Word: alliluyeva
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Nearly 18 years ago, Joseph Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, defected to the West bearing an astonishing message. At a New York City press conference that was televised around the world, and later in two books, the child of one of modern history's most brutal tyrants repudiated her father and Communism, while affirming her faith in God and freedom. Svetlana's defection was more than a propaganda coup for the West: it was a symbolic event in the moral imagination of millions of people. The child of the man who stood accused of having killed more people than...
...Wright, a disciple of the Russian-born mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, was spellbound by some coincidences between the living and the dead. Her daughter, by an earlier marriage in Russia, had also been named Svetlana; moreover, she had been born in Georgia, the region from which Svetlana Alliluyeva's father hailed. Somehow it followed in Mrs. Wright's mind that Stalin's daughter should marry the first Svetlana's widower, William Wesley Peters, known as Wes, Taliesin West's chief architect...
...American television crews were lying in wait outside the exclusive Sovietskaya Hotel last week, when the frumpy woman in fur hat and buttoned-up coat appeared in the company of a burly escort. Since Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, 58, returned to Moscow last month after 17 years in exile in the West, she has been playing hide-and-seek with Western reporters. She reacted in anger to the latest ambush. "I am not going to talk to you, not one word," she snapped. "You have no right. You are uncivilized people. You are savages." When asked about...
Seventeen years ago, Joseph Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva took a taxi in New Delhi to the U.S. embassy, where she asked American officials for asylum. The Soviets had allowed her to visit India in order to take home the ashes of her common-law husband, who had died of a respiratory disease. After asylum was granted, she flew to New York, where she greeted reporters at the airport with "Hello there, everybody." She explained her electrifying defection by declaring that in the U.S. she would seek "the self-expression that has been denied me so long in Russia...
Though such glimpses into Mafia domestic life are rare, they appear eerily familiar. Indeed, the Mafia princess bears a family resemblance to another victim of unbounded evil, the princess of the Kremlin. In Svetlana Alliluyeva's 1967 memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend, Stalin's daughter tells similar tales of disappearing family friends, and her father often made a show of mourning those he had ordered killed. Svetlana too was forbidden to pursue her chosen career, in this case, literary scholarship, and was denied her first lover, a Jew. Though both daughters ultimately escaped from their palatial prisons...