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After the success of her New York Times-bestselling childhood memoir Twenty Letters to a Friend, Josef Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva—subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s critically acclaimed biography Stalin’s Daughter—penned this riveting account of her year-long journey to defect from the USSR and start a new life in America.
The story of Only One Year begins on December 19, 1966, as Svetlana Alliluyeva leaves Russia for India, on a one-month visa, in the custody of an employee of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It ends on December 19, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey, as she and two American friends join in a toast to her new life of freedom.
That year of pain, discovery, turmoil, and new hope reaches its climax with her decision to break completely from the world of Communism, to turn her back on her country, her children, and the legacy of her notorious father—Joseph Stalin. Why did she make such a drastic choice? This book, a detailed account of reality in the USSR, is her explanation.
Frank, fascinating, and thoroughly engrossing, Only One Year reveals life behind the Iron Curtain, the risks and subterfuge of defection, and one extraordinary woman’s fight for her future.
⭐“Among the great Russian autobiographical works: Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy’s Confession.”—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker
The story of Only One Year begins on December 19, 1966, as Svetlana Alliluyeva leaves Russia for India, on a one-month visa, in the custody of an employee of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It ends on December 19, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey, as she and two American friends join in a toast to her new life of freedom.
That year of pain, discovery, turmoil, and new hope reaches its climax with her decision to break completely from the world of Communism, to turn her back on her country, her children, and the legacy of her notorious father—Joseph Stalin. Why did she make such a drastic choice? This book, a detailed account of reality in the USSR, is her explanation.
Frank, fascinating, and thoroughly engrossing, Only One Year reveals life behind the Iron Curtain, the risks and subterfuge of defection, and one extraordinary woman’s fight for her future.
⭐“Among the great Russian autobiographical works: Alexander Herzen, Pyotr Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy’s Confession.”—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker
418 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 1986
106 people are currently reading
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About the author
Svetlana Alliluyeva
7 books16 followersSvetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (Russian: Светлана Иосифовна Аллилуева, Georgian: სვეტლანა ალილუევა, later known as Lana Peters (Georgian: ლანა პეტერსი), was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife. In 1967, she caused an international furor when she defected and became a naturalized citizen of the United States until 1984 when she returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship returned. She later went back to the United States and also spent time in the United Kingdom. At the time of her death she was the last surviving child of Stalin.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 21 reviews
December 10, 2015
Один год из жизни дочери Сталина, но какой год! Прочёл эту книгу после "Дочерь Сталина" - очень хорошо дополняет её. Особенно впечатлила глава посвящёная верхушке правительства - отлично показывает какие ничтожества нами правили.
February 16, 2025
Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, wrote and published two books after the death of her father. “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” the first, is a personal memoir depicting her life in the Soviet Union until 1966 and her relationship to her father. This book, her second, titled, “Only one Year”, documents her defection to the West in 1967 from India and her initial experiences in the United States. It also represents her escape from a lifetime of manipulation and indoctrination in the USSR. She came to a small northern Indian village to scatter the ashes of her beloved Indian husband in the Ganges. But fate thrust her into a daring escape to the West just a day prior to her return to the Soviet Union. This memoir reflects on her time in India (1966-67), her early months in the US, and her long Soviet past. It also explores her father’s persona, the Soviet political system, the Gulag, and her loving extended family. Svetlana writes engagingly, keeping the reader entranced in her honest and heartfelt narrative.
This memoir begins on December 19, 1966. It was the day Svetlana left Moscow for New Delhi, carrying her husband Brajesh Singh’s ashes. Her mission was to go to the village of Kalakankar in Uttar Pradesh, the home village of Singh, where she would immerse the ashes in the holy river Ganges. The Soviet government gave her permission to stay in India for two weeks for this purpose. When she reached Kalakankar, its solitude and the river’s tranquility enchanted her. Kalakankar was a poor village with no historical importance or famous temples. Yet, she felt the earth, the river, the sky, the birds and the villagers blend into a single unity, transforming her. Svetlana extends her stay in India to three months, much against the desire of the Soviet embassy. But India, its people and spirit, was already making her long to assert her identity and liberate herself from the control and manipulation of the Soviet system.
