Review by New York Times Review
A YOUNG PRINCESS walks the corridors of an ancient palace, surrounded by adoring relatives, governesses and tutors. Her father is a beloved ruler of a vast country, and she is his only daughter and favorite child, his "little sparrow," his "little fly." She brings him presents of violets and strawberries, and he pets her, showering her in bristly kisses redolent of tobacco. She spends idyllic summers at the family dacha, where her father's merry friends, whom she calls "aunts" and "uncles," come on visits and regale her with stories and songs. The world she inhabits seems magical to her, "that place of sunshine." But as she gets older, she starts seeing and hearing more, and sinister shadows creep into the light, dimming it little by little. The aunts and uncles begin to vanish one by one. Her grandmother says: "Where is your soul? You will know when it aches." Her mother draws a little square over the child's heart with her finger and tells the girl, "That is where you must bury your secrets"; then, before the girl's seventh birthday, she shoots herself in her own heart with a Mauser pistol. The little girl's world is shattered, never to be the same. Troubled and lonely, she will spend decades trying to escape the horror of her past, the terrible weight of history. "You can't regret your fate," she will say later, "though I do regret my mother didn't marry a carpenter." She is Svetlana, her father is Joseph Stalin, and her extraordinary story is the subject of "Stalin's Daughter," Rosemary Sullivan's thoughtful new biography. At 623 pages of text, plus sources and footnotes, the work may seem daunting, but it remains riveting throughout. It would perhaps be difficult to write a dull book given the material. Born in 1926, Svetlana lived through the purges and the war. She experienced not only her mother's suicide but also the disappearance of most of her relatives into gulags. (According to the official Soviet version, Nadezhda Alliluyeva died of acute appendicitis; Svetlana learned the truth only at the age of 16, from an article in The Illustrated London News that she was reading to practice her English.) Her first love, the prominent screenwriter Aleksei Kapler, was sent to labor camps when Stalin learned of their courtship (he disapproved). Her half brother Yakov, with whom she was close, perished in a German P.O.W. camp after Stalin refused a prisoner exchange to save him. Her remaining brother, Vasili, died of alcoholism two days short of his 41st birthday. In 1967, 14 years after Stalin's death, Svetlana Alliluyeva created an international scandal by defecting to the United States, only to return to the Soviet Union in 1984, then run away again in 1986, each escape taut with cloak-and-dagger suspense worthy of any spy thriller. She fell in love disastrously and often, had three children from three of her four failed marriages, published several books, made a million dollars, lost a million dollars, moved from home to home with the restlessness of a nomad, abandoning the past again and again, driven by eternal disquiet, "always leaving things all over the globe," in the words of her younger daughter, Olga, before dying nearly destitute in Wisconsin, at the age of 85, under the anonymous name of Lana Peters. Olga scattered her ashes in the Pacific Ocean. The historical context of Alliluyeva's unsettled life, the immense monstrosity of Stalin forever looming behind her, makes her story impossibly haunting and equally impossible to put down. Sullivan is an eminent biographer, with books on Margaret Atwood and Theodore Roethke, among others, but she is not a Soviet scholar, and those interested primarily in Stalin and his era may wish to seek out other, more comprehensive studies, like "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," by Simon Sebag Montefiore, or "Stalin," a more problematic but impassioned portrait by Edvard Radzinsky. If these books read like History with a capital H, Sullivan's work rings a decidedly intimate note, for her focus is not on Stalin himself but on the shadow he cast upon the private life of one woman; yet it is precisely this narrow focus that lends the book its fascination. At times one feels as if one is looking at the back side of history: The picture is on the obverse. But the broad contours come through - the violence, the terror, in countless minute, heartbreaking flashes. The little girl dressing her dolls in black because "Mommy died and I want my dolls to be wearing Mommy's dress"; the young woman in a hospital contacting her father after a difficult labor only to receive an officious letter stating: "The state needs people, even those who are born prematurely"; the middle-aged defector breaking into an awkward dance at an elegant Princeton dinner, to show how she was forced to perform at her father's all-male parties. ("She actually went to the floor and kicked," the appalled hostess notes.) Throughout, Sullivan treats the wealth of facts she has uncovered with a sensitive, compassionate touch. What toll did it take, she asks, to grow up a child of a bloody tyrant, then be compelled to live with such knowledge? There are times, perhaps, when her understanding may seem overly generous, especially to those who experienced life in the Soviet Union firsthand. Alliluyeva's story may inspire pity and respect, but one cannot help wondering whether, in some ways, she was not more like her father than her biographer is willing to admit. In a rather chilling echo of Stalin's abandonment of his oldest son, Alliluyeva abandoned her own children when she defected, at a time when her defection meant that their futures would most likely be destroyed, not to mention that she would probably never see them again. (In the end, when she did return 17 years later, her tense reunion with her son quickly led to a final estrangement, while her daughter refused to see her at all.) And in a muted echo of Stalin's purges, Alliluyeva published a memoir while in America in which she described her nonconformist friends in Russia; the portraits were easily identifiable by the K.G.B., and as a result, her exposed "friends" were blacklisted, banned from traveling and subjected to surveillance. Sullivan softens the episode by commenting that "Svetlana wanted to honor the Russian intelligentsia and to protest their treatment," yet it is hard to believe that the daughter of Stalin, who understood the secret workings of the Soviet system all too well, would not have grasped the sinister implications of her actions. THERE ARE NUMEROUS other instances when the ordinarily stoic, amiable, kindly Alliluyeva turns paranoid, vengeful and imperious, alienating friends, lashing out at her family, burning bridges that most people would fight to preserve. Perhaps she feared this in herself. In one of the many American homes she rented, she saw a dying rat in a garage and was plunged into sudden, seemingly disproportionate terror. "This rat," she wrote in a striking letter to a friend, "was like something very BAD in my own soul." Whatever the answers to the many riddles of Alliluyeva's life, Sullivan tells a nuanced story that, while invariably sympathetic, nonetheless allows readers the freedom of their own interpretations. The complex and tragic figure that emerges offers an extraordinary glimpse into one of the grimmest chapters of the past century. 'You can't regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn't marry a carpenter.' OLGA GRUSHIN is the author of "The Dream Life of Sukhanov" and "The Line." Her new novel, "Forty Rooms," will be published next winter.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 22, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 herselfthough 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 disappearexecuted or vanished into the gulagsand 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
