November 22 2011 years
An 85-year-old woman has died in the United States. Svetlana Alliluyeva — Stalin's daughter. Translator and memoirist. "Girl No. 1."
I tried not to judge, but to show how devastating it was for my father himself, what he dedicated his life to. At the height of his fame and power, he was neither happy nor satisfied: he was tormented by eternal fear, he created a void around himself, and he led those who continued to blindly believe him into a dead end.
She was born in 1926, when her father was already General Secretary. At the age of six, she lost her mother to suicide.
When my mother left us, my father was left completely alone. I think what happened next, in the late 30s and after the war in the 40s, was the result of his complete loneliness on top of the world. No one will argue with him anymore.
After graduating from an elite school, she wanted to enroll in the Literary Institute, but her father was against it. In 1949, she graduated from the history department of Moscow State University, then completed her postgraduate studies. She worked as a translator.
Back in the early 30s, my father was visiting Gorky at his apartment. Alexei Tolstoy, writers, and scientists were sitting at the table. They were discussing some of the latest scientific discoveries, and when asked for my father's opinion, he said, "Well, I'm a backward person..." The young physicist Volkenstein, Tolstoy's stepson, suddenly made a pun: "Let's drink to STALIN!" Everyone froze for a moment. But my father swallowed the joke, raised his glass, and the toast was drunk.
After her father's death, she was stripped of her Kremlin pass, deprived of all his savings (the money simply disappeared from his desk drawer), and was asked to take her mother's surname. Nadezhda Alliluyeva.
In 1967, the Soviet authorities did not allow her to stay in India, where Svetlana went to take the ashes of her companion, an Indian communist aristocrat.
The heavy chains that had always weighed on my heart in the USSR were lifted from me. In Moscow, I had always been passive and paralyzed; I felt like all that remained was to "live out the rest of my life," babysitting my grandchildren—and the young would live on. Here, in India, I suddenly felt like I had the strength to start a new, personal life.
She requested political asylum and emigrated to the United States, leaving behind her 17-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son in the Soviet Union. The head of the KGB was dismissed for this oversight. Semichastny (came instead of him Andropov).
Time magazine called Alliluyeva the most prominent Soviet defector. At her first press conference, she stated that the entire party leadership, starting with Lenin, and not just her father, bore responsibility for the repressions.
In America, she married for the fourth time, to an architect (her previous marriages included a legal scholar, the son of a Soviet propagandist, and an African economist). She had a daughter with him and divorced two years later.
She earned money through writing and received donations. She published "20 Letters to a Friend," a memoir about her father and life in the Kremlin, which she wrote back in the USSR and smuggled out the manuscript in advance. According to some estimates, the book earned her around $2,5 million.
Good triumphs, although, alas, it often happens too late, and so many kind, wonderful people, called to adorn the earth, perish unjustifiably, senselessly, and unknown
In the book “Only One Year,” she personally accused her father of the shootings at Katyn.
In 1984, she returned to the USSR, but her relationship with the authorities and her children did not work out; in 1986, she left for the United States again.
Neither Coca-Cola, nor blue jeans, nor Snickers, nor jackets can hide the donkey ears of the Party and the KGB sticking out everywhere.
In recent years, she lived in a nursing home under the name of her last husband - she was Lana Peters. She acted in Russian documentaries.
