‘Stalin’s Daughter,’ by Rosemary Sullivan

Ten years later, at the height of the Cold War, Alliluyeva sparked an international incident by defecting to the United States.

In “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” the memoir she published in 1967, Alliluyeva repudiated communism, compared Stalin’s regime to the reign of Ivan the Terrible, romanticized her mother, Nadya (who had committed suicide in 1932 when Svetlana was 6 years old), and expressed the hope that as they read about their country’s history with feelings of “pain, contrition and bewilderment,” the next generation of Russians would summon the strength to live their lives differently.

In “Stalin’s Daughter,” Rosemary Sullivan, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, draws on CIA, KGB and Soviet government documents, and interviews with Svetlana’s youngest daughter, to provide a detailed, sensitive and largely sympathetic account of Alliluyeva’s turbulent and tragic life.

Through multiple marriages, lots of love affairs, a defection, a brief return to the Soviet Union and yet another about-face, Sullivan demonstrates, Svetlana remained tethered to and tortured by her connection to Josef Stalin.

In her last interview in 2010, Sullivan indicates, Alliluyeva, who by then was bent by scoliosis and living in poverty, told British journalist David Jones that she would not forgive her father: If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and aunts, I will never forgive him.

The Great Terror over which he presided (through the collectivization of agriculture and the purges of Communist Party members) resulted in the exile, imprisonment and death of millions and millions of citizens of the Soviet Union.

[...] Stalin refused to save (or targeted) Nadya’s close relatives “who had the misfortune to move in the circles of power that overlapped with those designated for liquidation.”

The pressures of living as Stalin’s daughter, then, produced two dominant and contradictory behavioral modes: abject submission and all-out rebellion.

In 1975, for example, George Kennan, the author of the Cold War doctrine of containment, received in a diplomatic pouch a letter from an unidentified American journalist who claimed that Svetlana’s son, Joseph, who had denounced her for defecting, now wished to visit her in the United States.

She worried that Soviet experiments into microwave radiation might be responsible for her headaches, disorientation and depression.

[...] Svetlana Alliluyeva was, indeed, caught in a paradox.