Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva.

including many critical remarks about Priscilla Johnson McMillan's translation throughout and correcting her own surname on the title ("Allilueva...no need of 'y'..."); Svetlana annotates the copyright information and the dedication leaf heavily, with corrections and animadversions regarding the translation, and again on some 50 pages in the text of the book, and also on the dust jacket



first British edition, 256 pages, 8vo, original cloth, dust jacket, annotated by another hand on the flyleaf ("Author's Copy")

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"...this is another illegal outrage. She was not a professional translator--never did any work before or after my book--but got the Copyright!...She added me 2 years of age--as many historians did--to make me more 'adult' a witness of those years...p.76: 'Jewish eyes'--should be Semitic eyes. p.77: [my daughter] Catherine. (not 'Yekatorina')...My translator refused (in 1967) to work together with me--but she claimed that her translation has been 'Authorized' by Author. Just one more lie in all the dread of this First Publication (S.A.)..."

Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926-2011) was the only daughter of Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva (who committed suicide in 1932). She always said that Stalin "broke her life".  Stalin was devoted and indulgent to Svetlana, but his love was obsessive and controlling, preventing her marrying whom she wished (see Simon Sebag Montefiore's obituary 'Enduring Lessons of Stalin's Little Sparrow' in the Financial Times).  Svetlana defected to the United States in 1967 and this memoir was published by Harper & Row soon afterwards, to great consternation in the Soviet Union. Svetlana lived in England in the years 1982-1984 and she may have made these annotations to the British edition at this time.