By Rosemary Sullivan, 2015

The subtitle of this book is no exaggeration.  In this winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Rosemary Sullivan brings together a huge amount of published and archival material, letters and interviews to create a compelling portrait of one of the most complex and tragic figures of the 20^th century.

Svetlana is best known for her defection in New Delhi in 1967, and for her autobiography Twenty Letters to a Friend.  She was in India to take home the ashes of her fourth (and common-law husband) and had already had three brief legal marriages.

A mother at 18, like most of the Soviet elite Svetlana took little interest in the day-to-day lives of her children. Her son and daughter from her early marriages were young adults when she left them behind, and distance and the KGB prevented her from ever establishing a better relationship.

Svetlana never lost her propensity for brief, tempestuous relationships that ended badly. In the U.S. she married the architect Wesley Peters, to whom she gave most of the fortune she got as an advance on her memoir. In her previous life she had never handled money and had no clear idea of what things cost.

Of course we don’t choose our parents–whatever we get in that regard is a matter of luck.  Svetlana was particularly unlucky in hers. The suicide of her mother Nadya when Svetlana was  six cast a shadow over her life, as did her paternal heritage. As a child she had little idea what her father did for a living and did not know the nature of her mother’s death—which, of course, she interpreted as abandonment.

No matter how hard she tried to disappear after her defection, avoiding Russian emigres and trying to pass as Lana Peters, journalists and just ordinary curious people kept recognizing her. Pro-Stalinists were eager to meet her and expected her to agree with them that her father was a misunderstood hero whose henchmen did the dirty work that he didn’t know about.  Anti-Stalinists assumed that she supported everything her father had done and thus were predisposed to hate her.

As a young child Svetlana was doted on by her father; as she got older he paid her just enough positive attention to keep her coming back for more. By her mid-teens she experienced her father’s banishment of the much older man she was in love with (there was the same age difference as between Stalin and Nadya), and the pain of having Stalin hit her on the face to express his anger at the relationship. By this time Svetlana had figured out that her dad had had some of her closest relatives and many other people murdered.

It was also as a teenager that she became aware that her mother’s death was a suicide rather than the result of acute appendicitis. Some writers have suggested that Stalin had Nadya murdered, or perhaps even shot her himself.  Sullivan’s take is that the death was definitely a suicide, motivated by Nadya’s unhappiness in her marriage and her horror at the growing tyranny of her husband’s regime. Although Stalin treated Nadya badly in life, Svetlana believed he missed his dead wife terribly for the rest of his days, and that with her demise the softening influence she provided was gone forever.

Svetlana moved a dizzying number of times after defecting to the US. She also moved to Britain for a while, where for a time she lived in housing for the indigent elderly, and then back to the Soviet Union.  There she moved from Moscow to Tbilisi in an effort to reconnect with her Georgian relatives. The months in Georgia were particularly fraught, as her fourteen-year-old American daughter was in danger of being kidnapped into a forced marriage. After the Georgian interlude it was back to the US, where Svetlana died in Wisconsin in 2011. She moved almost annually in the month of November, around the anniversary of Nadya’s suicide.

Svetlana had fewer dishes and less furniture than I do, but she was packing a lot of emotional baggage. I have had a much easier life than she did and I had much better parents.  Having lived in the same house for three years, I am finally beginning to feel settled after five moves in four years. I cannot imagine moving the number of times Svetlana did. An inner compulsion to find something better or at least different kept her in motion.

Partly because she moved around so much, Svetlana communicated with many people through letters. Letters are certainly a treasure trove for a biographer—one that future biographers will not have. Unfortunately, Svetlana could fall out of love as quickly as she fell in, whether with men or with friends of either sex.  The other side of her passionately loving nature was her nasty temper, and when aroused she wrote terrible accusatory letters, which she made the mistake of actually mailing.  She lost many friends this way.

I am among the few letter writers left, although there are fewer and fewer people to correspond with. I was fortunate to have a mother who encouraged me to sleep on any letter I wrote and tear it up or add to it in the morning. The fact that the post office was four miles away also put a brake on mailing something horrible on the spur of the moment.  Svetlana’s mother was dead for most of her life, so could not advise her about this or anything else, and apparently the mail box was often too close.

Although she lost many friends through her angry accusations, Svetlana did keep on making new friends until the end of her long and tumultuous life.  This is a testament to her ability to continue making new connections.

Apart from intelligence and energy, Svetlana had two other great blessings in her life.

The first was her childhood nanny, who gave her warmth and stability, and possibly also faith. With one of history’s great atheists as her father, Svetlana was a spiritual seeker her whole life. Although she avoided the Russian Orthodox Church to protect her privacy, she explored other denominations and spent some time in a Roman Catholic monastery and had a priest called when she was dying.

The second great gift was her American daughter, Olga Peters, with whom she enjoyed a loving and close relationship.  Svetlana was a much better mother in her forties and fifties than she had been with the children of her youth.  Initially wanting to keep her distance from her mother’s biographer, eventually Olga gave Sullivan generous access to her time and to Svetlana’s papers.

According to Olga, Svetlana finally came to a more mature understanding of Nadya’s suicide. After Svetlana’s own attempt at suicide in England was thwarted by bystanders, Olga felt that her mother was finally able to forgive Nadya. “Svetlana now understood what suicide was about. It happened in a crazy moment and for crazy reasons.  It was a dark day, it was raining, the wind blew your umbrella inside out, someone didn’t keep an appointment for lunch, something triggered your despair. . . . Suicide could simply be an impulsive accident when no one was there to stop it.”

Svetlana had been so traumatized as a child by the sight of Nadya’s dead body that she was determined to spare Olga similar pain.  In fact this most caring of mothers did not let her daughter know when she was on her death bed and had given the staff instructions “ . . . not to admit her to her mother’s hospital room.” This left Olga feeling left out and hurt.

It is a testament to Rosemary Sullivan’s humanity that she never loses her compassion for her difficult character.  It is proof of Sullivan’s skill as a writer that I as a reader never lost my empathy for or curiosity about this fascinating woman at the centre of a book that is more than 600 pages long.

I paid full price ($34.99 plus GST) for Stalin’s Daughter when Rosemary Sullivan appeared at LitFest in October.  Now that I have read the book I wish I had got into the long line-up to have it autographed.