Notes

Born in the early years of the USSR, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation & purges that haunted Russia, but she didn't escape tragedy—the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts & uncles, & a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. Gradually learning of the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet & in 1967 defected to the USA—leaving her two children behind. Altho she was never a part of her father’s regime, she couldn't escape his legacy. Her American life was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles & died poor in Spring Green, Wisc.
With access to KGB, CIA & Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Sullivan pieces together her incredible life in an 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.