After three months, she returns to Delhi, all set to fly back to Moscow. On the penultimate day, in a moment of reckless abandon, she turns her back on her children, her family and country. She takes a taxi and lands at the front doors of the US embassy in Delhi and requests political asylum. Her presence comes as a shock to Bob Rayle, the CIA officer who receives her, because the CIA was not even aware that Stalin had a daughter! Verifying Svetlana’s identity proved impossible because of the lack of photographs. Still, America’s open-mindedness swung into action and ambassador Chester Bowles helped Svetlana to be whisked away on a commercial flight to Rome, Italy, the same night. The Soviet authorities woke up too late for such a high-level defection from the USSR. The incident drew international attention, forcing the Americans to move her to Switzerland, a neutral nation. She waits six weeks in Switzerland waiting for the approval for her asylum. Then she arrives in New York, with journalists thronging the airport to ask her questions.
In the US, the famous American diplomat George F. Kennan and his family help her settle down and publish her first book, “Twenty Letters to a Friend”. This gives her enough money to live as an independent woman. Svetlana was generous with the money, giving a substantial sum to build a hospital in Kalakankar in India in memory of her husband. She also donated to two children’s homes in France and Switzerland and to Russian emigre newspapers and magazines in the US, apart from the Tolstoy Foundation. On December 19, 1967, she celebrates her first year of freedom in Princeton, New Jersey.
Both India and the US influenced Svetlana deeply. She writes in glowing terms about both societies and their people. She calls the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a brilliant and outstanding political leader. Nehru’s description of India, as an aesthete, connoisseur of art, and historian with a wide field of vision, captivated Svetlana. The tranquility of the Ganges in Kalakankar struck Svetlana as an image of eternity, a symbol of wisdom and serenity and of everything that endeared her to India. Every time she met the river’s watery surface, she felt she missed a heartbeat.
Though India was poor in the 1960s, it elevated Svetlana in spirit, making her want to spend the rest of her life in the village of Kalakankar. She stayed only three months, but she could be herself and free in India. She saw Indians were themselves and not part of a machine, as in Russia. Kalakankar’s residents suffered from poverty, hunger, and disease; yet, Svetlana found their freedom exhilarating. It set Svetlana herself free.
In contrast, her memories of the Russia she left were full of torment. Svetlana grew up in the Kremlin and the dachas of the Soviet party elite. Her father used to bring the major politburo members of the party every evening home and spend hours over dinner with them. She says she lived under the weight of the Soviet system for twenty-seven years till 1953 and spent the next thirteen years liberating herself from it. During the 27 years of the ‘Period of Stalinism’, she realized her father was a despot and a terror, destroying millions of peoples’ lives. She concludes the entire system to be corrupt and rested on a lie. About her childhood, growing up inside the Kremlin, Svetlana writes poignantly: “Truth did not penetrate the high walls that shut the Kremlin off from the rest of Russia. Behind those walls, I grew like a plant on a barren rock, reaching out toward the light, feeding somehow on air”.
When Svetlana studied Marxism in the university, she realized the actual conditions in the USSR had nothing to do with communism. She saw socialism in the USSR was just state capitalism. The society was a strange hybrid of a bureaucracy, the secret police that resembled the Gestapo, and a backward rural economy that belonged to the nineteenth century. Besides, anti-Semitism raised its head after 1927 with the exiling of Trotsky and purging of many old Jewish party leaders like Bukharin. Svetlana argues why communism cannot ever reform itself. In 1956, when Khrushchev de-Stalinized the USSR, he could not declare that the party had supported Stalin’s cult and had become an obedient agent of Stalin’s will. The fear of admitting the party’s guilt made Khrushchev dump all the blame on Stalin. This act indirectly discredited Khrushchev himself as well as the entire party. For this, the party would not forgive Khrushchev and had to ‘purge’ him later. This shows that a totalitarian regime could neither accuse nor transform itself. Suicide is not its nature. It can only kill others! Svetlana concludes from her experience of Stalinism that communism does not differ from fascism. She also lays the blame for a one-party system, terror and brutal suppression of dissent at the door of Lenin rather than her father. She labels the Lenin Mausoleum, with its eternal preservation of Lenin’s body, a barbarous, Pharaonic sanctuary of World Communism. Mercifully, we learn that Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, had protested against it and refused to visit it. Svetlana says the idea of the mausoleum was Stalin’s.
