48
" On the evening of March 2, Dr. Yakov Rapoport was in his cell in Lefortovo Prison awaiting another torture session. He had been told that the hours for a “voluntary admission” of his guilt were running out. Stalin himself was following the course of his investigation, and was “displeased.” When his interrogator entered his cell, Rapoport was taken aback. He expected this was his end, but his torturer told him he needed his expert opinion. Would the doctor tell him what “Cheyne-Stokes respiration” was? Presumably Stalin’s doctors had ventured this as their diagnosis. Rapoport replied that it was “spasmodic, interrupted breathing,” found in infants and adults suffering “lesions of the respiratory centers in the brain . . . as in brain tumours, cerebral haemorrhages, uremia, or severe arteriosclerosis.” Could someone with such a condition recover? his interrogator asked. “In the majority of cases, death is inevitable,” Rapoport replied.11 He was asked to recommend a Moscow specialist to attend such a patient. He named eight specialists but said that, unfortunately, they were all in prison. "
― Rosemary Sullivan , Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
51
" She was shocked by the complexity of her own emotions, alternately love and relief: It’s a strange thing, but during those days of illness when he was nothing but a body out of which the soul had flown and later, during the days of leave-taking in the Hall of Columns, I loved my father more tenderly than I ever had before. . . . During those days, when he found peace at last on his deathbed and his face became beautiful and serene, I felt my heart breaking from grief and love. Neither before nor since have I felt such a powerful welling up of strong, contradictory emotions.14 Perhaps she saw the face of the man he might have been had he not, as she felt, subsumed all his humanity to an idea—the idea of Stalin, the symbol of Soviet power. And strangely, she felt guilt—she had not been a good daughter. “I’d been more like a stranger than a daughter, and had never been a help to this lonely spirit, this sick old man, when he was left all alone on his Olympus.”15 "
― Rosemary Sullivan , Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
59
" Long before the bombs fell and soldiers and civilians died, long before extermination camps did their work of horror, there was the war of nerves, the propaganda war being fought for people’s minds. Despite the stories that are told in retrospect where everything is clear and predictable, it is never easy to decipher where the real enemy is or who will be the victim. In France the illusion of normalcy was sustained for years. And then, in a moment, the world collapsed like a burnt husk. Millions of people were blindsided. Despite the ominous signs, they could not believe a world war could happen. Not a second time. "
― Rosemary Sullivan , Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille