For Svetlana and the Soviets, It’s Been a Long Goodby

--The daughter of one-time Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has lost her Soviet citizenship again, this time apparently by choice. A decree signed by President Andrei A. Gromyko said the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet had agreed to allow Svetlana Alliluyeva and her teen-age daughter, Olga, to relinquish their citizenship. Alliluyeva had been stripped of citizenship the first time in 1967 when she sought political asylum in the West. Alliluyeva settled in the United States and married Wesley Peters, Olga’s father, but they later separated. Friends said she could not settle down and she returned to Moscow with Olga in November, 1984, repenting for her defection and claiming she had been manipulated by the CIA. But in April, 1986, Alliluyeva, her Soviet citizenship restored, left again for the United States and Olga left for school in England. This time, she said that, in order to stay in the Soviet Union, she had been forced to accuse the CIA of manipulation and to claim that she had “never enjoyed a day of freedom” in the West.

--On a visit to Houston’s Texas Medical Center, Sweden’s Queen Silvia got a laugh from a simple health question about the Americans she and her husband, King Carl XVI Gustaf, have seen. “In going around the country, we have seen so many people who are very fat. Why is that? Can you give them exercise or do you just give them food and wait?” she asked heart surgeon Michael DeBakey. “It is very simple--they eat too much and too many of the wrong things,” DeBakey said. The royal couple are on a 17-day U.S. tour for the 350th anniversary of the first Swedish settlement in America.

--A planned television film about Midland, Tex., toddler Jessica McClure’s rescue from an abandoned well has been saved from a dispute over movie rights. Two competing groups of rescuers--municipal workers and a band of volunteers--had agreed to abide by the decision of a five-member panel appointed by Mayor Carroll Thomas after almost two months of feuding. The panel chose a proposal from Los Angeles-based Interscope Communications over one from producer Larry Spivey, president of Highland Communications Group. The winning company will negotiate with Jessica’s parents. Jessica, then 18 months old, fell into the well last Oct. 14, and rescuers worked 58 hours digging through solid rock to save her.