Svetlana Alliluyeva
In this riveting, New York Times-bestselling memoirâ€”first published by Harper in 1967â€”Svetlana Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivanâ€™s critically acclaimed biography, Stalinâ€™s Daughter, describes the surreal experience of growing up in the Kremlin in the shadow of her father, Joseph Stalin.,Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, his second wife. In 1967, she fled the Soviet Union for India, where she approached the U.S. Embassy for asylum. Once there, she showed her CIA handler something remarkable: a personal memoir about growing up inside the Kremlin that sheâ€™d written in 1963. The Indian Ambassador to the USSR, whom sheâ€™d befriended, had smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union the previous yearâ€”and returned it to her as soon as she arrived in India.,Structured as a series of letters to a â€œfriendâ€â€”Svetlana refused to identify him, but we now know it was her close friend, Fyodor Volkensteinâ€”this astounding memoir exposes the dark human heart of the Kremlin. After opening with Stalinâ€™s death, Svetlana returns to her childhood. Each letter adds a new strand to her remarkable story; some are wistfulâ€”romanticized recollections of her early years and her familyâ€”while others are desperate exorcisms of the tragedies that plagued her, such as her motherâ€™s suicide and her fatherâ€™s increasing cruelty. It is also in some ways a love letter to Russia, with its ancient heritage and spectacularly varied geography.,Candid, surprising, and utterly compelling, ,Twenty Letters to a Friend, offers one of the most revealing portraits of life inside Stalinâ€™s inner circle, and of the notorious dictator himself.
Nonfiction,History,Cultural,Russia,Autobiography,Memoir,Biography,Russian History,Soviet Union,Biography Memoir,Literature,Russian Literature,Politics,Biography,Autobiography
Twenty Letters to a Friend