Stalins Daughter, Rosemary Sullivan
Stalins Daughter, Rosemary Sullivan
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Stalin's Daughter
The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

Author: Rosemary Sullivan

Narrator: Karen Cass

Unabridged: 19 hr 43 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 06/02/2015


Synopsis

Winner of the Plutarch Award for Best BiographyPEN Literary Award FinalistNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistNew York Times Notable BookWashington Post Notable BookBoston Globe Best Book of the YearThe 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.Illustrated with photographs.

About Rosemary Sullivan

ROSEMARY SULLIVAN, the author of fifteen books, is best known for her recent biography Stalin’s Daughter.  Published in twenty-three countries, it won the Biographers International Organization Plutarch Award and was a finalist for the PEN /Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Her book Villa Air-Bel was awarded the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem Award in Holocaust History. She is a professor emeritus at the university of Toronto and has lectured in Canada, the U.S., Europe, India, and Latin America.  


Reviews

Goodreads review by Krista on December 08, 2015

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......more