Stalin’s Daughter
The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of 2015
A 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.
About the author
Rosemary Sullivan has written poetry, short fiction, biography, literary criticism, reviews and articles. Her recent books include the critically acclaimed Villa Air-Bel and Labyrinth of Desire. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, and has been awarded Guggenheim, Camargo, and Trudeau Fellowships. She is a recipient of the Lorne Pierce Medal awarded by the Royal Society of Canada for her contribution to Literature and Culture, and is an Officer of the Order of Canada.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 2011), Stalin's only daughter, lived an almost impossible life at the edges of 20th-century history. Poet and biographer Sullivan (Villa Air-Bel) masterfully employs interviews, Alliluyeva's own letters, and the contents of CIA, KGB, and Soviet archives to stitch together a coherent narrative of her fractured life. Its first act Sullivan depicts her lonely existence as the motherless "princess in the Kremlin" is remarkable enough, but as Alliluyeva slowly came to understand the extent of her father's cruelty, she began to resent the U.S.S.R. and her role in its mythology, abandoning her two children and defecting to America in 1967. In her startling second life, Alliluyeva made a fortune by publishing her memoir, only to lose it through a disastrous marriage orchestrated by Frank Lloyd Wright's widow. Alliluyeva also formed and dissolved countless friendships as she moved nomadically around America and England, even briefly returning to the U.S.S.R., before settling in Wisconsin to live out the rest of her days in anonymity. Readers shouldn't expect insight into Stalin's psyche he was just as mysterious and mercurial to his family as he is to historians but Sullivan takes them on a head-spinning journey as Alliluyeva attempts to escape her father's shadow without ever fully comprehending the man who cast it.