Her interest in India and its caste system influenced her enough to see a caste system operating in the USSR. In her view, the Party belongs to the highest Brahmin caste while the army is the Kshatriya upper caste. The millions of workers and peasants are the lower castes. They provide the strength and power to the system, while the ‘Brahmins’ sucker them and the Kshatriyas intimidate them. In 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet revolution, Svetlana makes some significant observations. Russia in 1917 was an immense, disordered, peasant nation. The provisional government, seizing power in March 1917, possessed superior historical understanding compared to the Bolsheviks. They suited Russia better. She felt Lenin’s revolution was premature and caused all the sorry consequences because it did not understand Russia’s historical problems. Svetlana says there is no public opinion, no public information and no public reaction in the USSR. The public remains paralyzed and unresponsive to world affairs. India and the US felt strikingly different; a departure from her previous lethargic and silent existence.
Any memoir of Svetlana cannot avoid remarks on her father, Joseph Stalin. Though she elaborated on her father, her extended family and the Soviet system in her first book, “Twenty letters to a friend”, she makes further observations in this book. Svetlana says she would never try to explain her father’s crimes. It was because she did not possess the psychological genius of Dostoevsky to penetrate another man’s soul and examine it from within. However, she says powerful self-control was part of Stalin’s nature and she would not call him neurotic under any circumstances. His rudeness manifested only in words, not physically. In contrast, her brother Vasily could hit his adjutants, chauffeurs, subordinates and even police officers on the street.
Svetlana reveals Stalin expressed no interest or sympathy toward educated women. Whenever her mother, Nadya, brought educated governesses into the house, he could not stand them. Nadya had aspirations, personal opinions, and a spirit of independence. It irritated Stalin. To have in his home a modern, thinking woman, who stood up for her point of view, appeared unnatural to Stalin. When his son Vasily divorced his first wife because they had nothing to talk about between them, Stalin mocked him for wanting a woman with ideas. Svetlana states with conviction that her father drove her mother to suicide by being what he was.
Stalin had an altogether peasant’s outlook on many things. He had a utilitarian approach to art, a distrust of erudition and a narrow, practical mind. When Svetlana was a teenager, he would criticize her appearance and her clothes in front of others, reducing her to tears. If she wore a tight-fitting sweater, he would chastise her and ask her to change into something loose-fitting. Stalin was also ultra-paranoid. Special doctors performed chemical analysis on every scrap of food that went into his kitchens. Officials attached formal written records to every loaf of bread. These records stated “No poisonous elements found,” bore official seals, and carried the signature of a responsible poison specialist! Svetlana concludes her father suffered no pangs of conscience or experienced happiness, even at the peak of his glory and power. Instead, the void he created around himself frightened him.
One can appreciate this book from multiple perspectives. It is a humane document depicting the struggles of a Soviet citizen against systemic tyranny. It is a deep, psychological account of a young woman who lost her mother at age six to a suicide and whose father was an all-powerful despot. One can view it as a political critique of the Soviet system, its party elite and its totalitarian nature. It is also a tender document of a woman who loved her husband and his country, India, and admired the freedom and openness of the United States. I found the book having an irresistible appeal as a young woman’s yearning for truth, openness and liberation.
This memoir begins on December 19, 1966. It was the day Svetlana left Moscow for New Delhi, carrying her husband Brajesh Singh’s ashes. Her mission was to go to the village of Kalakankar in Uttar Pradesh, the home village of Singh, where she would immerse the ashes in the holy river Ganges. The Soviet government gave her permission to stay in India for two weeks for this purpose. When she reached Kalakankar, its solitude and the river’s tranquility enchanted her. Kalakankar was a poor village with no historical importance or famous temples. Yet, she felt the earth, the river, the sky, the birds and the villagers blend into a single unity, transforming her. Svetlana extends her stay in India to three months, much against the desire of the Soviet embassy. But India, its people and spirit, was already making her long to assert her identity and liberate herself from the control and manipulation of the Soviet system.
