Comments on and quotations from "In Putin's Footsteps"' - Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia's Eleven Time Zones by Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler
It has been almost 28 years since both the end of the Soviet Union and Communism in Russia, which soon followed. However, only now are American and other outsiders really beginning to find out what life in the "new Russia", its many cities and provinces, has become. This book presents both some of the old and familiar negative and, sometimes surprising, new positive evaluations.
"After taking over from Yeltsin as acting president on the first day of the new Millennium"{the year 2000}, the authors then point out that eighteen years later Vladimir Putin is still very much in charge and is just beginning his fourth presidential term in office.
"At times you can't help feeling that Moscow is Byzantium, its modernized version, with Mercedes and gourmet supermarkets."
"Cities of the Mighty Volga" - Ulyanovsk did not revert to its pre-Soviet name, Simbirsk. Whereas Samara did not keep its Soviet name of Kuibyshev.
"Examining the museum's exhibits{in Ulyanovsk} < > we realized that only four leaders have remained in Russia's recent, and well-curated, official historical memory. First, Lenin, < > Stalin comes second < > Leonid Brezhnev is the third < > {Putin is the fourth, of course.}"
"And what of the "reformers" - Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Boris Yeltsin? They have almost completely dropped out of history, at least as the Russian state now presents it."
The more positively presented cities seem to be:
"The Urals' Holy Trinity":
"Perm is the Urals' culture capital - the "first city in Europe," < > Others view it as the last European city < > The Perm Paradox."
Yekaterinburg is called a "well-kept city" and it is compared to Chicago!
"Founded in 1586, Tyumen, the current hub of the Russian oil industry, has had an even shinier look than most." It is called the "Capital of Russia's Klondike".
Novosibirsk is told as "A Story of Science{ because of nearby Akademgorodok} and Serendipity". It is apparently Russia's third largest city and is positively described as "a stunning success."
And, not for the first time, Vladivostok is compared to San Francisco.
Magadan is called the "Gulag Capital". Even though this chapter is about 22 pages long it does not mention that an American politician named Henry Wallace, who became Secretary of Agriculture and then Vice President from 1940 to 1944, was reported to have visited this city, probably in the 1930s, and praised what he saw there![ Further checking-up turned up the fact that Vice President Henry Wallace visited Magadan in 1944]
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Sunday, March 3, 2019
Experimental Blog # 230
Quotations from and comments on "The Cold War" - A World History by Odd Arne Westad
"The human cost of Stalin's state-building was immense. Lenin had set a bloody pattern by executing at least one hundred thousand people without any form of judicial process."
"At least ten million Soviet people were killed by Stalin's regime from the late 1920s up to his death in 1953. < > In addition, at least three million died in the Ukrainian famine, which the regime did much to provoke and nothing to prevent."
"How could the Soviet system, based on terror and subjugation, appeal to so many people around the world?"
"Eastern Europe was remade by Communism, western Europe was remade by capitalism. < > Part of the reason for the success of the new were the disasters of the old. After Europe's calamitous half century, any stability would do, even one that was imposed by outside powers through the Cold War."
"Communism was to be China's weapon for modernization < > It would make the country rich and strong."
"By the late 1970s much of Latin America was ruled by military dictators. < > In all, fifteen out of twenty-one major states in Latin America were led by military dictators by the end of the decade."
"The Cold War in Europe ended because years of closer association between East and West had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other, and because of western Europe's proven record of successfully integrating peripheral countries into the European Community."
This is a very long book with about 629 pages of text and about 638 footnotes. The author was born, in 1960, and grew up in Norway. He later seems to have spent years in Britain at the London School of Economics; and only very recently has become a professor at Harvard University.
Of course, everybody can only have their own subjective point of view; and this author can not be an exception. Norway has a short border with Russia; and the author is very involved with the Western European and American points of view.
Although Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev seem to be, by far, the most written about people in this book, there are only 2 other Russians, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev, as compared to 9 Americans, in total, in the top 20 people talked about in this book. The Americans are, in alphabetical order: James Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
The remaining 7 of the top 20, in alphabetical order, are: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharal Nehru, and Zhou Enlai.
