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. Priscilla Johnson McMillan (born Priscilla Mary Post Johnson) (July 19, 1928 – July 7, 2021) was an American journalist, translator, author, and historian. She was a Center Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. In 1967, McMillan translated the memoirs of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin's daughter, who had gained much attention that year by defecting to the United States. There was considerable competition among translators and publishers for the assignment, but a recommendation from former U.S. Ambassador and foreign policy legend George F. Kennan helped her get it. She had first encountered Svetlana twelve years earlier, during her first visit to the Soviet Union, when under the name Stalina, she had taught a class at Moscow State University. Svetlana spent her first weeks in America staying at McMillan's father's estate in Locust Valley. Derived from a Kirkus review: Everyone will be curious--and Europeans currently viewing with satisfied amusement the snapshots which complement this "family chronicle" are the gainers from the furor surrounding its publication. The Kremlin's concern was unnecessary: there is nothing to ruffle the forthcoming anniversary of the Revolution, nothing incendiary or especially provocative. Mrs. Alliluyeva's political philosophy as expressed here is a benevolent one-worldliness; she is as faithful to the Old Bolsheviks as she is to the God she committed herself to in her mid-thirties. Being neither chronological nor comprehensive, this is not, despite her designation, precisely a chronicle; rather it is a confession, a purgative, in the form of testimony--to her father as a fond parent; to the natural, wholesome family life of the Party leadership before 1932; to the sensibility and wisdom of her mother; to the nobility of her grandparents, various relatives and friends. But each of them, beginning with her mother, came to a tragic end, victims of Stalin--the adult Svetlana acknowledges what the child Svetlana still cannot reconcile. The disclosures are few: the details of her father's "difficult and terrible" death; the depredations of her alcoholic brother Vasilly; the loathing of her family for Beria from the first. Svetlana herself has a certain interest. She describes the constrictions imposed by her position, mentions briefly a thwarted romance and her first two marriages, reports an increasing alienation from her father. And she regrets the losses justified by elevating ends over means. When this was set down, the author had not come to terms with herself, with her father's role, with the system. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Russia, Soviet Union, Stalin, Communism, Moscow, Beria, Khrushchev, Kremlin, Jews, Lana Peters
[Book #85500]
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