Books: Witness to Evil

• Share

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.