It seems that the author, Odd Arne Westad, might say that these 20 people are the most important "world players" in the Cold War era.
"The human cost of Stalin's state-building was immense. Lenin had set a bloody pattern by executing at least one hundred thousand people without any form of judicial process."
"At least ten million Soviet people were killed by Stalin's regime from the late 1920s up to his death in 1953. < > In addition, at least three million died in the Ukrainian famine, which the regime did much to provoke and nothing to prevent."
"How could the Soviet system, based on terror and subjugation, appeal to so many people around the world?"
"Eastern Europe was remade by Communism, western Europe was remade by capitalism. < > Part of the reason for the success of the new were the disasters of the old. After Europe's calamitous half century, any stability would do, even one that was imposed by outside powers through the Cold War."
"Communism was to be China's weapon for modernization < > It would make the country rich and strong."
"By the late 1970s much of Latin America was ruled by military dictators. < > In all, fifteen out of twenty-one major states in Latin America were led by military dictators by the end of the decade."
"The Cold War in Europe ended because years of closer association between East and West had reduced the fear that the two sides had for each other, and because of western Europe's proven record of successfully integrating peripheral countries into the European Community."
This is a very long book with about 629 pages of text and about 638 footnotes. The author was born, in 1960, and grew up in Norway. He later seems to have spent years in Britain at the London School of Economics; and only very recently has become a professor at Harvard University.
Of course, everybody can only have their own subjective point of view; and this author can not be an exception. Norway has a short border with Russia; and the author is very involved with the Western European and American points of view.
Although Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Gorbachev seem to be, by far, the most written about people in this book, there are only 2 other Russians, Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev, as compared to 9 Americans, in total, in the top 20 people talked about in this book. The Americans are, in alphabetical order: James Carter, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
The remaining 7 of the top 20, in alphabetical order, are: Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jawaharal Nehru, and Zhou Enlai.
It seems that the author, Odd Arne Westad, might say that these 20 people are the most important "world players" in the Cold War era.
Thursday, February 14, 2019
Experimental Blog # 229
Quotations from and comments about "The Future is History" - How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia by Masha Gessen
"I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had really never come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB; others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West."
"Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. < > The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces..."
"The cliche' of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened."
"For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment. <> Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Commottee's membership several times a year ..."
"One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests < > In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet.""
"Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened."
"..Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. < > By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them."
"When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief - not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name."
"On January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. < > Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent..."
"Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting the Communist Party. < > With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past."
The author's sources, as well as the author herself, perhaps, seem to become more removed from government actions during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. She writes about a "Nation Divided" and the assassination of Boris Nemtsov on February 27, 2015, who was the father of one of her sources, besides being a very important politician, who became a leader of anti-government demonstrations.
"So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea."
"I spent my thirties and forties documenting the death of a Russian democracy that had really never come to be. Different people were telling different stories about this: many insisted that Russia had merely taken a step back after taking two steps toward democracy; some laid the blame on Vladimir Putin and the KGB; others on a supposed Russian love of the iron fist, and still others on an inconsiderate, imperious West."
"Perestroika was an impossible idea on the face of it. The Party was setting out to employ its structures of command to make the country, and itself, less command-driven. A system whose main afflictions were stagnation and inflexibility was setting out to change itself. < > The leaders of many of the Soviet Union's constituent republics were becoming lax in monitoring and containing nationalist forces..."
"The cliche' of the era was "floodgates." Everyone in every field was claiming that the floodgates had opened."
"For over a generation before Gorbachev came to power, Politburo membership had generally been a lifetime appointment. <> Gorbachev started reshuffling the Central Commottee's membership several times a year ..."
"One after another, the Eastern European states allowed protests < > In Romania, where the Party would not budge, a rebellious army seized and executed the Communist dictator and his wife. But the revolutions elsewhere were described by both local and Western press as "velvet.""
"Soviet society had been forbidden to know itself, and had no native language to describe and define what had happened."
