Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

Just completed reading this amazing book about the life of Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan. It gives us a very accurate picture of Svetlana Alliluyeva, who bore the mark of Cain - Stalin’s Daughter, of which she was conscious all her life and this had somehow determined her behaviour. She would have preferred not to be Stalin’s daughter and that her father would have been an unknown carpenter.She lost her mother when she was six years old. Her mother, Nadezhda “Nadya” (Alliluyeva) Stalina was Stalin’s second wife. She committed suicide and Svetlana had very few memories of her. Svetlana’s relationship with her father was very complicated. It was a sort of love-hate relationship. She was not aware of the cruelties that her father had carried out even against his own family. He had no mercy for any of his imagined opponents, who were assassinated or imprisoned for long periods. Stalin was a total paranoiac. The food that he was served had to be tasted by his own servants in front of him before being served.The author had done amazing and thorough research on this biography. While reading this book, one feels very involved in Svetlana’s tough life. One can empathize with her. Svetlana defected to the US in 1967, abandoning her two children, who never forgave her.Svetlana had married three times in the USSR. The first husband, Grigori “Grisha” Morozov, a Jewish friend of Vasili her brother, who she married in 1944 and divorced in 1947. He became a law professor.Her second husband, Yuri Zhdanov, who she married in the 1949 and divorced in 1951.Her third husband was Johnreed “Johnik” (Ivan) Svanidze, who had a very tough life, and was exiled to Kazakhstan to work in the mines there. He returned to Moscow in 1956 and married Svetlana. They got divorced after a year.Her fourth husband was an Indian, son of the Rajah of Kalakankar in Uttar Pradesh. He suffered from ill-health when he met Svetlana in 1963. He died in 1966. After that, she defected.The book continues describing her dramatic defection to the US after her fourth husband’s death and her life there.Her life was very dramatic and she was constantly meeting people who befriended her and many also abandoned their friendship with her as well. She was never happy and was always relocating and even lived in England for a while with her third daughter from a disastrous marriage to an American, Wesley Peters, an architect.All in all, this book is a fascinating read and describes Svetlana’s lifestyle and her personal tragedies as a writer. This book also gives us an insight into Svetlana’s complicated relationships with many of her friends and her slide down into financial problems, much of which are her own making.This is an excellent read and never boring not for a moment.

‘Stalin’s Daughter,’ by Rosemary Sullivan, Looks at a Complicated Life. Reviewed in NY Times“The strongest proof that Svetlana Alliluyeva was Joseph Stalin’s daughter is that this small, demure-looking redhead scared people — and not just because her face and coloring so resembled her father’s.She had some of his fevered intensity, which showed up even in one of their favorite games: Hostess, in which little Svetlana gave bossy orders, and Russia’s unopposed tyrant, in the role of her humble Secretary, pretended to grovel in response. When he wasn’t signing letters to her as “Your Little Papa,” the man who struck fear in many a Russian heart was calling himself, in 1935, “Svetanka-Hostess’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. Stalin,” for his 9-year-old princess’s amusement.But a lot of Stalin’s teasing had a tone of threat to it, too. Nikita S. Khrushchev once said of this father-daughter relationship that “his was the tenderness of a cat for a mouse.” And as Svetlana grew up and saw the fear that her father, and even she, aroused, she was too smart to mistake the fairy tales he told her for Russian reality. Looking backward, as the Canadian historian Rosemary Sullivan does clearly and evenhandedly in “Stalin’s Daughter,” it appears astounding that the girl who could have had the world’s worst daddy issues managed to grow up at all.The early part of this book is a tangle of fried and burned family relationships, all destroyed by Stalin as he rose to power. Though he was dependent on a large extended family during Svetlana’s earliest years, family portraits from that time must be captioned with the names of those he arrested, had shot or otherwise caused to disappear.Most egregious and mysterious is the matter of the little girl’s mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, known as Nadya, who supposedly shot herself after a long, bitter evening of quarreling with her husband in front of many witnesses. The degree to which Svetlana was sheltered — she was 6 ½ at the time — was so extreme that she did not know of her mother’s possible suicide until years later.Ms. Sullivan fills this measured, informative biography with contrasting theories about such events, because there is no such thing as an uncomplicated death that involved Joseph Stalin. But it is not a highly opinionated book. It paints a strong but slightly distant portrait of the headstrong Svetlana, whose every brush with adversity seemed to make her tougher. She grew up to be so sexually charged that she became a danger to any man on whom she set her sights.When she had just turned 17, her romance with Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, a worldly Jewish cineaste, brought them some remarkable movie-watching moments (Garbo, in “Queen Christina”: “I have grown up in a great man’s shadow. I long to escape my destiny.”). It also brought Kapler five years in a labor camp — and another five after he stealthily visited Moscow, not looking for Svetlana but simply trying to see his wife.Still, Svetlana entered into three official marriages in Russia (one a purely political arrangement cooked up by her father) and one common-law union before the dying wish of the last man, Brajesh Singh, allowed her to leave the country. He was Indian-born, and he wanted his ashes scattered on the Ganges. Svetlana liked India and perhaps would have enjoyed staying there indefinitely, had she not sensed opportunity at the American Embassy in New Delhi. But the book grows ever more fascinating in explaining how her 1967 decision to defect made for a huge mess late in the Cold War and turned her into a political football”.

A tyrant whose ego ran wildStarved millions while spoiling his child.Behind the Iron Curtain, one thing is for certain:A madman leaves none undefiled.#bookreviewsaslimericks

As the Beatles once said, "You're gonna carry that weight a long time." That's the issue for Svetlana Stalin, whatever she does, wherever she goes, whatever she makes of her life, she's carrying THAT name. Even when she ditched it for her mothers maiden name everyone knew who she was. Psychologically the damage had been done early on, and clearly affected the rest of her life. I felt the earlier parts of the book were the most interesting, and it could have been a little shorter, as once the novelty of Stalin;s daughter living in the suburbs of the USA and England wore off, it got a little slow. But a fascinating read none the less.

This is an incredibly well-written book about the much-married daughter of Stalin. Svetlana certainly led an eventful and not always very happy life. It began in the USSR of the 1920s as the daughter of the brutal Russian dictator and her life would then lead her to defect to the USA, live in England, return to the USSR and so back to the USA. She was officially married four times, had numerous other lovers and had three children over a huge timescale (1945 through to 1971). This is a very well written book by Rosemary Sullivan and at 623 pages long covers Svetlana's life in considerable detail. I personally found the earlier sections (her relationship with her father) far more interesting and ultimately as Svetlana inevitably became less of a 'player' on the world stage and slipped into obscurity, so I found the book less interesting. It is way too long in many ways. Still - it is an amazing biography of a person we probably don't know much about now in 2015.

I absolutely loved this book. I am fascinated by Russia, Stalin, the Soviet Union and all that, but this is a unique angle, and Svetlana’s story is told beautifully.Just imagine being HIS daughter.There isn’t a boring part here, and the tale is often mind-blowing. It’s also very moving.A must-read.

An interesting read. To think of Stalin's daughter living a humdrum life in British surburbia is iincongrous in the extreme. I was particularly interested to note that she had spent time in the county of my birth, Cumbria. It would seem she was far more taken with the Lake District than Historical Materialism. Very sensible.

Amazing subject matter. In-depth, incredible read. Not very well written in parts, hence 4 stars but the subject matter more than compensates.