About book Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary And Tumultuous Life Of Svetlana Alliluyeva (2015)
What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it?Svetlana (Alliluyeva) Stalina (later known as Lana Peters) led a larger life than most, and in the exhaustively researched Stalin's Daughter, author Rosemary Sullivan presents a woman that most people would have found mercurial and unlikeable in person, but on the page, a reader can't help but step back and wonder, What must it have been like to be born Stalin's daughter? How do you survive finding out that your beloved father was a monster when you're not a monstrous person yourself?On the one hand, most Russians thought of Svetlana as the Princess of the Kremlin, but the childhood she describes (in letters, remembered conversations, and her own memoirs written years later) is one of a lonely little girl with a distant mother, an absent father, no real friends, and a home in gloomy bureaucratic quarters. After Svetlana's mother committed suicide when the little girl was only six (the fact of the suicide only accidentally revealed to Svetlana many years later), she became even more isolated and lonesome. Svetlana's story jumps ahead years at a time and the book isn't even half done when Stalin dies – and that's important to note because this isn't really Stalin's story, but his daughter's.Through the years, Svetlana was a romantic, passionately falling in love with inappropriate mates, and eventually endured four failed marriages. When she fell for an Indian diplomat whom the Russian government refused to give her permission to marry, Svetlana lived as his wife for years, nursed him through his final illness, and was shocked when the Politburo gave in to her demands to carry his ashes to India for last rites. While in India – and despite leaving two adolescent children behind in Moscow – Svetlana presented herself to the American Embassy with the intent to defect. Much cloak and dagger ensued, and despite not wanting to provoke a major incident at the height of the Cold War, the US eventually allowed Svetlana to emigrate in order to publish her first memoir about growing up in the Soviet Union. Because the book made a lot of money (and because Svetlana was clueless about taking care of money and still a hopeless romantic), the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright was able to lure her to Taliesin West (Wright's desert-based utopian society) and encourage Svetlana to marry her own widowered son-in-law. The marriage didn't last, but the couple had a daughter (despite Svetlana now being 44), and taking care of her became Svetlana's raison d'être. Money was an issue for Svetlana for the rest of her life, and in order to give little Olga the best possible education, they moved constantly – from state to state, to England, a defection back to the USSR (!), a return to the West – and along the way, Svetlana alienated those who would try to help her, would erupt with anger every time someone mentioned her father, would give her heart to men who didn't know how to deal with her. At the very end, Svetlana lived as an anonymous hunchbacked old woman in a small town nursing home, surviving on the meager pension she had been able to accrue, looking forward to visits from the one child she still had contact with.This (and so much more) is the story of Svetlana's life, and the research is evident on every page, with quotes and footnotes in nearly every paragraph. For the most part, the story is told in Svetlana's own words (in addition to having written four memoirs, the woman was a constant letter-writer), and where former friends are quoted, it's often from their own memoirs (and I have to think that most of them wouldn't have published books if they hadn't known Stalin's daughter, so I don't know how impartial their opinions of her actually were). And yet, despite the fascinating potential of this story and the obvious scholarship involved, I found this book to be a little dull. I also felt the presence of the author and her own opinions throughout these pages. Often, there would be declarative statements like: Buried in the minds of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives.In a book where so much is supported by quotes and footnotes, when a statement like that is made unsupported, I can't help but think, “If that's an important psychological concept that you're trying to tie in, you ought to note a source. If, on the other hand, it's just common knowledge (which I suppose is the case), then what's the point of saying it?” And while that might sound like a petty complaint, it happened many times on these pages and it started to irk me. I also felt the unwelcome presence of the author in passages like: As he lay dying on the evening of March 1, it is unlikely that Stalin was sending a silent cry for help to Svetlana, however much she may have longed for him to do so. It is heartwrenching that she imagined he was.Or: One thinks of Svetlana at that door, banging for an hour until she broke the glass and her hands bled, and imagines that she was beating in fury against all the ghosts of her past who had failed her: her mother, her father, her brother. Her lovers. And now, this new life.In a work of nonfiction – no matter how intimately the author got to know her subject – I reject the notion that she can know what's on other's minds. And yet...Rosemary Sullivan won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for Stalin's Daughter, I see that most reviewers liked it very much, and for myself, I am glad to have learned about the unhappy biography of someone I hadn't ever heard about. This was not a waste of time, but not nearly as good as I had hoped.
