
Stalin's Daughter
The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
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Narrated by:
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Karen Cass
The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators—her father, Josef Stalin.
Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father.
As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States—leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father's regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Wisconsin.
With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana's daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana's incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it's a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father's name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.
©2015 Rosemary Sullivan (P)2015 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...




















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Sometimes difficult to understand, wonderful story
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A synopsis: Svetlana’s life was a chase after externals—human, religious, and geographical—to find fulfillment. She lived the classic rich kid syndrome albeit with a fine intellect and no drug use. She was emotionally off-balance, pushed and pulled by whims, having no idea of money’s worth until it was gone. She was what Americans used to call a “flibbertigibbet,” with a Slavic tang Despite her cleverness she was extremely impulsive, often a romantic patsy. She wasn’t loved and cherished as people should be except, perhaps, by her first husband (who she divorced after having a child, then moving on) and her final, American-born daughter. She was never an drinker, never a boorish hag, never a seeker of publicity, but on the contrary was warmhearted, honest, charming. She spoke English, French, German, Georgian and Russian. She wrote English well. She taught literature at Moscow University although she ultimately spurned academics. After she defected she burned through a million-and-a-half dollars from U.S. book deals. She gave much of it away and was pathetically swindled out of the bulk of what remained. Meanwhile, the two children she abandoned in Russia resented her leaving and never re-established warm relationships with her. Svetlana was brought to ground by old age: penniless, living in a series of charity houses in England and the United States. By that time she wore second-hand clothes from thrift shops, used a walker, cooked in a communal kitchen . . . sad, sad, sad. Thank goodness for Social Security checks and her youngest daughter, Olga, for whom she sacrificed to send to private schools. In her last interview in an old folks’ home Svetlana said, “Stalin damaged my life.” But disentangling causes of her fate is more complicated than that. There are strands from her father’s influence, her own impetuous and stubborn personality, the emptiness of immigrant disconnection, and the anti-materialism of Soviet culture; all constellated to produce an outcome. As he approaches her end readers will think to themselves, “Oh no. Svetlana, as smart as you are, why did you make those choices?”
A Slowly Disolving Life
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Would you try another book from Rosemary Sullivan and/or Karen Cass?
I will never listen to Karen Cass again.How could the performance have been better?
The narrator needs to slow down and enunciate. She mushes words together at a rapid pace, lowers her voice so that words are inaudible, increases the volume and pitch when speaking in character. Really, a quite bad performance.terrible narrator
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The author did a really great job pulling this tumultuous life together into a coherent story.
Well done story about a complex person.
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Disappointing
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Aside from some editing errors, the author’s cursory examination of Svetlana’s books, and its meager information about fascinating people (like S. I. Hayakawa), Sullivan has written an interesting biography. “Stalin’s Daughter” is not a scholarly work but it offers some credible evidence for the life of a most unusual historic figure. It is a fascinating book that revises one’s opinion of Svetlana’s intellect and view of life. At the same time, it gives glimpses of American and Russian nationalism and the cult-like Taliesin West School run by Oligivanna in Arizona. “Stalin’s Daughter” offers a case study for the sins and failings of totalitarian and capitalist countries.
SVETLANA
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Absolutely riveting.
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Fascinating
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Why I listened to Stalin's Daughter to the very end.
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most intriguing story
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