She is best remembered for her surprise defection to the United States in 1967, and her even more surprising return to the Soviet Union in 1984. Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926-2011), Joseph Stalin's only daughter, lived longer than most of the Russian dictator's other family members and associates, but hers peripatetic life was characterized by impulsivity, loneliness and deep losses. She also drew on family letters and on KGB, CIA, FBI, NARA and British Foreign Office files.
Rosemary interviewed dozens of people who knew Svetlana, including family and friends in Moscow and the CIA agent who was in charge of moving her from India when she defected. In her research for Stalin's Daughter, Rosemary Sullivan had the full co-operation of Svetlana’s American daughter, Olga. A woman shaped and torn apart by her father’s legacy, Svetlana Stalina spent her final years as a nomad, shuttling between England, France and the US. She spoke four languages and was politically shrewd, even warning in the late '90s of the consequences of the rise to power of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. In 1984, she returned to the Soviet Union, this time renouncing the US, and then reappeared in America two years later, claiming she had been manipulated by her homeland. Her last husband was William Wesley Peters, architect Frank Lloyd Wright's chief apprentice, with whom she lived at Taliesin West, Wright’s desert compound in Arizona. She married four times and had three children. Svetlana burned her passport soon after her arrival in New York City and renounced both her father and the USSR. Publicly she was the young darling of her people privately she was controlled by a tyrannical father who dictated her every move, even sentencing a man she loved to ten years' hard labour in Siberia. Beyond Stalina's controversial defection to the US in a cloak-and-dagger escape via India in 1967, her journey from life as the beloved daughter of a fierce autocrat to death in small-town Wisconsin is an astonishing saga.
Svetlana Stalina, who died on November 22, 2011, at the age of eighty-five, was the only daughter and the last surviving child of Josef Stalin.
Stalin's Daughter is a work of narrative non-fiction on a grand scale, combining popular history and biography to tell the incredible story of a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators.
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