Stalin's Daughter

Born in 1926, Svetlana Alliluyeva grew up inside the Kremlin as her father’s power soared along with that of the Soviet Union. Eighty-five years later, she died alone in rural Wisconsin. Revealed here for the first time, the many lives of Joseph Stalin’s daughter form a riveting portrait of a woman who fled halfway around the world to escape her birthright.Svetlana was protected from the horrors that her father inflicted upon Soviet citizens, but she was not immune to tragedy. Her mother committed suicide, and her father’s purges claimed the lives of aunts and uncles; he also exiled her lover to Siberia. After her father’s death, she defected to the United States at the height of the Cold War—leaving behind two children. For a time, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin community, overseen by his controversial third wife, was a second family; Svetlana married a member, and they had a child. But Wright’s widow manipulated their friendship for financial gain, and the marriage disintegrated. Drawing on FBI, CIA, and Russian State Archives, and with the cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan has created this masterful biography that places Svetlana in a broader context, without losing sight of her powerfully human story that reveals the heart of a brutal world and offers an unprecedented look at its mastermind.