After three months, she returns to Delhi, all set to fly back to Moscow. On the penultimate day, in a moment of reckless abandon, she turns her back on her children, her family and country. She takes a taxi and lands at the front doors of the US embassy in Delhi and requests political asylum. Her presence comes as a shock to Bob Rayle, the CIA officer who receives her, because the CIA was not even aware that Stalin had a daughter! Verifying Svetlana’s identity proved impossible because of the lack of photographs. Still, America’s open-mindedness swung into action and ambassador Chester Bowles helped Svetlana to be whisked away on a commercial flight to Rome, Italy, the same night. The Soviet authorities woke up too late for such a high-level defection from the USSR. The incident drew international attention, forcing the Americans to move her to Switzerland, a neutral nation. She waits six weeks in Switzerland waiting for the approval for her asylum. Then she arrives in New York, with journalists thronging the airport to ask her questions.
In the US, the famous American diplomat George F. Kennan and his family help her settle down and publish her first book, “Twenty Letters to a Friend”. This gives her enough money to live as an independent woman. Svetlana was generous with the money, giving a substantial sum to build a hospital in Kalakankar in India in memory of her husband. She also donated to two children’s homes in France and Switzerland and to Russian emigre newspapers and magazines in the US, apart from the Tolstoy Foundation. On December 19, 1967, she celebrates her first year of freedom in Princeton, New Jersey.
Both India and the US influenced Svetlana deeply. She writes in glowing terms about both societies and their people. She calls the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, a brilliant and outstanding political leader. Nehru’s description of India, as an aesthete, connoisseur of art, and historian with a wide field of vision, captivated Svetlana. The tranquility of the Ganges in Kalakankar struck Svetlana as an image of eternity, a symbol of wisdom and serenity and of everything that endeared her to India. Every time she met the river’s watery surface, she felt she missed a heartbeat.
Though India was poor in the 1960s, it elevated Svetlana in spirit, making her want to spend the rest of her life in the village of Kalakankar. She stayed only three months, but she could be herself and free in India. She saw Indians were themselves and not part of a machine, as in Russia. Kalakankar’s residents suffered from poverty, hunger, and disease; yet, Svetlana found their freedom exhilarating. It set Svetlana herself free.
In contrast, her memories of the Russia she left were full of torment. Svetlana grew up in the Kremlin and the dachas of the Soviet party elite. Her father used to bring the major politburo members of the party every evening home and spend hours over dinner with them. She says she lived under the weight of the Soviet system for twenty-seven years till 1953 and spent the next thirteen years liberating herself from it. During the 27 years of the ‘Period of Stalinism’, she realized her father was a despot and a terror, destroying millions of peoples’ lives. She concludes the entire system to be corrupt and rested on a lie. About her childhood, growing up inside the Kremlin, Svetlana writes poignantly: “Truth did not penetrate the high walls that shut the Kremlin off from the rest of Russia. Behind those walls, I grew like a plant on a barren rock, reaching out toward the light, feeding somehow on air”.
When Svetlana studied Marxism in the university, she realized the actual conditions in the USSR had nothing to do with communism. She saw socialism in the USSR was just state capitalism. The society was a strange hybrid of a bureaucracy, the secret police that resembled the Gestapo, and a backward rural economy that belonged to the nineteenth century. Besides, anti-Semitism raised its head after 1927 with the exiling of Trotsky and purging of many old Jewish party leaders like Bukharin. Svetlana argues why communism cannot ever reform itself. In 1956, when Khrushchev de-Stalinized the USSR, he could not declare that the party had supported Stalin’s cult and had become an obedient agent of Stalin’s will. The fear of admitting the party’s guilt made Khrushchev dump all the blame on Stalin. This act indirectly discredited Khrushchev himself as well as the entire party. For this, the party would not forgive Khrushchev and had to ‘purge’ him later. This shows that a totalitarian regime could neither accuse nor transform itself. Suicide is not its nature. It can only kill others! Svetlana concludes from her experience of Stalinism that communism does not differ from fascism. She also lays the blame for a one-party system, terror and brutal suppression of dissent at the door of Lenin rather than her father. She labels the Lenin Mausoleum, with its eternal preservation of Lenin’s body, a barbarous, Pharaonic sanctuary of World Communism. Mercifully, we learn that Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, had protested against it and refused to visit it. Svetlana says the idea of the mausoleum was Stalin’s.
