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. 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. 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. and her role in its mythology, abandoning her two children and defecting to America in 1967. 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. 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. Eighty-five years later, she died alone and penniless in rural Wisconsin. Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011), Stalin’s only daughter, lived an almost impossible life at the edges of 20th-century history. Award-winning author Rosemary Sullivan returns with a revelatory biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, a woman fated to live in the shadow of her father, notorious Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.Born in 1926, Svetlana Alliluyeva spent her youth inside the Kremlin as her father’s power soared.
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