Still, Svetlana entered into three official marriages in Russia (one a purely political arrangement cooked up by her father) and one common-law union before the dying wish of the last man, Brajesh Singh, allowed her to leave the country.

It also brought Kapler five years in a labor camp - and another five after he stealthily visited Moscow, not looking for Svetlana but simply trying to see his wife. When she had just turned 17, her romance with Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, a worldly Jewish cineaste, brought them some remarkable movie-watching moments (Garbo, in “Queen Christina”: “I have grown up in a great man’s shadow. She grew up to be so sexually charged that she became a danger to any man on whom she set her sights. It paints a strong but slightly distant portrait of the headstrong Svetlana, whose every brush with adversity seemed to make her tougher. Sullivan fills this measured, informative biography with contrasting theories about such events, because there is no such thing as an uncomplicated death that involved Joseph Stalin. Though he was dependent on a large extended family during Svetlana’s earliest years, family portraits from that time must be captioned with the names of those he arrested, had shot or otherwise caused to disappear.

The early part of this book is a tangle of fried and burned family relationships, all destroyed by Stalin as he rose to power. Looking backward, as the Canadian historian Rosemary Sullivan does clearly and evenhandedly in “Stalin’s Daughter,” it appears astounding that the girl who could have had the world’s worst daddy issues managed to grow up at all. Khrushchev once said of this father-daughter relationship that “his was the tenderness of a cat for a mouse.” And as Svetlana grew up and saw the fear that her father, and even she, aroused, she was too smart to mistake the fairy tales he told her for Russian reality. Stalin,” for his 9-year-old princess’s amusement.īut a lot of Stalin’s teasing had a tone of threat to it, too. When he wasn’t signing letters to her as “Your Little Papa,” the man who struck fear in many a Russian heart was calling himself, in 1935, “Svetanka-Hostess’s wretched Secretary, the poor peasant J. She had some of his fevered intensity, which showed up even in one of their favorite games: Hostess, in which little Svetlana gave bossy orders, and Russia’s unopposed tyrant, in the role of her humble Secretary, pretended to grovel in response. The strongest proof that Svetlana Alliluyeva was Joseph Stalin’s daughter is that this small, demure-looking redhead scared people - and not just because her face and coloring so resembled her father’s.

Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan