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

The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of the woman who lived her life in the shadow of one of history’s most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin.

Born in the early years of the USSR, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation & purges that haunted Russia, but she didn't escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts & uncles, & a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. Gradually learning of the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet & in 1967 defected to the USA—leaving her two children behind. Altho she was never a part of her father’s regime, she couldn't escape his legacy. Her American life was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles & died poor in Spring Green, Wisc.

With access to KGB, CIA & Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Sullivan pieces together her incredible life in an account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it’s a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father’s name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world.