Letters From Stalin's Daughter

When Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., visited Moscow last summer, he found the Russians agitated and upset over the impending publication of Svetlana Alliluyeva's memoirs. They wanted publication postponed until after this month's observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Failing that, they tried to blunt the event by leaking in advance a bowdlerized version of the much-awaited book by Joseph Stalin's daughter. Mr. Schlesinger, chronicler of the Ages of Jackson and Roosevelt, and of the Kennedy Administration, here illuminates the historical values of Mrs. Alliluyeva's book written before her flight from the Soviet Union and before she composed the remarkable document to Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, first published in the June Atlantic.