Her interest in India and its caste system influenced her enough to see a caste system operating in the USSR. In her view, the Party belongs to the highest Brahmin caste while the army is the Kshatriya upper caste. The millions of workers and peasants are the lower castes. They provide the strength and power to the system, while the ‘Brahmins’ sucker them and the Kshatriyas intimidate them. In 1967, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet revolution, Svetlana makes some significant observations. Russia in 1917 was an immense, disordered, peasant nation. The provisional government, seizing power in March 1917, possessed superior historical understanding compared to the Bolsheviks. They suited Russia better. She felt Lenin’s revolution was premature and caused all the sorry consequences because it did not understand Russia’s historical problems. Svetlana says there is no public opinion, no public information and no public reaction in the USSR. The public remains paralyzed and unresponsive to world affairs. India and the US felt strikingly different; a departure from her previous lethargic and silent existence.
Any memoir of Svetlana cannot avoid remarks on her father, Joseph Stalin. Though she elaborated on her father, her extended family and the Soviet system in her first book, “Twenty letters to a friend”, she makes further observations in this book. Svetlana says she would never try to explain her father’s crimes. It was because she did not possess the psychological genius of Dostoevsky to penetrate another man’s soul and examine it from within. However, she says powerful self-control was part of Stalin’s nature and she would not call him neurotic under any circumstances. His rudeness manifested only in words, not physically. In contrast, her brother Vasily could hit his adjutants, chauffeurs, subordinates and even police officers on the street.
Svetlana reveals Stalin expressed no interest or sympathy toward educated women. Whenever her mother, Nadya, brought educated governesses into the house, he could not stand them. Nadya had aspirations, personal opinions, and a spirit of independence. It irritated Stalin. To have in his home a modern, thinking woman, who stood up for her point of view, appeared unnatural to Stalin. When his son Vasily divorced his first wife because they had nothing to talk about between them, Stalin mocked him for wanting a woman with ideas. Svetlana states with conviction that her father drove her mother to suicide by being what he was.
Stalin had an altogether peasant’s outlook on many things. He had a utilitarian approach to art, a distrust of erudition and a narrow, practical mind. When Svetlana was a teenager, he would criticize her appearance and her clothes in front of others, reducing her to tears. If she wore a tight-fitting sweater, he would chastise her and ask her to change into something loose-fitting. Stalin was also ultra-paranoid. Special doctors performed chemical analysis on every scrap of food that went into his kitchens. Officials attached formal written records to every loaf of bread. These records stated “No poisonous elements found,” bore official seals, and carried the signature of a responsible poison specialist! Svetlana concludes her father suffered no pangs of conscience or experienced happiness, even at the peak of his glory and power. Instead, the void he created around himself frightened him.
One can appreciate this book from multiple perspectives. It is a humane document depicting the struggles of a Soviet citizen against systemic tyranny. It is a deep, psychological account of a young woman who lost her mother at age six to a suicide and whose father was an all-powerful despot. One can view it as a political critique of the Soviet system, its party elite and its totalitarian nature. It is also a tender document of a woman who loved her husband and his country, India, and admired the freedom and openness of the United States. I found the book having an irresistible appeal as a young woman’s yearning for truth, openness and liberation.
May 1, 2021
S. A.’s second memoir is a wonderful blend of statecraft and love. The author flees the Soviet Union to bury a beloved Indian partner but then defects to the United States. This defection was necessarily an international scandal. Yet her reasons for leaving Russia were complex and deeply personal. It’s interesting to note that the author never really found peace, but instead came back to the USSR before emigrating back to the USA and eventually dying in relative obscurity in Wisconsin. Her other memoir and recent biography about her life are also worth reading.
