Stalin's Daughter

Starred review from April 6, 2015
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.

April 15, 2015

Sullivan's (Villa Air-Bel) biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926-2011), daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, is insightful and thoroughly researched. Drawing from Svetlana's personal lifelong correspondence and interviews with family and friends, Sullivan paints a portrait of a woman at times conflicted over her sense of self, often used as a pawn in the battle of ideology between East and West, and forever caught, despite her own efforts, in her father's shadow. When Svetlana defected, she traded political oppression for freedom of expression. She also experienced the unsettling transition away from a privileged position within Soviet society to being a functioning member of the capitalist West. Her lack of proficiency with matters of finance, along with her frequent struggles to find love and happiness, were major, long-standing themes. Sullivan frequently highlights instances when Svetlana's lack of fiscal acuity or her willingness to be influenced by those who claimed her affections exacerbated difficult situations or even assisted in their creation. VERDICT This excellent and engrossing biography is suitable for anyone interested in Russian history or in Svetlana's struggle to make a difference in a world that never could separate her from her father. [See Prepub Alert, 9/14/14.]--Elizabeth Zeitz, Otterbein Univ. Lib., Westerville, OH

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
A biography of haunting fascination portrays its subject as a pawn of historical circumstance who tried valiantly to create her own life. Canadian biographer Sullivan's previous works (Villa Air-Bel: World War II, Escape, and a House in Marseille, 2006, etc.) often took her into the complicated lives of women artists, and in this sympathetic biography of Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926-2011), the author has illuminated another challenging, mercurial subject. There is a parallel strangeness to the two halves of Svetlana's life. In her early years, she grew up in the ideologically strenuous Soviet Union, with the run of the Kremlin and various dachas. She was the darling of her supreme dictator father, but before she turned 7, her mother killed herself-though suicide was not the "official" cause of death. Svetlana was also held somewhat apart in school, shadowed by bodyguards and agents, and she learned the shattering truth about her mother's death from English-language magazines when she was 15. In the second half of her life, she walked into the American embassy in New Delhi in 1967, where she had been allowed to scatter her husband's ashes, and defected, carrying a manuscript and abandoning her two older children in Moscow. Determined not to end up silenced as an artist, she enlisted the help of former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan and others. Svetlana had seen her family and artist friends disappear-executed or vanished into the gulags-and she had grown disillusioned and embittered by the Soviet system, to the skittishness of American officials, who were afraid of a Soviet political backlash. With great compassion, Sullivan reveals how both sides played her for their own purposes, yet she was a writer first and foremost, a passionate Russian soul who wanted a human connection yet could not quite find the way into the Western heart. The author manages suspense and intrigue at every turn.

Starred review from May 1, 2015
Stalin's only daughter, his little sparrow, was the object of both doting attention and icy indifference. Even after defecting to the U.S. in 1967, Svetlana remained all her life the political prisoner of my father's name. When she was six, Svetlana lost her mother to suicide; later she lost scores of relatives to death and imprisonment as her notoriously ruthless father did not spare them his tyranny. At 41, after securing permission to travel to India to scatter the ashes of her partner, whom she was forbidden to marry, Svetlana impulsively defected to the U.S. embassy, leaving behind her adult son and daughter. Though Stalin had been dead for 14 years, her defection triggered acrimony and geopolitical maneuverings in both the U.S. and Russia. Her memoir made her rich, but opportunists exploited her, and she died penniless. Sullivan draws on previously secret documents and interviews with Svetlana's American daughter, her friends, and the CIA handler who escorted her to the U.S. for riveting accounts of her complicated life, inside and outside of Russia. Svetlana's letters and family photographs enhance the portrait of a woman tortured by the secrets, lies, and intrigues at the center of her early life as a Kremlin princess and in later years as the object of fascination and scorn as the daughter of the feared Russian dictator.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)