Wednesday 9 December 2015

Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary And Tumultuous Life Of Svetlana Alliluyeva



What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it?
Svetlana (Alliluyeva) Stalina (later known as Lana Peters) led a larger life than most, and in the exhaustively researched Stalin's Daughter, author Rosemary Sullivan presents a woman that most people would have found mercurial and unlikeable in person, but on the page, a reader can't help but step back and wonder, What must it have been like to be born Stalin's daughter? How do you survive finding out that your beloved father was a monster when you're not a monstrous person yourself?

On the one hand, most Russians thought of Svetlana as the Princess of the Kremlin, but the childhood she describes (in letters, remembered conversations, and her own memoirs written years later) is one of a lonely little girl with a distant mother, an absent father, no real friends, and a home in gloomy bureaucratic quarters. After Svetlana's mother committed suicide when the little girl was only six (the fact of the suicide only accidentally revealed to Svetlana many years later), she became even more isolated and lonesome. Svetlana's story jumps ahead years at a time and the book isn't even half done when Stalin dies – and that's important to note because this isn't really Stalin's story, but his daughter's.

Through the years, Svetlana was a romantic, passionately falling in love with inappropriate mates, and eventually endured four failed marriages. When she fell for an Indian diplomat whom the Russian government refused to give her permission to marry, Svetlana lived as his wife for years, nursed him through his final illness, and was shocked when the Politburo gave in to her demands to carry his ashes to India for last rites. While in India – and despite leaving two adolescent children behind in Moscow – Svetlana presented herself to the American Embassy with the intent to defect. Much cloak and dagger ensued, and despite not wanting to provoke a major incident at the height of the Cold War, the US eventually allowed Svetlana to emigrate in order to publish her first memoir about growing up in the Soviet Union. 

Because the book made a lot of money (and because Svetlana was clueless about taking care of money and still a hopeless romantic), the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright was able to lure her to Taliesin West (Wright's desert-based utopian society) and encourage Svetlana to marry her own widowered son-in-law. The marriage didn't last, but the couple had a daughter (despite Svetlana now being 44), and taking care of her became Svetlana's raison d'être. Money was an issue for Svetlana for the rest of her life, and in order to give little Olga the best possible education, they moved constantly – from state to state, to England, a defection back to the USSR (!), a return to the West – and along the way, Svetlana alienated those who would try to help her, would erupt with anger every time someone mentioned her father, would give her heart to men who didn't know how to deal with her. At the very end, Svetlana lived as an anonymous hunchbacked old woman in a small town nursing home, surviving on the meager pension she had been able to accrue, looking forward to visits from the one child she still had contact with.

This (and so much more) is the story of Svetlana's life, and the research is evident on every page, with quotes and footnotes in nearly every paragraph. For the most part, the story is told in Svetlana's own words (in addition to having written four memoirs, the woman was a constant letter-writer), and where former friends are quoted, it's often from their own memoirs (and I have to think that most of them wouldn't have published books if they hadn't known Stalin's daughter, so I don't know how impartial their opinions of her actually were). And yet, despite the fascinating potential of this story and the obvious scholarship involved, I found this book to be a little dull. 

I also felt the presence of the author and her own opinions throughout these pages. Often, there would be declarative statements like:
Buried in the minds of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives.
In a book where so much is supported by quotes and footnotes, when a statement like that is made unsupported, I can't help but think, “If that's an important psychological concept that you're trying to tie in, you ought to note a source. If, on the other hand, it's just common knowledge (which I suppose is the case), then what's the point of saying it?” And while that might sound like a petty complaint, it happened many times on these pages and it started to irk me. I also felt the unwelcome presence of the author in passages like:
As he lay dying on the evening of March 1, it is unlikely that Stalin was sending a silent cry for help to Svetlana, however much she may have longed for him to do so. It is heartwrenching that she imagined he was.
Or:
One thinks of Svetlana at that door, banging for an hour until she broke the glass and her hands bled, and imagines that she was beating in fury against all the ghosts of her past who had failed her: her mother, her father, her brother. Her lovers. And now, this new life.
In a work of nonfiction – no matter how intimately the author got to know her subject – I reject the notion that she can know what's on other's minds. And yet...Rosemary Sullivan won the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction for Stalin's Daughter, I see that most reviewers liked it very much, and for myself, I am glad to have learned about the unhappy biography of someone I hadn't ever heard about. This was not a waste of time, but not nearly as good as I had hoped.


2016 RBC Taylor Prize Nominees


*Stalin's Daughter eventually won the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize. 
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