September 27, 2021
Only One Year is a memoir by Joseph Stalin's daughter recounting a trip to India (only allowed so she could scatter her deceased husband's ashes on the Ganges) and subsequent defection to America. It follows her first book Twenty Letters to a Friend, about her early years. Both are good reads, but Only One Year needed tighter editing. One chapter consists of vignettes of *all* the friends she left in Russia, which failed to propel her story.
Much fascinated me: Soviet doctors were still using leeches in 1966; Svetlana majored in United States history at the University of Moscow (!); she met Indira Gandhi while in India; Stalin's mother at the end of her life regretted that her son had not become a priest.
In her first book, Alliluyeva had shown an occasionally affectionate, fatherly side of Stalin in her very early years, for which she was later highly criticized. In this book the gloves came off: there is no nuancing the fact that Stalin was a monster. Arriving in America she became an instant celebrity; in truth, she hated being known as the Dictator's daughter.
Most compelling to me was her conversion to Christianity in 1962. She speaks of the comfort of reading the book of Psalms, of the joy of celebrating Easter in a Catholic cathedral in Switzerland, of being brought into the communion of believers. Offsetting this are her several Universalist statements.
Most thrilling to me was a lunch she had in New York with Leo Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra. Wait. WHAT? Stalin's daughter broke bread with Tolstoy's daughter? Can you imagine?
:: :: Alliluyeva returned to Russian in 1984 for a few years. Her religion changed several times, also. This book is in no way the end of her story.
Much fascinated me: Soviet doctors were still using leeches in 1966; Svetlana majored in United States history at the University of Moscow (!); she met Indira Gandhi while in India; Stalin's mother at the end of her life regretted that her son had not become a priest.
In her first book, Alliluyeva had shown an occasionally affectionate, fatherly side of Stalin in her very early years, for which she was later highly criticized. In this book the gloves came off: there is no nuancing the fact that Stalin was a monster. Arriving in America she became an instant celebrity; in truth, she hated being known as the Dictator's daughter.
Most compelling to me was her conversion to Christianity in 1962. She speaks of the comfort of reading the book of Psalms, of the joy of celebrating Easter in a Catholic cathedral in Switzerland, of being brought into the communion of believers. Offsetting this are her several Universalist statements.
Most thrilling to me was a lunch she had in New York with Leo Tolstoy's daughter, Alexandra. Wait. WHAT? Stalin's daughter broke bread with Tolstoy's daughter? Can you imagine?
:: :: Alliluyeva returned to Russian in 1984 for a few years. Her religion changed several times, also. This book is in no way the end of her story.
June 5, 2020
I am at a loss on how to critique this book. The information it afforded me on Lana's biography, which in turn is Russias biography, is satisfying. Her writing style, many times as lyrical as Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was at other times an exhaustive run on list of extraneous people and their lives. Yes, this gave more enlightenment to the Soviet stress and lifestyle but three examples would have sufficed in lieu of over twenty-five. I am left with much to ponder and am appreciative. A bit of editing to make this flow in a more smooth concise narrative would bump it to 4 stars.
September 24, 2013
The daughter of Joseph Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva was a fascinating personage in her own right. I enjoyed the parts of the book that were more descriptive of her than the history that enveloped her. Particularly poignant was her description of her courtship and (informal) marriage to Brajesh Singh, her time in Kalakankar, India, and her incredibly brave decision to not return to the Soviet Union.
February 13, 2009
Stalin's only daughter defected to the United States in the 60s. This book is her account growing up in the Kremlin, as well as her experiences after leaving Russia. Her story affords an intimate and rare glimpse into the evils of communsion and into the psyche of a sick and dysfunctinal dictator (aren't they all)
February 12, 2013
Very interesting. Written by Stalin's daughter. It is about how she escaped Russia and made it to America. I want to read her other book because it is about her parents and her childhood.
May 27, 2020
This is a fantastic informative book
Wow, what a book! The author does a beautiful job of laying her soul bare and expressing herself. She is very intelligent, filled with beauty, faith and love. You can just feel this in many chapters.
What a wonderful, charming person to have overcome being raised as Stalin’s daughter. She explains communism fully with not political rhetoric but with stories of actual Soviet citizens and how this utterly failed system enslaves and destroys.
