" Svetlana had little real influence over her father. Her fantasy that she might have saved him required an enemy who had corrupted him. She watched Beria scuttling around Stalin’s bed, leaning in obsequiously to assure the leader of his loyalty when Stalin opened his eyes and they thought he might regain consciousness, then assuming the dominant role of paramount leader and ordering the others around when he was sure Stalin would die. She decided Lavrenty Beria was that enemy. He was the “artful courtier” who had succeeded in deceiving her father, his Iago, who had “used his cunning to trick” her father into many of his crimes.16 This was absurd, a willful blindness that many in the family colluded in rather than face the evil that Stalin, a man whom they had loved and who had professed love for them, had perpetrated against them. They wanted to believe that Beria had fed Stalin’s vindictiveness until it became paranoia. "

― Rosemary Sullivan , Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva