Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva 28 February 1926 - 22 November 2011), later known as Lana Peters, 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 1987 when she returned to the Soviet Union and got her Soviet (later Georgian) citizenship returned. She later went back to the United States and also spent time in the United Kingdom.

Twenty Letters To A Friend

History

Alliluyeva, Svetlana

Russia

Harpercollins

In this riveting, New York Times-bestselling memoir—first published by Harper in 1967—Svetlana Alliluyeva, subject of Rosemary Sullivan’s critically acclaimed biography, Stalin’s 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 she’d written in 1963. The Indian Ambassador to the USSR, whom she’d befriended, had smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union the previous year—and returned it to her as soon as she arrived in India.
Structured as a series of letters to a “friend”—Svetlana refused to identify him, but we now know it was her close friend, Fyodor Volkenstein—this astounding memoir exposes the dark human heart of the Kremlin. After opening with Stalin’s death, Svetlana returns to her childhood. Each letter adds a new strand to her remarkable story; some are wistful—romanticized recollections of her early years and her family—while others are desperate exorcisms of the tragedies that plagued her, such as her mother’s suicide and her father’s 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 Stalin’s inner circle, and of the notorious dictator himself.

20 LETTERS TO FRIEND

Humor & Entertainment

Perennial

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: Herzen, Kropotkin, Tolstoy’s Confession.”—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker

Only One Year: A Memoir

Harper-perennial

20 Letters to a Friend

Hutchinson

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