Despite her lifelong desire to disassociate herself from her father, a notorious dictator who was responsible for killing tens of millions of people, Svetlana Alliluyeva struggled to step out from the shadow of Joseph Stalin, even after his death.
Rosemary Sullivan's biography Stalin's Daughter reveals Svetlana to be, in many ways, a naïve and sweet girl who craved love she never received from her parents. Growing up in Soviet Russia under her father's regime, she personally suffered many losses, witnessing her own family and friends disappear without explanation. Her mother died, apparently a suicide, when Svetlana was six.
Disgusted with what her father had done and the oppression he brought to the Soviet Union, in 1967 Svetlana defected to the United States. She smuggled with her a memoir she wrote in secret, Twenty Letters to a Friend, which was published soon thereafter. She was hopeful her life in a new country would lead to a future free of her father's legacy, but negotiating American culture proved difficult, and she found she was never beyond her father's influence. No matter where she was or whom she was with, people never failed to associate her with Stalin.
Sullivan (Villa Air-Bel) writes a thoroughly researched and detailed depiction of Svetlana's life, from her childhood to her death in 2011, using archives of interviews, correspondence, letters and unpublished works. Many of the specifics Sullivan shares of Svetlana's life come from Svetlana's own correspondence and stories, affording readers an intimate and profound representation of her state of mind and understanding of the world. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company