"..Yeltsin might have appeared to be tackling the pillars of the totalitarian system, its machines of ideology and terror. < > By the end of 1991, Yeltsin had a country to run. But even with the former institutions of the Soviet state under his control, he faced a dire deficit of instruments of governance, and of people to use them."
"When Mikhail Gorbachev, as Party leader, looked at some of the secret archives for the first time in the 1980s, he felt shock, disgust, and disbelief - not only because of what had been done but because it had been done by his own Party and in its name."
"On January 2, 1992, the government lifted price controls on consumer goods, with the exception of bread, milk, and alcohol. < > Within a month, prices had gone up 352 percent..."
"Yeltsin no longer had the strength, or the popular support, to continue fighting the Communist Party. < > With resentment the dominant emotion in the land, Yeltsin could afford no public confrontation with the past."
The author's sources, as well as the author herself, perhaps, seem to become more removed from government actions during the leadership of Vladimir Putin. She writes about a "Nation Divided" and the assassination of Boris Nemtsov on February 27, 2015, who was the father of one of her sources, besides being a very important politician, who became a leader of anti-government demonstrations.
"So this was how it worked. The famous got a bullet in the heart and the less famous got poison in their tea."
Saturday, February 9, 2019
Experimental Blog # 228
Quotations from "Red Famine" - Stalin's War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum
"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."
"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."
"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."
"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."
"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."
"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."
The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.
"The absence of natural borders helps explain why Ukrainians failed, until the late twentieth century, to establish a sovereign Ukrainian state."
"On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had "no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry," as a recent biographer has written."
"In just a few short months during the winter of 1929-30 the Soviet state carried out a second revolution in the countryside, for many more profound and more shocking than the original Bolshevik revolution itself. All across the USSR, local leaders, successful farmers, priests and village elders were deposed, expropriated, arrested or deported. Entire village populations were forced to give up their land, their livestock, and sometimes their homes in order to join collective farms. Churches were destroyed, icons smashed and bells broken."
"The Ukrainian famine reached its height in the spring of 1933. < > "Excess deaths" continued throughout the rest of 1933 and 1934". < > agreement is now coalescing around two numbers: 3.9 million excess deaths, < > and 0.6 million lost births < > These figures include all victims, wherever they died - by the roadside, in prison, in orphanages - and are based on the numbers of people in Ukraine before the famine and afterwards."
"In his momentous "secret speech" in 1956, Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, attacked the "cult of personality" that had surrounded the Soviet dictator and denounced Stalin for the murder of hundreds of thousands of people < > But Khrushchev, who had taken over the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1939, kept silent about both the famine and collectivization."
"Although the chaos of collectivization helped create the conditions that led to famine, the high numbers of deaths in Ukraine between 1932 and 1934 < > were not caused by collectivization either. Starvation was the result, rather, of the forcible removal of food from people's homes; the roadblocks that prevented peasants from seeking work or food; the harsh rules of the blacklists imposed on farms and villages; the restrictions on barter and trade; and the vicious propaganda campaign designed to persuade Ukrainians to watch, unmoved, as their neighbors died of hunger."
The author, Anne Applebaum, "lives in Poland with her husband, < > a Polish politician, and their two children" This is from the book jacket.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Experimental Blog # 227
Comments on "Stalin's Daughter - The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva" by Rosemary Sullivan
This book has about 632 pages of text plus about an additional 124 pages of family trees, preface, acknowledgements, list of characters{there are as many as 117}, sources, notes, bibliography, illustration credits, and index.
Besides that, roughly the first 190 pages contain a great deal of information about Joseph Stalin in the years leading up to his death in 1953. More information about the Bolsheviks and the soviet government continues for another 80, or more, pages until Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to America at the American embassy in India in 1967.
The author, Rosemary Sullivan, obviously has done an enormous amount of research and work, but her North American point of view, with its peculiarities, shows through nonetheless.
Is it fair to also point out that Rosemary Sullivan apparently did not think about writing a biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva until long after Svetlana's four books were published in 1967, 1969, 1984, and 1991; and after she had died in 2011?
