Stalin's Daughter

Good morning, now I am going to look at a documentary on Josef Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva.  The run time for this documentary is 52:13 and it is called Stalin’s Daughter.

Svetlana Alliluyeva was Josef Stalin’s daughter and in the midst of the Cold War, she fled to the United States through India.  Her defection was a bombshell and sent shockwaves through the Soviet authorities.  While in the United States, she became a media rockstar.  Her arrival in New York was a sensation. However, she finds that she still cannot escape her father’s shadow.  How did this young woman become the most famous defector?  What drove this woman to defect to the United States?

Svetlana Alliluyeva’s story begins in New Delhi.  A young woman entered the American Embassy and announced that she was Stalin’s daughter.  She was asking for political asylum.  Nobody really believed her and so she was brought to the United States with a CIA agent.  Everyone thought that she was a KGB plant.  However, the reality was very different.

This documentary leads off with a discussion on Joseph Stalin the man, and this discussion is led by his grandson.  The interview was very good and I appreciated that the grandson gave his time for this documentary.  Then there is a transition to Lenin and his death and how Stalin rose to power in the Soviet Union.  Lenin had warned the party leaders about Lenin’s ambitions.  As the leaders gathered around Lenin’s coffin the struggle for party leadership would begin.  Stalin’s second wife’s mother was key to the rise of Stalin.  She was Lenin’s secretary.

Then the documentary airs shows interviews with Svetlana Alliluyeva and she talks about her childhood.  Letters from Joseph Stalin to her daughter were discovered in the archives.  Their relationship was tender.  There was one letter where Svetlana orders her father to take her to the movie theater and Stalin agrees.  This is a stark contrast to the man history knows him as.  Svetlana’s mother would go back to school and would introduce Nikita Khrushchev to Stalin.  Joseph Stalin rules the Soviet Union with an iron fist.  He is determined to force collectivism in agriculture.  Millions die as a result of these policies.

Stalin’s wife, because she was going to school knew that the people were starving.  When she questioned her husband about what was going on he was furious.  Her personality would change and many people would notice that he looked very depressed and that there was fear in her eyes.  Then the Fifteenth Anniversary of the Communist Revolution came about.  Joseph Stalin was slightly drunk and was throwing things at his wife.  At the end of the night, his wife was dead.  The events surrounding her death are a mystery and her official cause of death was a “ruptured appendix.”  His wife’s death would change Stalin for the worse.

The documentary then transitions to an interview with a playmate of Stalin’s children.  He talks about the fear that Joseph Stalin inspired.  His father was in Stalin’s inner circle and his father often would say “You never knew what would happen after a dinner at Joseph Stalin.”  However, he was an affectionate father to Svetlana and would often write her little leaders.  It is here that a granddaughter of one of the Soviet writers: Maxim Gorky.  She was the best friends with Svetlana and she would have witnessed the rare occasion when Joseph Stalin was an affectionate father.  She also remembers the shudders she felt while dining with Joseph Stalin.  To learn more about Svetlana and the lead-up to her defection to the United States tune into the rest of the documentary.

This documentary did a really good job in laying out Joseph Stalin’s background and the interviewees were very well done and thoughtful with their answers.  You can see why Svetlana would eventually defect to the United States because of the climate of fear and intimidation around her father.  She was told her mother died from a ruptured appendix instead of being shot by her father.  Overall, this documentary was a very eye-opening look at Joseph Stalin and his daughter and it perhaps should have been a longer documentary.  This would be very good for research purposes and for history classes.