Svetlana Stalin: defector with a difference

From CHARLES FENYVESI in WASHINGTON
SOME years ago, Arthur Koestler, himself an exCommunist, remarked that after all cold war differences are resolved. the final confrontation would take place between the Communists and the anti-Communists. He referred, of course, to the fury with which disillusioned Communists tended to turn against the very system they had once fought for.
Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alluliyeva, appears to be of a new breed of defectors from Communism. She has not burned her bridges with the Soviet Union. Her criticisms of the Kremlin, although severe in substance as well as in their implications, have been couched in a soft language remarkably free from vindictive terms. What she has said so far does not amount to an irrevocable condemnation of the regime. In short, she has shown no indication of intending to set herself up in the enemy camp as a brooding political exile.
Svetlana Stalin is no antiCommunist in the usually accepted, cold-war sense of the word. Throughout the years, defecting ballet-dancers, sailors and journalists alike were in the habit of revealing themselves to be thwarted politicians. Svetlana Stalin disclaimed having a political philosophy and denied that she was in any way interested in politics.
But could her flight be without political content?
In a few stray comments Soviet officials have made, it was stressed that she acted as an individual—"a confused and impetuous woman"—and her act had "no political implications.
Svetlana Stalin made a private decision to live in a country other than her duties to the State required. She chose to lead a life different from what was prescribed for her.
Moreover, she rejected official Marxism and disparaged the value of the Bolshevik Revolution's prime claim to fame: Russia's material progress, the forever-rising production charts. Finally, she rejected the regime's claim to moral monopoly and found faith in God.
The fact that Svetlana Stalin dared think and act as a private person may prove to be, in the long run, the most significant political aspect of her break with Moscow.
Her revolt to assert the sovereignty of her private life is perhaps as important as, say, Wladyslaw Gomulka's defiance in 1956 of Soviet demands that he toe the international Communist line. There the confrontation was between "National Communism" and Moscow's "Centralised Communism," between different applications of the same Marxist theory, or, to go a step further, between divergent interpretations based on the same Hegelian dictum which declares the State's absolute rights over the individual.
At the core of Svetlana Stalin's revolt is her refusal to surrender her private life to the purported common good—the cause of Soviet Communism and the world revolution.
Her decision may not make much of an impact on intellectuals or even on the growing middle class which rules the Soviet Union. To them, she may be a bit too obvious and her predicament all too familiar. They may say that she simply went a step further than those, like the late Boris Pasternak, who have withdrawn from public life and live in what is called "an internal immigration."
Her flight is not likely to influence Kremlin politics, although de-stalinization would certainly be more embarrassing now, with the dictator's daughter in the United States.
Those who are likely to be most affected by Svetlana Stalin's defection are Russia's people—the very masses whose voice has been as silent in the 50 years since the Bolshevik Revolution as it was in the days of the czar.
Simple people everywhere in Eastern Europe will be vastly impressed by what Svctlana Stalin has done and said. They will find that she speaks their language, she has given expression to their sentiments about the system. The statement that "people are people everywhere" does not sound platitudinous to them. They are likely to agree with her criticism of Communism, which has little to do with subtle ideological differences within the same theory and which objects to the purges and the terror on the grounds that they exemplify man's inhumanity to man.
Her simplicity and religiousness, and her deep faith in the grand fundamentals of goodness, justice and love evoke an older, pre-revolutionary Russia. Her's is probably the authentic voice of millions of simple people who have never been, in the strict sense of the word, Communists or anti-Communists, and whose daily concern with earning a living never allowed them time to think in terms of ideologies. Their best thoughts represent the kind of broad, populist humanism that the Russia of Tolstoy, Bunin and even Gorky stood for.
It is an odd quirk of history that it had to be the daughter of modern Russia's most dreaded figure who should become, if she hasn't already, the personification of this return to the Russian earth. Svetlana Stalin's non-political faith in the "power of life and justice"—which is her definition of God—tells the world the amazing story that despite the shrill internal warfare, the mass-murders in the name of progress and the compulsory militancy of the world revolution, there survives an unchanged and perhaps unchangeable mystical Mother Russia, which is against violence and injustice, and which believes in the ultimate efficacy of love. And Svetlana Stalin found that "class struggle and revolution" cannot "go hand in hand with the idea of love."
The very last straw in the collapse of her faith in Communism was the refusal of the Soviet authorities to allow her to marry Brijesh Singh, an Indian Communist, because he was a foreigner and she "a kind of a State property." But the fact is that every person, for all intents and purposes, is a kind of a State property in a Communist State. Svetlana, Stalin's assertion of her individuality—called "the pursuit of happiness" in this country— amounts to a revolution.
She may very well become something of a folk hero in Eastern Europe, where Stalin's name still has a potent magic —black magic, that is. She will play the role of the wicked ruler's soft-spoken, gentle daughter who tries to undo the wrongs of her father and who thus reaffirms the belief that justice prevails over injustice, love over hate.
As for official Washington, it is still uncertain whether or not she will be an embarrassing guest. Exceptional care was taken to soften the political impact of her flight to the United States, lest the fragile detente with the Soviet Union suffer. Mr. Nicholas Katzenbach, Under-Secretary of State, has urged people not to see the affair "in terms of cold war rigidities."
She is, as Mr. Robert McCloskey, U.S. State Department spokesman, was at pains to emphasise on the date of her arrival to New York, "a welcome private visitor," travelling on an ordinary visitor's visa valid for six months, but which "may be extended if so desired."
Had Svetlana Stalin fled Russia a few years earlier, she would have been the greatest catch in the propaganda war between Washington and Moscow. Having quit the Soviet Union now, when the White House speaks of expanding the areas of common interest with Russia and policy-planners are paid for writing on the convergence of the two ways of life, Stalin's daughter succeeded in making an exit without a great official bang. But something far more positive than a whimper will be heard years and years from now.