Stalin’s Daughter
is a fast-paced, lengthy and fascinating biography by Canadian academic
Rosemary Sullivan who provides very revealing insight into the Soviet era’s labyrinthian
atmosphere of fear at the height of the purges, and after. Stalin “purged” no less than 8 members of his
own family – a number of whom were executed, though the family tended to blame
Beria instead (who himself was later executed under Khrushchev’s rule for allegedly
plotting against the state).
Key to the narrative is the story of Stalin’s second wife’s
suicide: Svetlana (Stalin’s only daughter), then age six, had no idea her
mother died of suicide until many years later when she stumbled across the fact
in an English paper as a teenager. Thus begins the daughter’s disillusionment
with the father. Stalin’s Daughter dwells on the point that Svetlana’s mother died
on November 8, 1932, but it fails to articulate fully the significance of the anniversary of the Russian Revolution on November 7, so in Stalin’s eyes his
wife’s suicide could be seen as a betrayal of himself and of the
Revolution. Moreover, as he accumulated
power and purged the so-called counter-revolutionaries, Stalin wanted to
present himself to the Russian people as its infallible leader, with no flaws
of personal history, the priest that his own mother so wanted him to be. His wife’s suicide was thus considered by him
a ‘stain’ on his political reputation, hence the arrests of Svetlana’s
favourite aunt and uncle, the sister and brother to Stalin’s second wife. It is also worth asking what might have happened had she not committed suicide.
It is possible that the suicide also helps explain why
Stalin never bothered to rescue his own son from a German POW camp. Yes, this son by his first marriage was
considered ‘guilty’ because he surrendered to the Germans (which was declared
illegal: he should have fought to death) but he was also likely old enough to
know of his stepmother’s suicide, so speculatively-speaking he held forbidden
knowledge in Stalin’s eyes. It is worth
adding, however, that Stalin had all the siblings of his first wife (who died
of typhus in 1907) executed in 1942 a year after his first-born son was
captured. So maybe it is simpler to say
that Stalin was busy erasing yet another ‘stain’ from his personal history.
The story of Svetalana’s surnames: Stalina, then Alliluyeva
(after her mother following Khrushchev’s “Thaw”), then Lana Peters (after
defecting to the United States in the Brezhnev era) examines the contours of a dramatic
Cold War contest, along with tragedy, loss and betrayal, sensitively portrayed
and extensively researched. Though there
was much that was unsettled about Svetlana’s life – and undesirable (who, for
example, would want to be the daughter of a mass murderer) - there was also an
enduring sense of strength, possibly inherited from her father, without the
paranoia, combined with an intellectual and emotional rejection of all for
which he stood. As a work of history Stalin’s Daughter is timely and helps
put Vladimir Putin’s clandestine (and not-so-clandestine) activities in greater
light and for that reason alone the book is a valuable read.
Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s
Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.
Toronto: HarperCollins, 2015.