“I want to explain to you, he broke my life.”Joseph Stalin purged and punished in greater numbers than Hitler’s Reich and he disappeared members of his own family. Author Rosemary Sullivan shows the weight his terror, and the desires of those in the power structure he created, on his only daughter. Sullivan recounts Svetlana’s tragic childhood and lonely life as the “princess of the Kremlin”. She was shaped by her mother’s death, her father’s on and off attention and her growing awareness of her father’s role in the disappearances of her relatives. Despite her isolation, she made some friends, some of whom paid a price for knowing her. Smith takes you through her education, her romances, her relationship with her father, her marriages and the birth and early life of her two children. You learn of her love for Brajesh Singh, and how this led to her defection. She came to the US with little understanding of the political, social or economic systems and was both helped and taken advantage of. You marvel at her book deal and earning potential and how she lost most of it in an unusual marriage. She had signed away her copyrights but did not recoup those loses despite offers to lecture, write more or provide information.You see her yearning for love, intellectual companionship, stability or just normalcy and how she undermined her search for each with abrupt decisions. She is described as spirited, pleasant, and warm but loses friendships in fits of anger. She faced down her father, diplomats and party officials for her freedom but didn't know how to use it, and even attempted to return to Russia where she knew she'd be restrained. She wanted stability, but divorced 4 husbands and moved uncounted times, leaving houses and furniture on two continents. She died in poverty in 2011 at age 85.The List of Characters was helpful such that I only needed the Index a few times and each time it worked. There are B&W photos placed with their content throughout. The Acknowledgements and Notes show the breadth of this as a research project. Sullivan has the skill to present this research as a highly readable, and at times a page turning narrative.A 2011 documentary, “Hitler’s Children” shows through the lives of the descendants of Himmler and Goering and others the difficulty of living a family legacy of mass murderers. Svetlana Alliluyeva’s burden was many times more difficult.
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My FAVOURITE book of the year . From the first sentence Of this book I was hooked.................... What would it mean to be born Stalin's daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it? From her days in the Kremlin, to her defection to the US Svetlana Alliluyeva's life is a fascinating and an emotional read both historically and psychologically. The title of this book is not an exaggeration, Svetlana Alliluyeva's life was extraordinary and tumultuous and Rosemary Sullivan's research and writing is outstanding. I found this a compelling biography, packed full of history, fast paced with plenty of emotion . I had the whisper sync version on kindle which enabled me to read and listen to this book. I perfer to read historical books but loved listening to the pronouncations of the Russian names of places and people and the narrator was very easy to listen to. The kindle version has plenty of photos and a family tree which is such a bonus. I think readers who enjoy Russian history will find Svetlana's story facinating reading. I just loved this book and although it took me close to two weeks to finish it, this is because I savoured every sentence and spent so much time googling people and places. I didn't want the book to end and the hardback copy is on my Christmas Wishlist as this is a book I want in my Library.
—Dem
A biography of Stalin's daughter -- three-time defector, financially successful author who ended her days in penury, satellite of the Taliesin commune, witness to searing moments of personal and political history -- seems like a can't-miss proposition. It turns out, though, that if the author is in love with her own armchair psychologizing, it can be a pretty grating disappointment. And boy howdy does Sullivan think her own insights here are piercing: the early chapters are full of portentous statements hinting that individual childhood episodes wracked Alliluyeva's character; the later chapters are full of special pleading that Alliluyeva's actions flowed from random childhood trauma. (At least the author's consistent.) No matter that much of that cod psychology fits poorly with what researchers know about how the mind and personalities form; this account doesn't even bother with internal consistency, merrily abandoning theories if they don't produce the tidy narrative Sullivan wants from them. One example of that: Alliluyeva experiencing childhood trauma and dislocation is portrayed as devastating, because the young are fragile. Her daughter Olga experiencing childhood dislocation is portrayed as okay, because the young are resilient. Even if the theorizing had seemed coherent, I probably would have thought it got in the way of the narrative. In the thoroughly unilluminating presentation it gets here, though, it actively detracts from the book.It doesn't help that the much of the theorizing comes off as special pleading for Alliluyeva's capricious, off-putting behavior. Alliluyeva's life definitely had its share of loss and fear, and it's easy to sympathize with her as a victim of history and of her own impulses. But Sullivan frequently pushes that sympathizing angle so hard that it is difficult not to feel resistance, especially when it combines with her similarly admiring spin on several of the sources who spoke to her. There's a certain wry humor when, 600 pages in, the author approvingly quotes Alliluyeva's dismissal of an earlier writer about the Alliluyev family as a dilettante, not expert in writing history or about Russia. (Sullivan's oeuvre is itself distinctly that of a biographer, and not one with an obvious Russian focus.) Moreover, for all the attempts to present family details as an essential key to Alliluyeva's life and character, seemingly momentous things fall through the cracks. You'll get to read about Alliluyeva's ability in old age to convince small-town Wisconsin locals to help her run errands, but will not know from the text of the book that Alliluyeva's estranged son predeceased her, or whether she had any reaction to that at all.To be fair, Sullivan does an admirable job of actually making this a book about Svetlana, not treating her totally as an entrée into talking about her father. And the writing is mostly elegant, at least when not invoking what a "paradox" the author finds many people to be (it may be that all humans are paradoxes, but if so it hardly seems necessary to repeatedly flag it); I especially appreciated that this book, unlikely many biographies, had a structure giving roughly equal attention to the various phases of its protagonist's life, from childhood through old age. That's not enough to have made me wished I hadn't been reading some other biography of the subject.
—JQAdams
This was a very well documented biographical work on Svetlana Stalin. She had gone by a few other names in her life time but this is the one that most people will recall because of it's link to her father. This book grabbed my attention and held it from cover to cover. At times, it was easy to become confused because of all the many, many names that were mentioned. If this were a required reading for a class, it would have been necessary to take many notes on who all these people were and how they were related to Svetlana. It was depressing to learn that her father's executions included close family members. Svetlana lived an adventurous life. She moved when the whim struck her. Indeed, defecting to the United States was a whim that hit her when she was in India bringing her lover's cremains home. Highly recommend this book.
—Sharon
