A child both petted and coldly dominated by one of history’s most brutal dictators, Svetlana Alliluyeva’s life would veer between passion and loneliness. As depicted here in a lengthy, deeply considered biography, she can be seen as a person, but will always remain a symbol of the desperation of a former captive to gain and enjoy true freedom. 

Award-winning author and poet Rosemary Sullivan (VILLA AIR-BEL, LABYRINTH OF DESIRE) takes on the task of bringing this remarkable journey into close focus within the colossal panorama of history. Alliluyeva’s infamous father is frozen in collective memory as someone who could not possibly have been a loving parent, but he did, to a limited extent, accord his only daughter a certain gruff affection. She retained a sense of her very early years as a happy, golden realm. But after her mother’s suicide, the exact truth of the incident unknown, the little girl became a servant to paternal whim and, like all good servants, strove to please, to avoid punishment and scorn.

"What Sullivan makes clear is that Stalin’s daughter was stronger than she knew, ultimately capable of defying her father and others... Sullivan takes care not to draw hard conclusions about this remarkable figure."

Sullivan --- who interviewed Alliluyeva’s daughter, Olga (now known as Chrese Evans), among many others, and pored through voluminous archives --- finds few periods of true contentment in her subject’s "extraordinary and tumultuous life"; perhaps Olga herself was responsible for what tranquility there was. Arguably the 20th century’s most noted defector, Alliluyeva could recall, for example, only one happy hour in her several-year relationship with Olga’s father, Wesley Peters. Peters was an American architect who, goaded by his overbearing mother, all but forced marriage on Alliluyeva and then systematically leeched away most of the small fortune she had garnered from her autobiography. Their communal lifestyle, based on principles established by Frank Lloyd Wright, dismayed Alliluyeva, doubtless reminiscent of her childhood in Stalin’s compound. In her later years, the émigré’s peregrinations --- to Europe, back to the former Soviet Union, back to the US --- forced penury upon her, most of her income spent on Olga’s private schooling, while Alluliyeva shopped at thrift stores and altered clothes to fit. 

What Sullivan makes clear is that Stalin’s daughter was stronger than she knew, ultimately capable of defying her father and others, like Peters, who sought to dominate. She knew of many of Stalin’s perfidies (she overheard him planning the “auto accident” that killed a Jewish anti-fascist) and carefully plotted to escape the perverse governance he set in place. She stood up to diplomats and got what she wanted, including life as an American. But behind the bravado were the troubled, eerie moods that Olga described as “the night terrors of a child alone and lost.” One ex-lover described her as “a slave to her passions; inside the slave, a tyrant always dwells.”

Sullivan takes care not to draw hard conclusions about this remarkable figure. She was brilliant; she was capricious; she sinned and was sinned against; she could be bitter at times. In one telling incident, near the end of her life, when someone suggested that she might begin to see everyone she had ever known passing before her inner eye, Alliluyeva responded, “What about the people I don’t want to see?” Yet she developed and maintained a spiritual overview, as evidenced by her final letter to Olga: “We, who are without bodily traits, only spirits, we love you on Earth nevertheless.”