Did Stalin have a daughter? Yes, he had 👉
Stalin’s Daughter
On March 9, 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the (only) daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, defected to the West.
It happened on a trip to India where she'd walked into the US embassy and asked for asylum, leaving behind her country and her two grown-up children.
“It was a very difficult decision,” she said, “but I could not return to the useless life I’ve had for forty years. I hope that they will understand me.”
Svetlana settled in America and published a memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend, under big protests from Moscow. She hated the system her father had created, but still, well, Stalin was her father, and he was an important figure in her life. “I was probably the only person who knew other sides of him,” she says in an interview. “When I was a child, I saw real tenderness in him - he could be very insecure, I think, but he wanted to hide it because he didn’t like weakness.”
However, Svetlana also experienced some of Stalin's less flattering sides. In 1932, when she was six, her mother had died and although she’d been told that the mother’s death was caused by illness, Svetlana suspected that her father had murdered her. Everyone knew how violent Stalin could be towards his wife, and later, articles in the newspapers confirmed the little girl’s suspicion.
Svetlana returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 but couldn’t settle. According to sources, she went back to the West, where she lived in anonymity and poverty.
Invite fear on your creative journey
Author Elizabeth Gilbert encourages you to invite fear to join you when doing your creative work (because, P.S., it’ll turn up anyway).
Thanks for reading!
Until next time - Majken xx
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