She spoke four languages and was politically shrewd, even warning in the late '90s of the consequences of the rise to power of former KGB officer Vladimir Putin. In 1984, she returned to the Soviet Union, this time renouncing the US, and then reappeared in America two years later, claiming she had been manipulated by her homeland. Her last husband was William Wesley Peters, architect Frank Lloyd Wright's chief apprentice, with whom she lived at Taliesin West, Wright’s desert compound in Arizona. She married four times and had three children.

Svetlana burned her passport soon after her arrival in New York City and renounced both her father and the USSR. Publicly she was the young darling of her people privately she was controlled by a tyrannical father who dictated her every move, even sentencing a man she loved to ten years' hard labour in Siberia.

Beyond Stalina's controversial defection to the US in a cloak-and-dagger escape via India in 1967, her journey from life as the beloved daughter of a fierce autocrat to death in small-town Wisconsin is an astonishing saga. Svetlana Stalina, who died on November 22, 2011, at the age of eighty-five, was the only daughter and the last surviving child of Josef Stalin. You exist only in reference to a name.' 50.Stalin's Daughter is a work of narrative non-fiction on a grand scale, combining popular history and biography to tell the incredible story of a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators. The victim of an inescapable truth: 'You are Stalin's daughter. 9780007491131 Stalin's Daughter 50.5000 NZD InStock /shop/books/non-fiction /shop/books /shop/books/non-fiction/biography-memoir 'Compassionate and compelling, this is not a political story but a quest for love in the heart of darkness' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'Compassionate and compelling, this is not a political story but a quest for love in the heart of darkness' Simon Sebag MontefioreĪn observer as her relatives were mercilessly killed and her first love exiled.Ī woman who tore through relationships with men, joined and abandoned various religions, and became the most famous defector to the United States. 'A biography on an epic scale, with a combination of tragedy and history worthy of a Russian novel' IndependentĪ little girl, her father's only daughter, his 'little sparrow' instructed to bury her secrets in her heart by her mother, who shot herself soon after.Īn observer as. 'Compassionate and compelling, this is not a political story but a quest for love in the heart of darkness' Simon Sebag Montefiore

Stalin’s Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan