Stalin's Daughter

The incredible story of a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators. "Stalin's Daughter" is a work of narrative nonfiction on a grand scale. Svetlana Stalina's lifestory was more sensational than a Hollywood film, and forever shadowed by brutal tyranny and war. Svetlana Stalina's is a private life and yet it is also the story of the 20th century. No matter how many ways she tried, Svetlana could never escape her role as Stalin's daughter. She spent the first forty years of her life trapped within the gilded cage of the Kremlin; while she lived through the nightmares of mass starvation and the purges of millions, she was protected from that reality by the elitist, stifling world of Communist Party privilege. It could not save her from high drama and devastating loss in her personal life. The truth about her mother's violent death was hidden from her till she happened upon it at 16. Her first lover, a man twice her age, was exiled by her father, who forbade their liaison. She was twice divorced by the time she was 25. Her relatives disappeared, one after another, sent to war or into the Gulag. Slowly, the daughter of one of history's most brutal mass murderers faced the monstrosity of her father's life. In 1967, she shocked the world by denouncing communism and defecting to the United States, leaving her two children behind. She briefly lived at Taliesen with Frank Lloyd Wright's widow - who believed she was the reincarnation of her dead daughter of the same name. The second half of Svetlana's life, in America, became an odd parody of her former life, as if she carried the blueprint of Stalin's world within her. She continued to search for solace, and to run from her past, until, as Lana Peters, she died in poverty and obscurity at age 85 in a small town in Wisconsin. Even in death, her father's shadow engulfed her.