So glad she found peace and freedom and then reports how wonderful freedom is when she experiences and compares both! Read this book. You’ll love and appreciate your own freedom greater afterward.
Wow, what a book! The author does a beautiful job of laying her soul bare and expressing herself. She is very intelligent, filled with beauty, faith and love. You can just feel this in many chapters.
What a wonderful, charming person to have overcome being raised as Stalin’s daughter. She explains communism fully with not political rhetoric but with stories of actual Soviet citizens and how this utterly failed system enslaves and destroys.
So glad she found peace and freedom and then reports how wonderful freedom is when she experiences and compares both! Read this book. You’ll love and appreciate your own freedom greater afterward.
July 6, 2022
An arresting read that combines politics, history, travel & psychology, this memoir traces Stalin's daughter's defection from both Soviet Union and family. It illuminates how she detached herself from her father's brutal excesses and escaped via India to the United States. Hinduism and democracy both asserted their appeals and wrenched Ms Alliluyeva away from Russia. (She reveals Stalin's personal and political cruelties gradually, starting with the fact of her mother's suicide under Stalin's repressive domestic regime, then discussing his Communist Party cronies, most of whom also came under suspicion and were done away with.)
October 30, 2023
This is a fascinating book written by Joseph Stalin's daughter. Not only does she describe her thrilling escape from her Soviet minders in New Delhi, but also much about her experiences of her brief stay in rural India and the people (friends, family, and colleagues) whom she left behind in Russia when she chose to 'defect' to the West. In addition, she describes the disgust she felt for her father after it became clear (in the 1950s) to Russians what horrific crimes he had committed.
In brief, this is a book worth reading if you have even the slightest interest in the former Soviet Union.
In brief, this is a book worth reading if you have even the slightest interest in the former Soviet Union.
February 2, 2021
I ordered a different book from an Amazon bookseller, but they sent me this one instead. They said i should just keep and resent me the correct book, but this one looked interesting so I decided to read. It is an autobiography by Stalin's daughter about her life as an adult and when she defected to the US from the USSR. Incredibly interesting story that I really enjoyed, though I would say the last quarter of the book was a bit slower for me than the first 3/4. Since finishing I have ordered a full biography of her, as I am very interested in reading more about her life.
June 10, 2020
Russian Emigre's transformation
Being a reader of Chekov, Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Doestoevski and more recently Solzhenitsyn this book helps the understanding of Soviet Russian culture and thought, but does it in an informal way as Svetlana shares her life rather than a formal lecture. My wife and I enjoyed this book very much.
Being a reader of Chekov, Turgenev, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Doestoevski and more recently Solzhenitsyn this book helps the understanding of Soviet Russian culture and thought, but does it in an informal way as Svetlana shares her life rather than a formal lecture. My wife and I enjoyed this book very much.
July 21, 2020
Very enjoyable considering the sadness of the story. I remember when she defected, but of course, had no idea of her life with her father and the USSR. A real eye opener. A very brave and resilient woman.
January 28, 2018
She had such penetrating insights into so many characters. Well-written.
January 30, 2018
She has such keen insights into the personalities and characters of so many people. Well-written!
March 1, 2021
If you read Only One Book this Year, read Only One Year. It's fascinating!
February 7, 2022
I chose this book because I wanted to know more about Svetlana Alliluyeva (Lana). I distinctly remember when she came to the U.S. I saw her "press conference" when she landed in the U.S. It was played up like a defection and a slap in the face to the USSR, a big triumph for Capitalism. It was a political storm and the media put quite the spin on it.
It's clear from reading the book that this was not at all her intention. She never left Russia intending to defect to the US. In fact, when she left she had no idea she would not return. She went to India to honor her husband's faith and return his ashes to the Ganges from his home town. She had to fight to be allowed to do this, in fact, technically he wasn't her husband since she was not allowed by the Soviet to have the required civil ceremony. When she arrived, they tried to control her every movement, tried to cut short her stay, tried to prevent her from spending the full time of her Indian visa, much less allowing her to enjoy a longer stay in her husband's home town.
