![]() ![]() ![]() He still had political enemies to get rid of-Nikolai Bukharin, Lev Kamenev, and Leon Trotsky among others-but they would soon be vanquished. She was then at the mercy of her father, who, as she wrote, became the “final, unquestioned authority for me in everything.” By this time Stalin was well on his way to total dictatorship of the Soviet state. When her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932, Svetlana was six years old. ![]() (Her older brother, Vasily, died of alcoholism at age forty.) But Sullivan’s biography takes us beyond this obvious truth and helps us understand, through Svetlana’s stormy history, the nature of regimes that are as brutal as Stalin’s was. It is no wonder that Svetlana could not lead what most of us think of as a normal life, since she lived in the shadow of one of the most ruthless dictators of the twentieth century. Yet she carried on with determination until 2011, when she died of cancer at the age of eighty-five, with a handful of devoted friends who stuck by her despite her unpredictable temperament, and an American-born daughter who loved her unconditionally until the end. Her yearnings for a lifelong partner were never fulfilled and she was constantly disappointed in her choices of places to call home. In her revealing biography of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, Rosemary Sullivan portrays a woman who was never able to find herself. Joseph Stalin and his daughter Svetlana, Moscow, 1933 ![]()
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