This book has about 632 pages of text plus about an additional 124 pages of family trees, preface, acknowledgements, list of characters{there are as many as 117}, sources, notes, bibliography, illustration credits, and index.
Besides that, roughly the first 190 pages contain a great deal of information about Joseph Stalin in the years leading up to his death in 1953. More information about the Bolsheviks and the soviet government continues for another 80, or more, pages until Svetlana Alliluyeva defects to America at the American embassy in India in 1967.
The author, Rosemary Sullivan, obviously has done an enormous amount of research and work, but her North American point of view, with its peculiarities, shows through nonetheless.
Is it fair to also point out that Rosemary Sullivan apparently did not think about writing a biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva until long after Svetlana's four books were published in 1967, 1969, 1984, and 1991; and after she had died in 2011?
Sunday, August 12, 2018
Experimental Blog # 226
Comments on "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland" by Svetlana Alliluyeva
It turns out that the book "The Faraway Music", mentioned in the last blog # 225, was not Svetlana Alliluyeva's last published book. Her fourth and last published book, apparently, is this one, "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland"; which was written in 1988 in Wisconsin.
It is mostly about her return to the USSR from England in October of 1984 with her American daughter Olga, who was about 13 years old. It is also true that they had gone to England, and not to Switzerland, which Svetlana preferred, not because Olga was not accepted in school there, but because Svetlana, herself, could not be a permanent resident in Switzerland.
Svetlana's decision to return to the USSR was provoked by telephone conversations with her son that were unexpectedly resumed from England in 1982.
Although Svetlana apparently happily, more or less, met other relatives and friends in Moscow, after an absence of 17 years, her hopes of reconnecting with her son and daughter, Katya, were not fulfilled; so Svetlana and her daughter, Olga, soon leave for Tbilisi, Georgia on December 1, 1984.
In Tbilisi matters go much better, especially for Olga, who easily makes friends and learns both Russian and Georgian fairly well in a year's time.
By December of 1985, however, Svetlana has decided that since she has been unable to reestablish friendly relations with her Russian son and daughter, who lives and is a scientific worker in Kamchatka, she wants to leave the USSR, again.
After travelling from Tbilisi to Moscow, and back again; and experiencing many difficulties, including very serious, and mysterious, health problems, they are allowed to leave on separate days and to separate destinations. In the spring of 1986 Olga goes first back to her school in England, and Svetlana, with Olga's dog, Maka, returns to the USA in Wisconsin.
Svetlana has written this book in 1988 in familiar surroundings in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
It seems that Svetlana Alliluyeva had been discouraged from writing any more books. When she finished writing this book she was around 62 years of age; but she will live for another 23 years to be 85 in different places in England and Wisconsin; and perhaps visiting other places as well.
It turns out that the book "The Faraway Music", mentioned in the last blog # 225, was not Svetlana Alliluyeva's last published book. Her fourth and last published book, apparently, is this one, "A Book for Granddaughters - Travelling to the Homeland"; which was written in 1988 in Wisconsin.
It is mostly about her return to the USSR from England in October of 1984 with her American daughter Olga, who was about 13 years old. It is also true that they had gone to England, and not to Switzerland, which Svetlana preferred, not because Olga was not accepted in school there, but because Svetlana, herself, could not be a permanent resident in Switzerland.
Svetlana's decision to return to the USSR was provoked by telephone conversations with her son that were unexpectedly resumed from England in 1982.
Although Svetlana apparently happily, more or less, met other relatives and friends in Moscow, after an absence of 17 years, her hopes of reconnecting with her son and daughter, Katya, were not fulfilled; so Svetlana and her daughter, Olga, soon leave for Tbilisi, Georgia on December 1, 1984.
In Tbilisi matters go much better, especially for Olga, who easily makes friends and learns both Russian and Georgian fairly well in a year's time.
By December of 1985, however, Svetlana has decided that since she has been unable to reestablish friendly relations with her Russian son and daughter, who lives and is a scientific worker in Kamchatka, she wants to leave the USSR, again.