In fact, when she did go the the US Embassy to ask to come to the US, thinking she might later be able to go back to India, the US was suspicious and sent her to Switzerland instead. She would have stayed there, but she wouldn't have been able to publish her book (Twenty Letters) as they required her to stay strictly neutral, which really meant she couldn't express herself at all. Eventually she was allowed to come to the US, oh such a success on our part. ??
In fact, however, most of this book really isn't about Svetlana. It's about the people she knew in Russia, the leaders, their families, the political system.... It would be a great resource for an academic who wants to study the soviet system, the revolution, Stalin's reign, and the aftermath of Kruschev and Kosygin. Very little of the book is actually about Svetlana herself.
Which is actually what she IS about. She was a private person just wanting to live her life without every aspect being dictated to her. She wasn't politically active, but she couldn't possibly talk about her life without talking about the system that so controlled it, that treated her like an asset to be contained.
It's clear from reading the book that this was not at all her intention. She never left Russia intending to defect to the US. In fact, when she left she had no idea she would not return. She went to India to honor her husband's faith and return his ashes to the Ganges from his home town. She had to fight to be allowed to do this, in fact, technically he wasn't her husband since she was not allowed by the Soviet to have the required civil ceremony. When she arrived, they tried to control her every movement, tried to cut short her stay, tried to prevent her from spending the full time of her Indian visa, much less allowing her to enjoy a longer stay in her husband's home town.
In fact, when she did go the the US Embassy to ask to come to the US, thinking she might later be able to go back to India, the US was suspicious and sent her to Switzerland instead. She would have stayed there, but she wouldn't have been able to publish her book (Twenty Letters) as they required her to stay strictly neutral, which really meant she couldn't express herself at all. Eventually she was allowed to come to the US, oh such a success on our part. ??
In fact, however, most of this book really isn't about Svetlana. It's about the people she knew in Russia, the leaders, their families, the political system.... It would be a great resource for an academic who wants to study the soviet system, the revolution, Stalin's reign, and the aftermath of Kruschev and Kosygin. Very little of the book is actually about Svetlana herself.
Which is actually what she IS about. She was a private person just wanting to live her life without every aspect being dictated to her. She wasn't politically active, but she couldn't possibly talk about her life without talking about the system that so controlled it, that treated her like an asset to be contained.
March 24, 2020
Alliluyeva's second book after her arrival to the US in 1967, it examines that first year in detail. Starting before her defection, Alliluyeva explains her decisions and why she ultimately left the country of her birth to live in the United States. She gives an interesting perspective on her life, and shows the troubles faced by someone in her position. It is a good compliment to her first book, "Twenty Letters to a Friend," and serves as a kind of epilogue to that story.
April 16, 2017
Really fascinating and heartfelt memoirs from an interesting woman. I always wonder what life was like as the wife or daughter of huge historical figures or dictators.
The narrative is only partially linear, the overall plot taking place of the year of her defection but with lots of flashbacks and explorations of her relationship with her father when he was alive, and coming to terms of all the terrible things he did.
Of course there is some bias in the book and she makes herself seem a bit self-important at some times, but I don't think that takes away from the story.
I am surprised she left her children behind with no real chance to see them again, I think I'd feel really abandoned if I was her kid. She mentions it weighed on her and she did try to reach out to them after the escape, but it was just kind of something she accepted as an acceptable cost for her freedom. I don't know if I could have done it. But at least she was honest about her feelings on it.
Anyways, highly recommend to anyone who enjoys non-fiction with an interest in history. Really an eye-opening story that makes you think and want to do research on some of the people she mentions.
The narrative is only partially linear, the overall plot taking place of the year of her defection but with lots of flashbacks and explorations of her relationship with her father when he was alive, and coming to terms of all the terrible things he did.
Of course there is some bias in the book and she makes herself seem a bit self-important at some times, but I don't think that takes away from the story.
I am surprised she left her children behind with no real chance to see them again, I think I'd feel really abandoned if I was her kid. She mentions it weighed on her and she did try to reach out to them after the escape, but it was just kind of something she accepted as an acceptable cost for her freedom. I don't know if I could have done it. But at least she was honest about her feelings on it.
Anyways, highly recommend to anyone who enjoys non-fiction with an interest in history. Really an eye-opening story that makes you think and want to do research on some of the people she mentions.
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