was used past air force friends of her brother Vasily. Stalin, who in the middle of the war took time out personally to terminate the affair with Kapler, is chosen a "neglectful" parent while beingness berated for interference that extends fifty-fifty to complaints near his daughter'southward habiliment; by contrast, the mother is "a practiced family woman" late in the book where earlier she is said to be "practically never at home" and to accept spent "little time with us." Of the same female parent, she can't at one moment "recall her kissing or caressing me ever," while later she recalls that "she seldom kissed me or stroked my hair."

Depending on her portrait of her female parent and her preferences for her as a parent, is Svetlana's romantic idealization of the "old party" equally represented by the Alliluyeva family and their friends. It's therefore crucial that throughout, while claiming that her female parent was the better parent, all of her prove points the other way, notably her quotations of the 1 letter of the alphabet, common cold and admonishing, that her mother sent her and quotations from the many letters, full of affectionate games and phrases—"my footling Housekeeper," "my little sparrow"—addressed past Stalin even as late as 1950. While the female parent was alive, she assures u.s.a., Stalin was "neither a god nor a cult, but just a father of a family"—and nosotros know we're reading a domestic allegorization of the politics of the personality cult. In terms of that apologue, the suicide of the female parent becomes a portent of political disasters for the family, the revolution, and the Soviet Union: "The steady annihilation of everything my mother had created, [the] systematic elimination of her very spirit and then that zilch was left of it, then that everything would be exactly the opposite of what she had stood for." She asks whether her mother's death just left Stalin free to do what he wanted to do anyway, or whether "her suicide broke his spirit and made him lose his organized religion in all his old friends." Such questions, by suggesting that politics is exclusively a affair of personality, are quite useless in that they exclude the areas of national and even international politics which any answer is expected to comprehend. Anyway, we've already been told three pages earlier that "My father's spirit was in a sense broken." And guess who noticed it first—Beria, of form, "more treacherous, more practiced in perfidy and cunning, more insolent and single-minded than my father. In a word he was a stronger graphic symbol."

Mrs. Alliluyeva's political motives are probably every bit unconscious—and therefore every bit compulsive—as are the social ambitions and sexual sadisms that propel the rhetorics of God and Nature in those 19th-century novels of the Brontës. For 1968, the similarity, however interesting, is as well quite obnoxious, especially since Mrs. Alliluyeva'due south manner with people and politics isn't nowadays nearly as unique, in its literariness, every bit might exist hoped. Indeed, these "messages to a friend" are important equally an example of how politics can't actually be intelligently discussed equally a derivative of personalities, and that to confound the two is to escape the burden of either.

20 Letters To A Friend,

Source: https://www.commentary.org/articles/richard-poirier/twenty-letters-to-a-friend-by-svetlana-alliluyeva/

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