“Not only does she give a sense of what it was like to grow up in the Kremlin, but she talks about how you could tell the change in politics, by the change of the rugs that were arriving at the Kremlin from foreign dignitaries: Caucasian rugs when her mother was alive, then Persian rugs during the war and, after 1949, Chinese rugs.” She speaks of her childhood, her brother, her mother, of her father. “In her letters, Svetlana could be completely candid. “Svetlana always read the political landscape very well, and the letters reflect that,” said Sullivan. With Burkett, a British art historian and adventurer, Alliluyeva was able to open up and talk about her childhood in the Kremlin, offer a glimpse into her politically astute mind and feel free to both denounce Stalin and criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin. Several hundred letters − some typed, some handwritten, a few with doodles and photographs − offer a rare glimpse into the woman who shocked the world in 1967 when she stepped into the American Embassy in India to defect to the United States.

Now, thanks to Sullivan, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has acquired letters used in the book that were written by Alliluyeva in the final years of her life to her best friend, Mary Burkett.

Winner of the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for non-fiction and recently longlisted for the RBC Taylor Prize, the book was written by U of T professor emeritus Rosemary Sullivan. The tragic life of Josef Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who defected from the Soviet Union but always remained in the shadow of one of history’s most reviled figures is the subject of the award-winning book Stalin’s Daughter.

Stalin's daughter book