Authors: Rosemary Sullivan
My generation was trained to think this monument [Stalin] was the embodiment of all that was most beautiful in the ideals of Communism, its living personification….
But later I began to doubt…. Little by little it became more than obvious not only that my father had been a despot and had brought about a bloody terror, destroying millions of innocent people, but that the whole system which had made it possible was profoundly corrupt; that all its participants could not escape responsibility, no matter how hard they tried. And it was then that the whole edifice, whose foundation rested on a lie, crumbled from top to bottom.
16
She wanted to offer a real portrait of Stalin. After all, she knew him intimately.
[My father] knew what he was doing. He was neither insane nor misled. With cold calculation he had cemented his own power, afraid of losing it more than of anything else in the world…. To explain things in this way—as madness—is the easiest and simplest thing, but it isn’t true, and it isn’t an explanation.
17
He believed not in ideals but only in men’s realistic political struggles. Nor did he romanticize people: there were the strong, who were needed; equals, who were in the way; and the weak, who were of no use to anyone.
18
I don’t believe he ever suffered any pangs of conscience.
19
But Svetlana had a larger point to make. Her father was not
alone
responsible. A dictator needs accomplices. In 1966, before she defected, she read Milovan Djilas’s
Conversations with Stalin
and Isaac Deutscher’s
Stalin: A Political Biography
and was able to understand the history of the political struggle for supreme power that Stalin had waged in the Communist Party against all his former colleagues. Stalin had reedited, altered, and added to
A Brief History of the CPSU
(Communist Party of the Soviet Union) in order to exclude all rivals, in particular Trotsky. This text served as
official
history and was distributed in millions of copies. “My father needed this ‘textbook’ to throw out of history, once and for all, those who had been in his way,” she wrote.
20
But it was not the
true
history. The true history was that there were many participants in the political roulette game that Stalin had won, and after his death, the Party continued to play it.
Svetlana agreed that Khrushchev had raised “the banner of liberation” and would be remembered for his effort “to call things by their real names. The timid half-efforts of this vital, jolly, pig-headed man, broke the silence of many years.”
21
But Khrushchev was also responsible for the bloody events in Hungary and the killing of university students in Georgia, students whose bodies had lain in the streets because their relatives were forbidden to collect them. His eleven years in power were a pseudoliberation. Nothing had changed. “Sputniks, festivals,
jubilees, and consciousness drowned in Vodka on every occasion: ‘We are the greatest!’ ‘We are the best, the fastest, the foremost!’ “
22
Anti-Semitism was still rife—no Jews on the Central Committee. In the 1960s in the Soviet Union, you could be refused a job because you were Jewish.
Then, in her book, Svetlana did the unthinkable. She not only criticized the current Soviet government as neo-Stalinist, warning that reinstating Stalin’s “merits” would be disastrous not just for the USSR but for the world. She also traced the Soviet system back through Stalin to its roots in Leninism. This was sacred territory.
Lenin laid the foundation for a one-party system, for terror and the inhuman suppression of all dissenters. He was the true father of everything that Stalin later developed to its furthest limits. All efforts to whiten Lenin and make a saint of him are useless…. Stalin became the embodiment of [Lenin’s ideal], the most complete personification of power without democracy, built on the suppression of millions of human lives.
23
Edmund Wilson received an advance copy of
Only One Year
for review and wrote to his friend Helen Muchnic that he thought Svetlana’s new book was “terrific—quite different from the first—and I am afraid it may get her into trouble.”
24
When he saw Svetlana in early September, he suggested that her book was such a bombshell that the Soviets might just ignore it. She said they weren’t bright enough for that. “They would say, as they had done with her first book, that it had been written by the CIA and circulate scandals about her personal life.”
25
A reporter for
Look
magazine interviewed her and asked how the Russians would receive her book. She replied, “It is an anti-Communist book. They will receive it as they receive anti-Communist books.”
26
She was exactly right.
