Twenty Letters to a Friend: A Memoir

In this riveting, New York Times-bestselling memoirfirst published by Harper in 1967Svetlana Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivans critically acclaimed biography, Stalins Daughter, describes the surreal experience of growing up in the Kremlin in the shadow of her father, Joseph Stalin.

Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, his second wife. In 1967, she fled the Soviet Union for India, where she approached the U.S. Embassy for asylum. Once there, she showed her CIA handler something remarkable: A personal memoir about growing up inside the Kremlin that shed written in 1963. The Indian Ambassador to the USSR, whom shed befriended, had smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union the previous yearand returned it to her as soon as she arrived in India.

Structured as a series of letters to a friendSvetlana refused to identify him, but we now know it was her close friend, Fyodor Volkensteinthis astounding memoir exposes the dark human heart of the Kremlin. After opening with Stalins death, Svetlana returns to her childhood. Each letter adds a new strand to her remarkable story; some are wistfulromanticized recollections of her early years and her familywhile others are desperate exorcisms of the tragedies that plagued her, such as her mothers suicide and her fathers increasing cruelty. It is also in some ways a love letter to Russia, with its ancient heritage and spectacularly varied geography.

Candid, surprising, and utterly compelling, Twenty Letters to a Friend offers one of the most revealing portraits of life inside Stalins inner circle, and of the notorious dictator himself.