SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA BY PRISCILLA JOHNSON MCMILLAN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200680001-9
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: November 4, 2004
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: January 1, 1968
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

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Approved For Release 2005/01/13 : CIA-RDP88- 13 0R00Q2006800O1-9
The Virginia Quarterly Review
SVETLAl`IA A.LLILU i E VA
By PRISCILLA JOlINTSON McMISSAN
N the spring of 1967 the daughter of the late Josef
Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, touched down at Kennedy
airport, solid and smiling, yet somehow an eccentric
presence in our midst. A few months later, in October, she
published "Twenty Letters to a Friend," the book she had
composed while still living in the U.S.S.R. As I think about
Svetlana and the current leaders of the Soviet Union, whose
actions and attitudes appear to have precipitated her extra-
ordinary defection, the picture that comes to my mind is
that of SvetIana on the one hand and the Soviet leaders on
the other, each side unable to be anything but true to itself,
each imprisoned by laws of its own nature imperfectly un-
derstood, each behaving blindly, mechanically, to bring about
a consummation neither could consciously have wished for.
But the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva has in fact been studded
with signposts, so that her defection, an event that seemed
inconceivable on the face of it, turns out in reality to be one
of those occurrences psychiatrists call "overdeter pined" : the
action that appears in retrospect to have been inevitable and
ordained from the start, provided only that there be the op-
portunity-and some immediate provocation.
I believe that Svetlana's defection arose out of the feelings
she bore both her parents and that by immutable laws of
their own being the present leaders of the Soviet Union stum-
bled into the hapless role of surrogates for Stalin, to whose
station as father they succeeded.
A few words, first, about the book. In the story of her
mother's family, the Alliluyevs, Svetlana has created an al-
legory of the sufferings of the Soviet people as a whole. She
has shown that terrible as it was. to be a subject of Stalin
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