Only One Year
infuriated the KGB. She had maligned Lenin! The surviving minutes of a Government Safety Committee meeting directed by Yuri Andropov outlined the plot of deliberate obfuscation the Soviet government was hatching in order to sabotage her book. The Soviets would spread the word that Svetlana had not written the book at all. The enemy had written it as part of an anti-Soviet campaign. The enemy was bent on defaming the name of Lenin on the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Top Secret:
USSR
Committee
Government Safety, on the advice of the Ministers of the USSR
NOVEMBER
5, 1969
No. 2792-A
Reference: Moscow
On the information of the Safety Committee, the analyst is examining the publication of a new book by S. Alliluyeva, “Only One Year” as one measure of an expanding anti-soviet campaign underway in time for the 100-year anniversary of the birthday of Vladimir Lenin.
Recently in the newspaper “The New York Times” and other American publications, a number of pieces have appeared highlighting the publication of “Only One Year” which propose the idea that STALIN was unjustly blamed for “dictatorship and the police state.” In truth, he inherited everything from LENIN and “it is precisely LENIN who is
responsible for everything that is happening in the USSR.” “STALIN was not a perversion of LENIN. He was the sole possible outcome after LENIN.”
Keeping in mind the aforementioned, in the goal of distracting the global public from the slanderous campaign carried out by the enemy using S. Alliluyeva’s book “Only One Year,” the following action is recommended:
Through letters between Joseph Alliluyev and Ektarine Alliluyeva and the Politburo “TsK KPSS” in which indignation at the quisling behavior of their mother is discussed, to prepare and publish abroad letters of S. ALLILUYEVA’s children addressed to a famous political correspondent H. Salisbury [Harrison Salisbury], an editor at the New York Times who interviewed S. ALLILUYEVA and who had a personal acquaintanceship with her.
This action will be ensured by the publication of the aforementioned letters and interview with the children of S. ALLILUYEVA in one of the leading European journals/magazines.
To publish in Western print, the thesis that the new book by S. ALLILUYEVA is the result of the collective efforts of individuals who may include: D. [
sic
] KENNAN, L. SCHIFER, M. DJILAS, G. FLOROVSKY, A. BELINKOV, and others who recommend themselves as enemies of the USSR, specializing in falsifying the history of the Soviet Government. At the same time to include in those materials currently at the disposal of the KGB, information to personally compromise these individuals.
To direct a letter to the address of S. ALLILUYEVA from the known Soviet intelligentsia, who are personally acquainted with S. ALLILUYEVA (the writer Soloukhin; the cinema director Kapler, editor in chief of the journal “The
Soviet Screen,” Pisarevsky; professor Myasnikov who was academic advisor to S. ALLILUYEVA when she defended her thesis, and others), which would contain a motivational protest against the falsification of the facts surrounding the Soviet government, slandering V. I. LENIN. Such a letter may be sent to S. ALLILUYEVA via the KGB, with the calculation of it being worthy of publication abroad.
In preparing for the publication, in the soviet press, of these letters/articles in order to expose the construction of these lies, it is imperative to include the thesis that these pieces dirty the “facts” of the material available to the people, in that they are inadequate in a personal and public sense. With that comes the need to show the attempts of the enemy to undermine the greatness and authority of V. I. LENIN, while instilling distrust in our system with the help of such figures as S. ALLILUYEVA, discrediting the memory/eulogy of (Aleksander) KERENSKY and relying in her book on the demagoguery of TROTSKY.
Allow the Propaganda division of the TsK KPSS to analyse the book “Only One Year” in order to determine the new position and direction/strategy of the enemy, which may be present in the text, and on the basis of which the ideological campaign will be set in play to undermine the 100th anniversary of the birthday of V. I. LENIN.
Please consider.
Representative for the Committee on Government Safety,
Andropov
27
This top-secret document was among Svetlana’s personal papers. How or when she obtained it remains a mystery, though it is probable, if not verifiable, that it came to her through the CIA. How she reacted can be guessed. She would probably have thought,
Yes, this is how the secret police work in my country
,
and found their scheme to distort reality and steal her book both repulsive and predictable. The clear evidence of their blatant manipulation of her children would have been exceedingly painful, if also predictable. Of course, she would not have blamed Joseph and Katya; she knew that, like all those who came under KGB scrutiny, her children had little choice.
