Twenty Letters to a Friend
New York: Harper & Row, 1967. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. [12], 246 pages. Decorative endpapers. Illustrations. Notes. DJ has some wear and soiling. Minor edge soiling. Name and date in ink on fep. Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (28 February 1926 – 22 November 2011), later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. In 1967, she became an international sensation when she defected to the United States and, in 1978, became a naturalized citizen. From 1984 to 1986, she briefly returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship reinstated. She was Stalin's last surviving child. After her father's death in 1953, Alliluyeva worked as a lecturer and translator in Moscow. Her training was in History and Political Thought, a subject she was forced to study by her father, although her true passion was literature and writing. In a 2010 interview, she stated that his refusal to let her study arts and his treatment of Kapler were the two times that Stalin "broke my life," and that Stalin loved her but was "a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel." While in the Soviet Union, Alliluyeva had written a memoir in Russian in 1963. The manuscript was carried safely out of the country by Indian Ambassador T. N. Kaul, who returned it to her in New Delhi. Alliluyeva handed her memoir over to the CIA agent Robert Rayle at the time of her own defection. Rayle made a copy of it. The book was titled Twenty Letters to a Friend ("Dvadtsat' pisem k drugu"). It was the only thing other than a few items of clothing taken by Alliluyeva on a secret passenger flight out of India. More
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