After travelling from Tbilisi to Moscow, and back again; and experiencing many difficulties, including very serious, and mysterious, health problems, they are allowed to leave on separate days and to separate destinations. In the spring of 1986 Olga goes first back to her school in England, and Svetlana, with Olga's dog, Maka, returns to the USA in Wisconsin.
Svetlana has written this book in 1988 in familiar surroundings in Spring Green, Wisconsin.
It seems that Svetlana Alliluyeva had been discouraged from writing any more books. When she finished writing this book she was around 62 years of age; but she will live for another 23 years to be 85 in different places in England and Wisconsin; and perhaps visiting other places as well.
Sunday, July 22, 2018
Experimental Blog # 225
Notes and comments on and quotations from "Twenty Letters to a Friend" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan; "Only One Year" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, translated from the Russian by Paul Chavchavadze; and "The Faraway Music" by Svetlana Alliluyeva, author and translator.
The first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", was written by the author in the summer of 1963, about 10 years and 4 months after the death of her father, Joseph Stalin. At the time Svetlana had no ideas about publishing her manuscript as a book, or ever leaving the Soviet Union.
Svetlana left the USSR on December 19, 1966 to go to India with her late husbands ashes. She, and everybody else, expected that she would return in a month, or so; but she managed to extend her stay in India to March 1967. At that time Svetlana wanted to stay in India permanently, "forever", she says; but the government of India was afraid to let her do that, so Svetlana felt that she had no alterantive but to ask for help at the American embassy. After secret detours of a month, or so, she arrived in America in the middle of the international sensation that her defection, "the daughter of Stalin", had created.
During this time Svetlana had signed several documents that she very poorly understood that resulted in that she was completely deprived of any interference, or any other rights, over her manuscript, including the translation into English. Although her book became an international best seller, it produced many unpleasant and persistent "boomerang" effects for her.
Svetlana's second book, "Only One Year", was written within 2 years after her arrival in America; and this time she made very sure that she kept possession of the copyright, and she also approved of the translator.
The third book, "The Faraway Music", was written about 14 years later, in 1983, in Cambridge, England; where Svetlana had gone to live and to put her American daughter into a private school. Somewhat surprisingly, Svetlana wrote this book herself first in English.
It seems that soon after Svetlana wrote this third book, she and her daughter actually went back to the Soviet Union, where they restored Soviet citizenship to her, However, things did not work out for her, and her daughter, there either, and she was allowed to leave again after staying less than 2 years. She never says a word about this long trip.
In 1987 Svetlana herself translated her third, and apparently her last book, "The Faraway Music", into Russian.
Quotations from "Only One Year":
"...although I lived "at the top of the pyramid," < > my whole life, like that of the entire nation, became divided into two periods: before 1953 and after."
" ...in my early years, Communism was an unshakable stronghold. Unshakable remained my father's authority and the belief that he was right in everything without exception."
"Sometimes my father would suddenly say to me, "Why do you associate with children whose parents have been arrested?"
"In September 1957 I changed my name from "Stalina" to "Alliluyeva" - under Soviet law children could bear either their father's or their mother's name."
"My first impression of America was of the magnificent Long Island highways. < > The second thing I noticed < > was the number of women driving cars. < > it was the variety of feminine types at the wheel that struck me: pretty young girls, < > many Negroes, young and old; women in furs and extraordinary big hats ..."
Other sources say that Joseph Stalin was always reading, up to 400 pages a day. Although Svetlana relates an incident where Joseph Stalin is showing somebody his library and he says something like that although he is 70 years old; he is still learning.
""My father made up for his poor education only in the field of technical knowledge."
"He had a certain acquaintance with languages, dating back to his seminary days when he had studied Latin and Greek. He could read Georgian < > He knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form < > With the help of a dictionary he could make out a simple German text."
Svetlana very distinctly complained about the translation of her first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", that was translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. However, a very amatuer comparison of the English and Russian editions of this book reveals that, although this English translation is not a very literal translation that some people prefer, it always seems that the translator was trying to say the same thing in American English that the original text says in Russian. Perhaps the translator was in a hurry to "get the job done", for some reason.
