Bøger af Svetlana Alliluyeva

In this riveting, New York Times bestselling memoir?first published by Harper in 1967?Svetlana Iosifovna 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. 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 manuscript about her life 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.Structured as a series of letters to a ?friend??Svetlana refused to identify him, but we now know it was her close friend, the physicist Fyodor Volkenstein?this astounding memoir, also in some ways a love letter to Russia, with its ancient heritage and spectacularly varied geography, exposes the dark human heart of the Kremlin. Each letter adds a new strand to her story; some are wistful, while others are desperate exorcisms of the tragedies that plagued her life. Candid, surprising, and 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.

In this remarkable memoir, Svetlana Alliluyeva reveals her struggle to break completely from the world of Communism and the legacy of her notorious father ?Joseph Stalin? by defecting from the USSR to the United States.Only One Year begins on December 19, 1966, as Alliluyeva leaves Russia for India, on a one-month visa, in the custody of a staff member of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It ends on December 19, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey, as she and two American friends toast to her new life.Why would a woman flee the only world she has ever known? Brutally honest and moving, Only One Year is the personal story of a dictator's daughter who, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, made the drastic decision to defect. And now?nearly fifty years after its initial publication?Alliluyeva's compelling narrative of suffering, sacrifice, and subterfuge becomes all the more poignant becauseher escape ultimately did not bring her the freedom she so desperately sought.