However, the terrible thing was that the suspicion of treachery and espionage was so ingrained that the accusation stuck; many Russians believed the KGB propaganda. Even members of Svetlana’s own extended family suspected that she didn’t write
Only One Year.
28
It was too different from her first book.
In the acknowledgments, Svetlana had made the generous mistake of thanking all those who had read her manuscript in Russian. Among others, she thanked George Kennan, Louis Fischer, Robert Tucker, Georges Florovsky, Milovan Djilas, and Arkady Belinkov and his wife. This was where the KGB got its list for the “collective” authorship.
Arkady and Natalia Belinkov had indeed read the manuscript. In their memoir published in 1982, Natalia Belinkov explained:
Like many writers, who have been cut off from their familiar milieux and have not yet adapted to the new one, she needed readers. While we visited [Svetlana] we took on that role. Arkadii thought highly of this manuscript. He only had doubts about the chapter that was most important to Svetlana—“The Shore of the Ganges.” Perhaps it slowed down the development of the main plot….
We did not know, and neither did Svetlana, that at the same time as we were reading the book, it was being read in all the right places. It was read more than carefully. As a result, the head of State Security, Andropov, in December of 1969, ordered the Department of Propaganda
“to spread ideas into the Western press that the new book is the result of a collective work of people like Kennan, Fischer, Djilas, Florovsky, and A. Belinkov” and ordered “to include materials in the possession of the KGB that individually compromise every person on the list.” No, he [Andropov] was not concerned about “The Shore of the Ganges” slowing down the main plot of the book. He was saving Lenin’s reputation.
29
Kennan had read part one of
Only One Year
and told Svetlana it was very good. She didn’t offer him the rest to read. He made a few editorial comments, but nothing substantial.
30
Georges Florovsky was a professor at Princeton; mentioning him was a courtesy, as was mentioning Djilas, whom Svetlana had met only once.
Svetlana gave the Russian typescript to the Princeton historian Robert Tucker. He and his wife were neighbors whom she’d met shortly after she arrived in the United States when he’d tried to persuade her to lecture at Princeton University. Tucker posed questions, offered suggestions, and advised her to change the title. Svetlana told Louis Fischer in March that Tucker had “made ‘comments’ on almost every page, but I didn’t bother listening to him.”
31
In a portrait of Svetlana written for the
Washington Post
in 1984, titled “Svetlana Inherited Her Tragic Flaw,” Robert Tucker complained that she had taken almost none of his advice and that her unnecessary thank-you to him in her afterword caused him an “unpleasant moment” when he visited Moscow State University in 1970. His Soviet escort had pounced on him in an unguarded moment and told him in an intimidating way that he had read
Only One Year
, remarking nastily that it was American anti-Soviet propaganda.
We knew her as a student here and she couldn’t even write a course paper on her own…. Then he leaned very close to me and said in an intense voice: “You wrote that book.” If he believed that, I answered, he didn’t understand Svetlana. She was not one to accept easily a person’s critical suggestions, much less to allow somebody else to write her book. It would offend her pride of authorship. At that, the exchange ended with a frosty smile on our escort’s face.
32
Louis Fischer’s role was initially important. He was her lover. She had read the first part of her manuscript to him during those days in Princeton when their affair flourished, but he had already left for Paris and Tunis in mid-August while she was still in the midst of writing the book. And by the time he got back, their relationship was so acrimonious that he could hardly have offered his services as a reader. However, his presence in the initial stages of the writing probably influenced her tone.
Only One Year
was a more political book than
Twenty Letters to a Friend
, but, as she told her friend Lily Golden in her telephone conversation from Switzerland, she now knew so much more about the crimes of the Soviet government, and she was outraged.