Svetlana also repeatedly makes it very clear that she has a very low opinion of all public schools; no matter that they are in America or the Soviet Union or anywhere else.That was why she moved to England. She seemed to think that Switzerland, where her daughter could not be accepted, and then England had the best private schools.
However, wouldn't many people say that no country, including America, can really be better than its public schools?
The first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", was written by the author in the summer of 1963, about 10 years and 4 months after the death of her father, Joseph Stalin. At the time Svetlana had no ideas about publishing her manuscript as a book, or ever leaving the Soviet Union.
Svetlana left the USSR on December 19, 1966 to go to India with her late husbands ashes. She, and everybody else, expected that she would return in a month, or so; but she managed to extend her stay in India to March 1967. At that time Svetlana wanted to stay in India permanently, "forever", she says; but the government of India was afraid to let her do that, so Svetlana felt that she had no alterantive but to ask for help at the American embassy. After secret detours of a month, or so, she arrived in America in the middle of the international sensation that her defection, "the daughter of Stalin", had created.
During this time Svetlana had signed several documents that she very poorly understood that resulted in that she was completely deprived of any interference, or any other rights, over her manuscript, including the translation into English. Although her book became an international best seller, it produced many unpleasant and persistent "boomerang" effects for her.
Svetlana's second book, "Only One Year", was written within 2 years after her arrival in America; and this time she made very sure that she kept possession of the copyright, and she also approved of the translator.
The third book, "The Faraway Music", was written about 14 years later, in 1983, in Cambridge, England; where Svetlana had gone to live and to put her American daughter into a private school. Somewhat surprisingly, Svetlana wrote this book herself first in English.
It seems that soon after Svetlana wrote this third book, she and her daughter actually went back to the Soviet Union, where they restored Soviet citizenship to her, However, things did not work out for her, and her daughter, there either, and she was allowed to leave again after staying less than 2 years. She never says a word about this long trip.
In 1987 Svetlana herself translated her third, and apparently her last book, "The Faraway Music", into Russian.
Quotations from "Only One Year":
"...although I lived "at the top of the pyramid," < > my whole life, like that of the entire nation, became divided into two periods: before 1953 and after."
" ...in my early years, Communism was an unshakable stronghold. Unshakable remained my father's authority and the belief that he was right in everything without exception."
"Sometimes my father would suddenly say to me, "Why do you associate with children whose parents have been arrested?"
"In September 1957 I changed my name from "Stalina" to "Alliluyeva" - under Soviet law children could bear either their father's or their mother's name."
"My first impression of America was of the magnificent Long Island highways. < > The second thing I noticed < > was the number of women driving cars. < > it was the variety of feminine types at the wheel that struck me: pretty young girls, < > many Negroes, young and old; women in furs and extraordinary big hats ..."
Other sources say that Joseph Stalin was always reading, up to 400 pages a day. Although Svetlana relates an incident where Joseph Stalin is showing somebody his library and he says something like that although he is 70 years old; he is still learning.
""My father made up for his poor education only in the field of technical knowledge."
"He had a certain acquaintance with languages, dating back to his seminary days when he had studied Latin and Greek. He could read Georgian < > He knew Russian well in its simpler, conversational form < > With the help of a dictionary he could make out a simple German text."
Svetlana very distinctly complained about the translation of her first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend", that was translated by Priscilla Johnson McMillan. However, a very amatuer comparison of the English and Russian editions of this book reveals that, although this English translation is not a very literal translation that some people prefer, it always seems that the translator was trying to say the same thing in American English that the original text says in Russian. Perhaps the translator was in a hurry to "get the job done", for some reason.
Svetlana also repeatedly makes it very clear that she has a very low opinion of all public schools; no matter that they are in America or the Soviet Union or anywhere else.That was why she moved to England. She seemed to think that Switzerland, where her daughter could not be accepted, and then England had the best private schools.
However, wouldn't many people say that no country, including America, can really be better than its public schools?
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