Stalin's Daughter

As I've mentioned, Soviet Roulette is currently on hiatus due to the author's competing academic obligations. However, I do hope to post now and again until I am able to resume this blog in earnest. For the moment, I would just like to briefly mention Rosemary Sullivan's new book, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.  As I've mentioned previously, Alliluyeva's two memoirs were excellent.  In light of the searing honesty of these two books of personal reminiscences, one may not feel like a biography will add all that much to the subject. (And when I write "searing honesty" I have in mind Elroy's book, My Dark Places, which freely acknowledges that nobody is able to do more than confront one's demons as bravely as possible, on a day to day basis).  In truth, Sullivan's book does add some objectivity to Alliluyeva's poetic accounts, as well as offering a full account of the subject's fascinating life, which certainly didn't end after the period of time covered in the two autobiographical sketches. Sullivan's book also seems to show us that Stalin's legacy did not end but rather continues to linger almost to this very day.  Sullivan's book also reminds us--as if we needed reminding in the age of Trump--that the stories of Russia and American are inextricably linked, for better or worse.

The Secret Life of Mass Murderers

Soviet Roulette has a very high regard for Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter. Previously, this blog described Svetlana's gentle book, Only One Year, which chronicled the author's third marriage, journey to India to bury her husband's ashes, and painful decision to defect to the United States in the 1960s. But Alliluyeva's first book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, is an even more poignant set of reflections and reminiscences about private life in the inner circles of Stalin's brutal dictatorship. As the author admits, the memoir isn't an objective history of her father's life. As a teenager during World War II, and someone with only limited access to her father at the best of times, Alliluyeva isn't well placed to explain her father's political life. And what kind of a child could have come to terms with a mother's suicide (or perhaps murder) and the quiet elimination of countless friends and family members?

Notwithstanding its lack of objectivity, Alliluyeva's limited perspective is fascinating and perhaps useful in terms of understanding how evil operates. From the author's perspective, and this perspective is contested by some well-placed eyewitnesses, Joseph Stalin had the capacity to behave tenderly toward those around him. In fact, in the first six years of the author's life, Stalin was often happily surrounded by his wife's large extended family. Moreover, Joseph enjoyed the company of children and frequently sent the young Alliluyeva tender notes. According to the author, Stalin felt especially close to Alliluyeva's mother, Nadezhda Allilyuva, although the dictator could be stern and aloof to her as well, until Nadezhda Alliluyeva's committed suicide, isolating Stalin from her family members and perhaps feeding his sense of victimization.

Alliluyeva's portrayal of her father may not be strictly accurate in all respects. In the author's opinion, Stalin was severely manipulated by Beria, who constantly pushed the dictator to destroy Beria's enemies, many of whom were members of the Alliluyeva's immediate family. Even allowing for Allilyeva's natural prejudice, there's a ring of truth about her analysis of the mechanics her father's sinister decisions.

According to Alliluyeva, Stalin had many healthy tendencies, but he simply could not forgive or forget anything that smacked of betrayal. If men like Beria whispered that a close friend or relative of Stalin had turned against him, Stalin turned his back on that person and was unable to change his opinion. One imagines that the independent minds of the Alliluyeva clan sometimes voiced criticism of the Soviet leader, and that even mild criticisms were reported to the cynical leader who then turned the matter over to someone like Beria. As it turns out, Alliluyeva lost dozens of her closest friends and relatives to this strange pattern of destruction. When her brother was captured by the Germans, Stalin couldn't help but believe that perhaps his son was to blame. He felt little sympathy for him, and, even worse, decided that his son's wife must have pushed his son to surrender to the Germans. She was promptly sent to the gulag, as so many others were.

In the end, this gentle, moving memoir demonstrates that Stalin's murderous regime was born of relatively banal impulses. With no culture of democracy or civil rights, why shouldn't one ordinary man's lonely, unforgiving, and suspicious temperament lead to disappearances on a vast scale?

Finding Lana Peters

Only once before has this blog touched upon the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, daughter of Joseph Stalin and, less famously, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who died (apparently) by her own hand in 1932. Several months ago I briefly reviewed one of her books that seemed to reveal the soul of a thoughtful but painfully sensitive woman who was doing her best to overcome the bloody legacy of her father's severe rule. Svetlana ended this book with a spiritual journey to scatter the ashes of an elderly husband in his native homeland, India, and a defection to the United States in 1967.

Prior to the time period outlined in this memoir of a single fateful year, Svetlana had fallen in love with a Jewish filmmaker who was sentenced to ten years of difficult exile by her father. Shortly thereafter, Svetlana married a fellow student (also Jewish, and Stalin refused to meet him) but divorced two years later. Soon thereafter, Svetlana married, Yuri Zhdanov, the son of a Stalin crony, Andrei Zhdanov.

Since that time, Wikipedia reveals that Svetlana married Brajesh Singh, sought aslyum in the United States, associated herself with the foreign policy maven George Kennan, and then moved to Scottsdale by invitation of Frank Lloyd Wright's widow. While there, Wikipedia asserts, Wright's widow, a mystic of sorts, encouraged Svetlana to replace her own dead daughter (also named Svetlana) as the wife of Taliesin fellow, William Wesley Peters. She did so, travelling back and forth between Scottsdale and Spring Green, Wisconsin, which is presumably how she wound up living near Madison.

The marriage dissolved, but after two short moves to Great Britain and Georgia, Svetlana returned in Wisconsin, apparently for good. It's hard to imagine Svetlana so close. The feeling can't be too unlike what it must have felt like to have Karensky as a college professor at Stanford in the 1950s. Unfortunately for the woman, the role of Stalin's daughter is awe-inspiring--history incarnate. If it weren't for the fact that Svetlana now understandably shuns public contact of any sort (save for a recently filmed interview), I would be tempted to do a road trip up north one of these days.

I still regret the trip I didn't take to Lawrence Kansas where, inprobably, a high school friend somehow befriended one of my favorite literary heros, William Burroughs. At any rate, in the absence of an invitation to Madison, I'll have to settle for two more of her books, Twenty Letters to a Friend (indirectly dealing with her father's long shadow) and Distant Music (an examination of the Taliesin life with the adopted sobriquet, Lana Peters.)