Twenty Letters to a Friend

"Stalin had three children, but the one he was closest to when she was young was Svetlana. She was born in 1926, so there are many early pictures of her with him and other members of the Politburo, out at the dacha, and so on. Her mother died by her own hand—evidently after a quarrel with Stalin—when Svetlana was about six. The Letters are written after Stalin’s death, but also after Khrushchev’s dethronement of Stalin in 1956, when he criticized the excesses of Stalinism. Svetlana herself shares these criticisms. But she still loves her father, though she was estranged from him in adult life, mainly. For her, he’s a very problematic father, but also a beloved one. So she’s trying to deal with both a father who was Stalin and a mother who was very severe, not a cuddly mother at all, but is idealized by Svetlana after she dies. She becomes a saint, basically, in Svetlana’s memory, and everything goes wrong when she dies. If only she hadn’t died then everything would be okay, is the general sense you get from this memoir. In terms of Svetlana’s own trajectory and what led to her writing such a book, she had a fairly tumultuous love life and was connected with a number of men. Sometimes she married them, sometimes not. One of them, in the 1960s, was an Indian communist who was living in Moscow. He got sick and after he died, she asked permission to take his ashes to Delhi for burial. After a certain amount of toing and froing, she was allowed to go. While she was there, evidently on an impulse, she went to the American embassy and defected. She then gave press conferences saying that things were not great in the Soviet Union, and she wanted to live in the United States. That was a tremendous scandal within the Soviet Union, as you can imagine, Stalin’s daughter defecting. Now, she didn’t stay defected. After 17 years, she re-defected and came back to the Soviet Union, where her adult children had been left. This didn’t work out either, and she defected again. This makes her sound like a total fool, which she was not. But she was obviously an impulsive person who made some bad choices. Anyway, this book was written after the first defection. It was her arrival present to the West, as it were. It was a big sensation here, too. It was read out on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe . It was great propaganda stuff for the West. And while Khrushchev says he didn’t read it, he must have heard excerpts of it. There are some parts of his memoir—notably the death of Stalin—where he and Svetlana are so much on the same page that I can’t help thinking that he, to some degree, remembered her account as he was writing. So it was a bestseller in the West. It was not a bestseller in the Soviet Union, because it wasn’t available—legally, at any rate. But the whole thing was a sensation on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Yes, she was a literary scholar. That was her education. She was in the same institute as Sinyavsky and even had an affair with him, at one point. He was senior to her. I think he was her head of department, or something like that. Being a literary scholar doesn’t necessarily mean you want to write, but it does mean that you’re keenly interested in literature. Another interesting thing to mention about Svetlana is that she and a number of the other Politburo children formed a sort of tribe. Most of them grew up in the immediate post-war period, and their favorite thing to study at university was American Studies. She had studied Hemingway , and they were all in love with American cinema. Yes."