The 82nd anniversary of Stalin's birth cut no ice in Moscow, where Pravda--which in the late dictator's prime regularly praised his name as many as 300 times per issue--wrote him off with a single mention: a reference to "the serious obstacles that the Stalin cult of personality placed in the path of the development of Marxist-Leninist theory.''

In Washington's party-of-the-week. Diane ("Dede") Buchanan, 18, daughter of former State Department Protocol Chief Wiley Buchanan, made her debut in the stately gold-and-white Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States. Upstairs, the elegant elders made their way through a champagne supper to the soothing accompaniment of society's tried-and-true Music Maker Meyer Davis--who wrote for the occasion a number that began "Dede loves to travel and dance all night . . ." Downstairs, under a sign reading DEDE'S PEPPERMINT LOUNGE, the belle of the ball and her peer group rattled the chandeliers keeping time to the Bo Diddley twist combo--and took their refreshments from a mobile hot-dog cart. Some Latino envoys--notably the uninvited--muttered sourly that the'affair was a "profanation" of the OAS building, but Nicaraguan Ambassador Guillermo Sevilla-Sacasa. dean of the capital's diplomatic corps, pronounced it "a perfectly beautiful party."

Baffled by the anxiety of a U.S. newsman to learn her vibrant statistics. Cinemactress Melina (Never on Sunday) Mercouri marveled: "In Greece we don't care if a woman is small or tall or how she is built. We judge her on her charm, tone of voice, and her capacity to listen to a man well. I never give anyone my measurements. I don't know them, so how could I? I could find out what they are. but I really don't see what the argument is about."

Looking like a couple of Abercrombie & Fitch Minutemen, California's Democratic Governor Pat Brown and a Republican predecessor. U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren, indulged in a little apolitical potshooting in the duck-rich Sacramento Valley. "Both of them." assured Comrade at Arms (and Sacramento City Manager) Bartley Cavanaugh. "are careful hunters, and there is no shooting over the limit." Diplomatically unreported by Cavanaugh was the fact that while the Chief Justice did. in fact, knock down his limit of five mallards and sprigs, the city-bred Governor managed to bag only four.

Pushing ahead with his campaign to humanize Britain's dismal prisons, Home Secretary Richard Austen Butler announced his newest device for rehabilitating gaolbirds: a $280 prize for the best original literary, artistic or musical composition produced behind bars. Unmentioned, at his own request, was the instigator and donor of the award: Author Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler, 56. whose Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth grew out of his own imprisonment by the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War and by Vichy France during World War II.

Launching into his eleventh annual Christmas mission to the nation's cold war outposts, New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, 72, regaled the troops with an account of his own frustrated military career. Back in 1918, His Eminence, then working on the archdiocesan newspaper in Boston, exuberantly bought naval chaplain's regalia only to be rejected by the Navy because he was too short. Back to the store went a determined Father Spellman to be fitted out in doughboy drab--whereupon he was foiled again by an archiepiscopal order freezing him in his Boston job. "I still visit the troops each Christmas," concluded the longtime military vicar to Roman Catholics in the U.S. armed forces, "because of my 1918 inferiority complex."

Yowling dissonantly in the arms of his Aunt Elizabeth as the Archbishop of Canterbury sprinkled him with water from the River Jordan, Britain's 46-day-old Viscount Linley was christened David Albert Charles in the domed music room of Buckingham Palace. The ceremony over, David's proud parents, Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, set off to finish up their preparations for a Christmas en famille at the Queen's Norfolk country home, after which they planned to take a second honeymoon in the West Indies--sans the squalling viscount.

Buttonholed by a CBS-TV interviewer for his views on President Kennedy's campaign for wide tariff-cutting powers to keep the U.S. in step with Europe's burgeoning Common Market, Kansas' spunky Alf M. London, 74, expressed emphatic support for the Kennedy proposals. Did he feel strongly enough to quit the Republican party if it fought freer trade? Well, blurted the 1936 G.O.P. standard-bearer who was buried by F.D.R. in the biggest political avalanche in U.S. history: "With the state of the world today, I'd be very much tempted."

"I was burning myself out," confessed Jordan's hard-living King Hussein, 26. as he ended a fortnight's physical checkup in London. "The doctors have advised me to take three days rest each week and a month off every six months. I'm not to do any more aerobatics, and I must fly only in pressurized planes.'' Happily, after eight beleaguered years on the precarious Hashemite throne, the doughty descendant of Mohammed felt he could afford an occasional rehabilitating breather. "Things are now going well at home,'' reported Hussein. "We are over the battle for survival.''

Home again from a goodwill tour of the Far East that had won her a host of new friends (TIME, Dec. 15), Britain's coltish Princess Alexandra, 25, mourned the loss of an old one--the beloved teddy bear that she had mislaid sometime during a cruise down Burma's Irrawaddy River. This week, both the Burmese Army and the R.A.F. having confessed failure in massive teddy bear hunts, someone in the royal family was bound to be shopping for a Christmas replacement for the furry creature that had been Alexandra's pillow pal since childhood.

Confounding enemies who gossiped that she had gone into seclusion for a nose bob, volatile Soprano Maria Callas returned to Milan's La Scala five days after undergoing punishing treatment for sinusitis and won 25 rapturous curtain calls in Cherubini's Medea. Warbled Callas. tossing off the hasty comeback as mere noblesse obbligato: "Everyone else can be ill and get sympathy, but I cannot afford to be sick because the press watches my every movement for a chance to get a smack at me."

Even with Congress in recess, the partisan snipers still plinked away. As the Republicans' leading sharpshooter, New York's Congressman William Miller, retreated to Florida to meditate the wisdom of surrendering either his chairmanship of the G.O.P. National Committee or his House seat, his fellow New Yorker, Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler, helpfully counseled him to hang onto the latter. After the recent "Rocky-mandered" reapportionment of New York's congressional districts, gibed Celler, a Republican could not be unseated in Miller's district "by St. Gabriel himself." Responded Miller: ''I hope--for once in Celler's life--that he's right."

With Moscow's cultural commissars still smarting from his poetic onslaught on Soviet anti-Semitism (TIME, Nov. 3), Russia's indomitable Evgeny Evtushenko, 28, stirred up a new hullaballoo by rebuffing the lionization of the young intelligentiki and flatly denying that his outspokenness made him "a brave man." Wrote Evtushenko in Russia's Literaturnaya Gazeta (Kiev edition only):

Sometime

Posterity will remember --and will burn with shame

When they shall have done with shame and lies

Those strange times

When

Common honesty was called courage.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.