Twenty Letters to a Friend

“Fascinating from the first page to the last . . . A rich and absorbing memoir . . . To be Stalin’s daughter and to remain human is itself admirable.” —The New York Times Book Review

In this riveting, New York Times–bestselling memoir—first published by Harper in 1967—Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s critically acclaimed biography, Stalin’s Daughter, describes the surreal experience of growing up in the Kremlin in the shadow of her father, Joseph Stalin. In 1967, she fled the Soviet Union for India, where she approached the U.S. Embassy for asylum. Once there, she showed her CIA handler something remarkable: a manuscript about her life that she’d written in 1963. The Indian Ambassador to the USSR, whom she’d befriended, had smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union the previous year.

Structured as a series of letters to a “friend”—Svetlana refused to identify him, but we now know it was her close friend, the physicist Fyodor Volkenstein—this astounding memoir, also in some ways a love letter to Russia, with its ancient heritage and spectacularly varied geography, exposes the dark human heart of the Kremlin. Each letter adds a new strand to her story; some are wistful, while others are desperate exorcisms of the tragedies that plagued her life. Candid, surprising, and compelling, Twenty Letters to a Friend offers one of the most revealing portraits of life inside Stalin’s inner circle, and of the notorious dictator himself.

“Fascinating, revealing, profoundly human, and significant. . . . The letters move relentlessly on through deepening tragedy, dark happenings, and deaths.” —Los Angeles Times

“She is a shrewd observer of character, and her analysis of her father’s psychology . . . is chillingly convincing.” —The Baltimore Sun