Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-FictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2015A painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators – her father, Josef Stalin.Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy – the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States – leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father’s regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin.With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it’s a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father’s name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.
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Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Harper in 2015
Copyright © Rosemary Sullivan 2015
Rosemary Sullivan asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work.
Cover photograph © The David King Collection
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007491117
Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007491124
Version: 2016-06-29
Frontispiece: Eight-year-old Svetlana with her father, Joseph Stalin, on vacation in Soshi.
(Svetlana Aliluyeva private collection; courtesy of Chrese Evans)
Contents
The Djugashvili and Alliluyev Family Trees
PART ONE: The Kremlin Years
Chapter 1 That Place of Sunshine
Chapter 3 The Hostess and the Peasant
Chapter 5 The Circle of Secrets and Lies
Chapter 8 The Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign
Chapter 9 Everything Silent, as Before a Storm
Chapter 10 The Death of the Vozhd
PART TWO: The Soviet Reality
Chapter 12 The Generalissimo’s Daughter
Chapter 15 On the Banks of the Ganges
PART THREE: Flight to America
Chapter 16 Italian Comic Opera
Chapter 20 A Mysterious Figure
Chapter 21 Letters to a Friend
Chapter 24 The Taliesin Fiasco
Chapter 25 The Montenegrin’s Courtier
Chapter 26 Stalin’s Daughter Cutting the Grass
Chapter 28 Lana Peters, American Citizen
Chapter 29 The Modern Jungle of Freedom
PART FOUR: Learning to Live in the West
Chapter 34 “Never Wear a Tight Skirt If You Intend to Commit Suicide”
What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it? In the USSR, Stalin was mythic. He was the vozhd, the supreme leader who built the Soviet Union into a superpower and won the war against the Nazis. To his millions of Soviet victims, however, he was the man responsible for the Terror and the infamous Gulag. In the West, he was widely demonized as one of the world’s most brutal dictators. Try as she might, Svetlana Alliluyeva could never escape Stalin’s shadow. As she lamented, “Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.”>1
In the USSR, her life was unimaginably painful. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide when Svetlana was only six and a half. In the purges of the Great Terror in the late 1930s, Stalin did not spare his family. Her beloved Aunt Maria and Uncle Alexander Svanidze, the brother and sister-in-law of Stalin’s first wife, were arrested and executed as enemies of the people; their son Johnik, her childhood playmate, disappeared. Uncle Stanislav Redens, the husband of her mother’s sister Anna, was executed. Uncle Pavel, her mother’s brother, died of a heart attack brought on by shock. When she’d just turned seventeen, her father sentenced her first love, Aleksei Kapler, to the Gulag for ten years. The Nazis killed her half brother Yakov in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1943. In 1947 and 1948, during the wave of repression known as the Anti-Cosmopolitan Campaign, her mother’s sister Anna and Pavel’s widow, Zhenya, were sentenced to seven years in solitary confinement. Zhenya’s daughter Kyra was imprisoned and then exiled.
After her father’s death in 1953, the tragedies continued. Her elder brother, Vasili, was arrested and eventually died of alcoholism in 1962. Her literary friends in the mid-1960s were sent to forced-labor camps. When she finally found peace in a loving relationship with a man named Brajesh Singh, she was officially refused the right to marry him before he died, though she was given official permission to carry his ashes back to India.
