Living with Stalin

Stalin’s Daughter
Rosemary Sullivan
Harper
2015, pp 741, Rs 1,751

The strongest proof that Svetlana Alliluyeva was Joseph Stalin’s daughter is that this small, demure-looking redhead scared people — and not just because her face and colouring so resembled her father’s.

She had some of his fevered intensity, which showed up even in one of their favourite games: Hostess, in which little Svetlana gave bossy orders, and Russia’s unopposed tyrant, in the role of her humble secretary, pretended to grovel in response. When he wasn’t signing letters to her as “Your Little Papa,” the man who struck fear in many a Russian heart was calling himself, in 1935, “Svetanka-Hostess’ wretched secretary, the poor peasant J Stalin,” for his nine-year-old princess’s amusement.

But a lot of Stalin’s teasing had a tone of threat to it, too. Nikita S Khrushchev once said of this father-daughter relationship that “his was the tenderness of a cat for a mouse.” And as Svetlana grew up and saw the fear that her father, and even she, aroused, she was too smart to mistake the fairy tales he told her for Russian reality. Looking backward, as Canadian historian Rosemary Sullivan does clearly and evenhandedly in Stalin’s Daughter, it appears astounding that the girl who could have had the world’s worst daddy issues managed to grow up at all.

The early part of this book is a tangle of fried and burned family relationships, all destroyed by Stalin as he rose to power. Although he was dependent on a large extended family during Svetlana’s earliest years, family portraits from that time must be captioned with the names of those he arrested, had shot or otherwise caused to disappear.

Most egregious and mysterious is the matter of the little girl’s mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, known as Nadya, who supposedly shot herself after a long, bitter evening of quarreling with her husband in front of many witnesses. The degree to which Svetlana was sheltered — she was six-and-a-half at the time — was so extreme that she did not know of her mother’s possible suicide until years later.

Sullivan fills this measured, informative biography with contrasting theories about such events, because there is no such thing as an uncomplicated death that involved Stalin. But it is not a highly opinionated book. It paints a strong but slightly distant portrait of the headstrong Svetlana, whose every brush with adversity seemed to make her tougher. She grew up to be so sexually charged that she became a danger to any man on whom she set her sights.

When she had just turned 17, her romance with Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, a worldly Jewish cineaste, brought them some remarkable movie-watching moments. It also brought Kapler five years in a labour camp — and another five after he stealthily visited Moscow, not looking for Svetlana but simply trying to see his wife.

Still, Svetlana entered into three official marriages in Russia (one a purely political arrangement cooked up by her father) and one common-law union before the dying wish of the last man, Brajesh Singh, allowed her to leave the country. He was Indian-born, and he wanted his ashes scattered on the Ganges. Svetlana liked India and perhaps would have enjoyed staying there indefinitely, had she not sensed opportunity at the US Embassy in New Delhi. But the book grows ever more fascinating in explaining how her 1967 decision to defect made for a huge mess late in the Cold War and turned her into a political football.

The way she wound up under the wing of diplomat George F Kennan, and managed to attract so many benefactors with homes in picturesque places, made her an extremely fortunate gypsy for her first experience of American life. So did the financial arrangements surrounding the publication of her first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend. Instantly rich, she became a benefactor. By this point, she had severed all ties to her past, which included two Russian children.

Svetlana’s showdown at Taliesin West, the Arizona compound controlled by Frank Lloyd Wright’s dictator-like widow, Olgivanna, made for one more test of her resilience. She can be viewed as desperate, always in search of the man and home she never had, but that reduces her story to soap opera proportions. Or she can be seen as a woman from a highly eccentric gene pool who was constantly in motion throughout a long, unpredictable life.

After the Wright incident, during which she married a gold digger with Taliesin affiliations, she was not finished defecting. Read the rest of the book to learn how she ricocheted back to Russia, dealt with those abandoned children in addition to her brand-new baby, picked up stakes yet again and finally wound up at a compass point that made no sense, yet made all the sense in the world.

This biography does justice to the part of her that was Svetlana’s alone: survivor, adventurer, petty tyrant instead of brutal one, truly charming “Hostess,” although she always wanted control. It’s an admiring portrait of an amazingly adaptable person facing all but insurmountable odds. She refused to let her lineage seal her fate.