Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan: book review

Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (2012) is about Svetlana (1926-2011), the daughter of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) with his second wife Nadezhada Alliluyeva (1901-1932). It is in four parts: I – The Kremlin Years, II – The Soviet Reality, III – Flight to America, and IV – Learning to Live in the West. It’s a 768-page book, well-presented, with each chapter containing a black and white photograph.

The prologue commences on March 6, 1967, when at 41 years of age Svetlana entered the US Embassy in New Delhi, India, seeking political asylum – defection. The US Government – the FBI and CIA – didn’t even know that Stalin had a daughter. She was on a plane to freedom that night – but not without difficulty.

Svetlana was the youngest of Stalin’s three children. Her half-brother Yakov was 19 years older (his mother died of typhus when she was 22). Stalin then married 16-year-old Nadezhada in 1917 and had Vasili in 1921 and Svetlana in 1926, when Stalin was 48.

The chapter on The Kremlin Years commences in November 1932 with the death of Svetlana’s mother, when she was six years old and her mother was 31. Stalin never remarried. Svetlana was 16 – it was 1942 and World War II had commenced – when she learned that her mother had committed suicide with a miniature pistol.

Sullivan writes of Svetlana’s first love, her studies in American history, and growing up under a communist regime – not one of luxury but austerity, restriction, and rules. Svetlana married Grigori Morozov in 1943 against her father’s wishes, although he did not prevent the marriage. They had a son, Joseph in 1945. Grigori was literally a ‘shirt-tearer’ when angry, and they divorced, although she is said to have regretted her decision later in life. Her second marriage to Yuri Zhdanov, a scientist, ended in divorce and a daughter, Katya, in 1950.

By the end of the war in 1945, her ties to her father diminished. Stalin died in 1953, aged 75 – a doctor recommended eight specialists, ‘but said that, unfortunately, they were all in prison.’ After his death about a million Gulag prisoners were released, two of Svetlana’s aunts came home, and in 1957 she changed her surname from Stalina to Alliluyeva, her mother’s surname. Her third marriage to Ivan Svanidze in 1962 ‘was as if two neuroses met – though his experience was much darker than hers.’ It lasted less than a year.

Svetlana loved an Indian man, Brajesh Singh, whom she met in a Moscow hospital in 1967 when she was 37 and he was 53; she for tonsilitis and he for emphysema. The government denied her permission to marry him (a foreigner), but she was given permission a few months later for an exit visa to carry his ashes back to India.

It was in India when fate played a hand. Two days before her flight home, she asked a Soviet Embassy official for her passport. To her shock, she was given it. ‘This was against regulations. Passports were to be given back to Soviet citizens only at the airport.’ Instead of going to a dinner function, Svetlana took a taxi to the US Embassy. Robert Rayle, in charge of defectors, arranged her flight out of India, and described her as ‘the most completely cooperative defector I have ever met … not spoiled or demanding … a warm, friendly person … very stable … quite naive.’ Another official was impressed with her ‘intelligence, stability, sincerity … the defection was not an irrational caprice.’ She left behind her children, everything, with only a manuscript, Twenty Letters to a Friend, as her financial security.

Landing in America there were ‘more people to greet her at the airport than had been there for the Beatles in 1964.’ She was both praised and condemned for leaving Russia, and for leaving her family, writing a book, and gaining freedom. Although she did not ‘choose her father’ her critics labelled her crazy, unstable, and ‘a murderer’s daughter’ – which continued throughout her life.

Moving frequently in America, her last marriage to William Wesley Peters led to a move to the architect commune in Wisconsin, the Taliesin, ‘an experiment in revolutionary communal living.’ They married in 1970 after three weeks – and after her second publication Only One Year (1969). They had a daughter Olga (1971) when Wes was 60 and she was 44 – and Svetlana changed her name to Lana Peters. But the marriage was ‘a heartbreaking disaster’ and ended in 1973.

In 1982 she moved to England with Olga. When she heard of her son Joseph’s illness in 1984 – he was 39 and she was 58 – she requested entry into Russia to see him and Katya (though Katya declined to see her mother). After 18 years away, she returned to Russia and restored her USSR citizenship – which sent shockwaves throughout the West: ‘the US government was outraged.’

In Russia she sought permission to live in Tbilisi, Georgia, which was granted. Here, with Olga, ‘life found a rhythm’ and ‘only here did she feel anonymous and at peace.’ She visited her father’s ancestral home in Gori, and her grandmother’s grave in Tbilisi, but she was lonely and ‘peace was an illusion.’ The change in government in March 1985, with Mikhail Gorbachev in power, brought a relaxed ‘perestroika’ regime. Svetlana approached Gorbachev and he granted permission for Olga, now almost 15 years old, to continue her studies in England. Svetlana asked for an exit visa to travel with Olga, but was denied, and she waved her daughter farewell at Moscow airport in April 1985.

For the second time, Svetalana defected. The events in New Delhi of her first defection in 1967 were truly fascinating – the best chapters – particularly how and why, the machinations, and the diplomatic considerations between the USSR, the USA, and India. How she did it the second time is just as intriguing. While in her hotel room in Moscow, after Olga’s flight, she had a visitor … The next day she was on a flight to America after only 18 months in Russia.

In 1991, after the collapse of the Gorbachev regime, Katya read Svetlana’s A Book for Granddaughters, published in Russian. Now a volcanologist, and a recluse, Katya sought contact with her mother. Joseph, however, died in November 2008. Svetlana died, aged 85, in Wisconsin, America, in November 2011. She never did like November.

Sullivan has presented an easy-to-read book that almost rigidly keeps its focus on Svetlana, rather than on her father. Sullivan tries to untangle facts from rumours, quotes from misquotes, and information from propaganda, using Svetlana’s books, interviews, and references. Readers see a peripatetic woman moving from house to house, country to country, lover to lover, trying to explain the ramifications of her decisions, oscillating between love and hate for her father, and dealing with people – those who wanted to kill her, condemn her, denounce her, exploit her, write about her, help her, or marry her. No matter what she did, no matter whether people liked or loathed her, she was forever tied to the name, personality, and deeds of her father.

Postscript: On December 30, 2015, BBC News announced that actor Gerard Depardieu, a Russian citizen since 2013, will play the role of Joseph Stalin in a new French film. Fanny Ardant will direct the film, an adaptation of Jean-Daniel Baltassat’s 2013 novel ‘Le Divan de Staline.’ It will be set in the 1950s and focus on an artist commissioned to create a monument to Stalin.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).