Rosemary Sullivan's STALIN'S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLELUYEVA

Some people have unbelievably strange lives, and then there's Svetlana Alleluyeva, aka Svetlana Dzhukashvilli, aka Lana Peters, aka... but better known as

Her real life, even in a bare bones outline, is weirder than any novel or movie could convey, which is to say that author Rosemary Sullivan had something of an unfair advantage as far as writing a book which would absolutely rivet its audience. As a young girl, Svetlana watched* her family disappear like characters in an Agatha Christie novel, but only later on in life learned that this was usually because they'd either angered her father or in some way posed a threat to or just annoyed one of his advisors. Usually a combination of those. When her father died his weird lingering death surrounded by people who weren't sure if they should help him, she got to watch the bizarre power struggles to succeed him and got treated as a pawn in them. She had been forbidden to marry her first love, a screenwriter who had rather glowing biopics of V.I. Lenin on his resume, because whoops, he was Jewish, but then was later allowed to marry a Jewish man (the first of many husbands; how many depends on how you count them, because some marriages were more official than others because totalitarianism). She finally got out of the U.S.S.R. only to scatter the ashes of an Indian citizen (whom she considered her fourth (?) husband but wasn't allowed to actually marry) on India's Ganges River and managed to slip her minders and sneak over to the U.S. Embassy to defect. She became a successful author and earned a lot of money with sensational but honest books but lost a lot of it in, for example, another ill-advised marriage to a member of Frank Lloyd Wright's posthumous cult. She met everyone from Isaiah Berlin to Terry Waite. She defected back to the U.S.S.R. at one point, teenaged half-American daughter in tow, because she missed the children she'd left behind in her first defection. And so on.

Sullivan gives all of this an immediacy and a felt impact largely through intimate interviews and hard-won access to enough of Svetlana's private (?) papers to be able to share Svetlana's perspective on matters in her own voice. Wisely, Sullivan foreshadows very little; if we don't already know what Stalin and his cohort were really up to from sources other than this book, we are not enlightened, in the course of the narrative, until Svetlana is. So at first Joseph Stalin is just a weirdly distant daddy whose children enjoy (?) considerable privilege but don't understand that they do because they're so insulated from the rest of society and aren't even told the truth about why certain family members (including Svetlana's own mother) aren't around anymore, and only later do we come to see him in anything like the way the rest of the world does -- and we get to share Svetlana's whiplash as her home country goes through crazed cycles of revering and reviling her father's memory, sentiments that she bears the brunt of once her father is dead, both in the U.S.S.R. and in her other homes of India, the United States and the United Kingdom. As she observes of the cult of personality around Stalin even decades after his death, "Tragically, many, even in the Gulag, continued to insist that Stalin knew nothing. It was evil advisers who were responsible.."

In the process, we get a timely reminder, as the present moment has brought many socialist ideas back to the fore, that we can't blindly trust people who espouse them to stick to them or the credo behind them. Once upon a time, Stalin and Beria and Khruschev would have agreed that eating the rich and defunding the police are good ideas, but not for the reasons that most of those now proclaiming them (myself included) generally mean them. The price of freedom is vigilance, and if a second socialist revolution ever occurs here in the West, the revolutionaries will do well to keep each other in check and remain vigilant against power grabs, ideological purity tests, authoritarianism in the guise of fairness, and any notion that ends justify means. It's really, really hard work, and I hope that we are smarter than the poor, starved, hidebound Russian populace of 1917 were and can learn from their experience. Sharing this book widely can only help.

*Ok, "watched" isn't quite so much the word as something like "noticed week's later that it had been a weirdly long time since she'd seen a person", but hey. We don't have a word for that, do we?