Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

I feel like Rosemary Sullivan and Laura Hillenbrand went to the same school of biography writing. There's such immediacy to the way they write and backed up with solid research. Clearly there's some creative licence taken but I feel that's unavoidable in any biography. It just depends on the author's intentions regarding absolute facts and readability. You can drily say the person walked every time they walked or you can say they staggered sauntered shuffled instead to achieve the scene you're trying to set. In any case, there are more than enough references to back up the facts that the emotive aspects as described by Sullivan comes across as authentic.

Svetlana, Svetlana, what a life. Or indeed what so many lives she had to live. The show more book begins with her defection and what an extremely effective way of immediately realising her complexities. Then the story more or less begins chronologically from her childhood with her defection serving as a clean midway point between her Soviet life and her American life.

Throughout, the book remained fast-paced and well-written and researched, maintaining the tension and intrigue. Svetlana is rendered sympathetically but not faultless. I wonder how different her life would've been if she never went to Taliesin. Or would there have been another manipulation around the corner? Perhaps as the daughter of such an infamous man, there was just no escaping the rumours and exploitation. In the end, Svetlana seemed to have continued living exactly the way she wanted under her circumstances and I hope Olga/Chrese is too.

Things of note:
- The first leg of Svetlana's defection flights to the US was a Qantas flight to Rome. Who at the original Qantas set-up could've imagined that one day, one of its flights!
- The defection flight timeline is still a bit confusing for me as the book says if only the underling had checked the flight status after receiving vehement opposition to Svetlana's defection, they would've realised they could've been recalled since they've been sitting in the airport for two hours. But the paragraph before said that the opposition only sent through after the flight had taken off?
- Sullivan described "webbed toes" as one of the reasons Stalin never swam but surely that's an advantage!
- The exact sentence "Beria was a Mingrelian from Western Georgia" appeared twice over a hundred pages which made me smile thinking that Sullivan just had that phrase saved on her notes. A peek behind the process!
- Even after the book informed us that Olga wanted to be called Chrese, the book continued referring to her as Olga. I wonder who made that decision to use her old name and why?
- The book did a trick on me by saying that Olga/Chrese won against her mother's flightiness and would stay at the same boarding school until she was eighteen. Then next chapter, Svetlana uprooted her back to the Soviet Union for eighteen months!

Aside: recently I had been recommended articles with headlines such as Who Betrayed Anne Frank, which I've been firmly not clicking. And only the other day, I saw that there was a book recently published on that very topic, written by no other than Rosemary Sullivan! But just as with the articles, I probably won't partake. show less

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. show more 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. show less

Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926-2011), Joseph Stalin's only daughter, lived longer than most of the Russian dictator's other family members and associates, but her peripatetic life was characterized by impulsivity, loneliness and deep losses. She is best remembered for her surprise defection to the United States in 1967, and her even more surprising return to the Soviet Union in 1984. Author Rosemary Sullivan explores Alliluyeva's story in great detail in Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary, Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Alliluyeva's mother committed suicide when her daughter was only six years old. She rarely saw her powerful father, but she received a privileged, isolated upbringing as a "Soviet princess".

Throughout her life, she show more was ruled by her impulses. As a young woman she married and divorced three times, and she was rumored to be a "nymphomaniac". Even her 1967 defection was the result of caprice, not political principle.

As an older woman she was given to paranoia and feared the intrusion of both the CIA and the KGB into her life. Many potential friends rejected her automatically when they found out her father's identity; others wanted to get into her good graces because they falsely assumed that she had inherited Stalin's mythical Swiss bank accounts. In reality, Alliluyeva had little understanding of financial matters and gave away much of what she earned as a writer and translator. At the end of her life, she was nearly destitute.

Author Sullivan goes into much detail about Alliluyeva's many dwelling places (as an adult, she relocated frequently, usually on a whim) and her famous and not-so-famous friends, but is considerably more reticent about other aspect of her subject's life. For example, in 1962 Alliluyeva was secretly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. Later in life she converted to Roman Catholicism. Was her demonstration of piety a means of rebellion against the Soviet Union's official atheism, or did she develop a genuine faith? Other than noting that Alliluyeva occasionally attended religious retreats, Sullivan leaves this question unanswered.

Sullivan's account of Alliluyeva's life is a sad story that only intermittently held my interest as a non-specialist reader. The parts about Alliluyeva's childhood and her involvement with Frank Lloyd Wright's cult-like architectural commune Taliesin West, where she met the American man who briefly became her fourth husband, comprise the book's most engaging chapters. The rest of the book is dreary and goes on too long. Allilyeva's life at the periphery of twentieth-century history does not stand up to over six hundred pages of scrutiny (almost eight hundred counting the footnotes and index). show less

For me, this Stalin's Daughter had two parts - Svetlana's life in Russia and her life after she defected. I picked up the book to read the first part and found myself slogging through many chapters of the second part. However, once I committed to reading the whole book (it's 600 pages not counting the references at the end), I found myself becoming more interested in the incredibly impulsive life of Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Author Rosemary Sullivan's research is impressive and her writing style smooth and conversational.
While I think Sullivan did an amazing and thorough job - the kind of biography Alliluyeva deserves - as a reader, much of the second part felt unnecessary and was frustrating to read. (After show more defecting from Russia, her life becomes incredibly socially complicated and it seems that all spats and slights are documented in this book.) show less

I listened to the audio version on a long car trip.
I’m not sure if the print version has a family tree as i found it difficult to follow all of the people that the author refers to.
This is a long biography of Svetlana Stalin the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, the former leader of the Soviet Union.
She was born in 1926 and lived until November 22 2011.
Her mother Nadia committed suicide when Svetlana was only 6 years old which meant that she was raised by governesses and relatives while her father ruled the Soviet Union. She was unaware of he father’s various pogroms, famines and murders until she was an adult. She adopted her mother’s last name Alliluyeva when she realized the significance of her father’s past. She defected to show more the United States in 1967 while on a trip to India to spread her husband’s ashes.
Rosemary Sullivan has uncovered and described a huge amount of research about this woman and has created a readable yet lengthy story of her life. Svetlana married 4 times and had three children. She abandoned her two children Joseph and Katya when she defected to the USA. She married the architect Wesley Peters and gave birth to a daughter Olga in 1971. As an American she used the name Lana Peters.
The psychological profile this woman is interesting. She was very intelligent and sociable but also very naive, impulsive and paranoid at times. Once in the USA she struggled to find a career and wrote Twenty letters to a friend, a her memoir about her life in the Soviet Union. Although she earned quite a sum at the time, she had no money sense and was naive about her finances. She overspent on family and friends spent her later years in financial difficulty. show less

I think Svetlana Alliluyeva (Stalin) deserves a posthumous award for heroism.

Her defection to the U.S. in 1967 was the perfect anniversary gift for the Bolsheviks, their Revolution, and the Stalin Regime. Escaping them was an embarrassing slap in their faces, which they richly deserved what with they way they ran affairs in Russia. Nobody in their right mind would be happy with all that.

I was particularly impressed that this woman was not evil in any way, other than having a temper. That's all? She felt bad about all the suffering for the rest of her life. I say she paid her personal dues.

Stalin's Daughter is a very well researched and written biography about Svetlana Alliluyava. I knew nothing about her prior to reading this book and was intrigued by much of what I read. She was a woman who led a tragic life and seemed to constantly be running away from or moving to another place to escape her past and find happiness. The book provides a lot of insight into the Russian government and the US and Russian relationship during her life. It is fairly quick reading but took me awhile since it is a rather thick hardcover book hence non-commuter friendly so I opted to only read it at home which didn't h
happen as often as I would have liked.