Stalin’s Daughter Quotes

“What would it mean to be born Stalin’s daughter, to carry the weight of that name for a lifetime and never be free of it?”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“When Rayle later submitted a mandatory report to the State Department on the defector’s “personality” and her “adaptability to different environments,” he described Svetlana as “the most completely cooperative defector I have ever met.” He said she’d remained cheerful and optimistic throughout the week as they waited in the safe house, even as she took in the shock that the Americans were refusing her asylum. As Rayle put it, “She recognizes that she cannot be considered a normal, ordinary human being and that her actions have political implications. . . . You’ll find her a warm, friendly person who responds to warmth and friendliness. I think you’ll find her genuinely likeable.” He added, “She is a very stable person.”21 But he warned that she seemed quite naive, as if she’d never lived “in any real world,” and would need help in finding her way in the West.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“When they were finally alone, Brajesh told Svetlana, with a calm resignation that was both disconcerting and moving, “Sveta, I know that I will die today.” He said he had had a dream of a white bullock pulling a cart. In India when you have that dream, it means death is coming.22 She did not believe him. At seven a.m. that Monday, he pointed to his heart and then to his head and said that he could feel something throbbing. And then he died. Into her mind came the memory of her father’s death, the only other death she had witnessed. She recalled her father’s outrageous struggle, his fear in the face of death, his terrifying last gesture of accusation. Singh’s death was quick and peaceful, his last gesture toward his heart. She thought, Each man got the death he deserved. With Singh’s death, Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Buried in the minds of those of us who are lucky is a childhood landscape, a place of magic and imagination, a safe place. It is foundational, and we will return to it in memory and dreams throughout our lives.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“The truth was that Svetlana did not know what love was. Some deep part of her probably believed she couldn’t be loved. She was still looking for a romanticized, idealized substitute for love. In this she was not unlike many women, though perhaps her case was extreme. She felt she needed a man to invent her or complete her. Her desperation came from the terror of being alone, but who among the men she was drawn to would bind themselves to Stalin’s daughter and take on that darkness?”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svetlana did not know how to be alone. Alone, she felt totally exposed. She thought she would be safe if only she could entwine her life in another, but then, once she had achieved this, she would feel suffocated, a pattern that would take her decades to break, if she ever succeeded.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svetlana began the slow process of realizing that her father was capable of condemning innocent people to prison and even to death. She would look back and say, “The whole thing nearly drove me out of my mind. Something in me was destroyed. I was no longer able to obey the word and will of my father and defer to his opinions without question.”32”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“can no longer accept a society in which you are told that there is only one point of view from which politics, and indeed life itself, must be judged.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“featured prominently on Russian TV news”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“interpuesto en su camino”, escribió.[13] Pero no era la historia verdadera. La historia verdadera era que había muchos participantes en el juego de ruleta política que Stalin había ganado, y después de su muerte, el Partido lo siguió jugando. Svetlana coincidía en que Khrushchov había izado “el estandarte de la liberación”, y lo recordarían por su esfuerzo “de llamar las cosas por sus verdaderos nombres. Los tímidos esfuerzos”
― Rosemary Sullivan, La hija de Stalin: La extraordinaria y tumultuosa vida de Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I do hope and believe the people will not vote him into the Presidency—but, then of course elections always could be rigged. . . . The”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Russia is quickly (in my opinion) sliding back into the past—with that awful former KGB-SPY now as an acting president! I”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Zinaida. As”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“the Stalinist credo: “a respect for obedience, hierarchy and institutionalized authority; a belief in reason, optimism and progress; recognition of a possible transformation of nature, society, and human beings; and an acceptance of the necessity of violence.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“My husband’s death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“but he was pleasantly surprised by Svetlana’s tranquillity. She later said, “I had been trained not to make decisions for myself, to wait and to be patient, above all to remain well-mannered.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svetlana entered wholeheartedly into Indian life, wearing a sari and eating the family’s vegetarian food. She walked about the village and visited with Brajesh’s old friends, but she had no illusions about the complexities and compromises of life in India. She found the caste system, with its seemingly ineradicable rules, disturbing.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svetlana had reached one of those transformative moments that seemed to recur in her life. After the exhaustion and sorrows of the last three years, the intrusions and constraints on her private life, she had reached a limit. This would be a turning point, though where she would turn was not yet clear.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“The irony was not lost on her that, because she was Stalin’s daughter—“state property,” as she bitterly called herself—she had been refused permission to accompany Singh to India while he was alive but had been granted a visa to carry his ashes back to his country after he was dead.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“There was a kerfuffle before Svetlana’s departure. Joseph’s wife, Elena, had grabbed Svetlana’s overnight bag to hand it to her. She’d shouted, “Don’t touch that!”26 Elena didn’t know that it contained the porcelain urn carrying Brajesh’s ashes. Joseph was angry at his mother’s sharpness, Elena looked offended, and Svetlana was distraught. She hadn’t had time to give more than a peck on the cheek to Katya. She had mismanaged her farewell.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say good-bye.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svetlana felt that something had changed in her. “Some inner line of demarcation” had been drawn. Something was totally lost. She did not yet know what this meant. Oddly, she also felt a kind of peace. She did not cry.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel opened on February 10, 1966. Despite the attempted intervention of organizations like PEN International, Daniel was sentenced to five years and Sinyavsky to seven years of hard labor in prison camps.14 Svetlana was appalled. This was grotesque, ugly, unconscionable. She came home each night to Singh with tales of the kind of meetings that were going on at the Gorky Institute, and he would ask, “But why? Why? . . . Seven years of prison for writing books? Just because a writer writes books?”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“By 1918 Nadya’s letters hint that she has fallen in love with Stalin. Svetlana explains that Nadya “had only begun to grow when the Revolution broke out, whereas he [Stalin] was already a man nearly forty, an age of hardened scepticism and cold calculation and all the other qualities important in a politician.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“She does not convey the monumentality of the event—the vozhd is dying—but rather she recounts the death as a daughter would. “Who loves this lonely man?” she asks, watching his ministers ricocheting between fear and ambition, Beria scrambling for ascendency. Only his servants. When a comatose Stalin raises his arm in his last moments, she sees this as a gesture of rage against life itself. He had wished to dominate life, but life had finally defeated him.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Svanidze had been “deranged” by his multiple imprisonments and was impossible to live with. According to Lily, he had become paranoid about his own Jewish origins and removed all his Jewish mother’s portraits from the walls. And he hated Svetlana’s son because Joseph was half Jewish.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“He said God loved me, even if I was Stalin’s daughter.”7 The remark suggests a depth of loneliness that is devastating.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“Of course, I asked him about it, very matter-of-factly. Yes, he fucked her once. So what?” Rozanova found it easy to blame Svetlana. She was “a hysterical woman—to have such a father.” Sinyavsky was just being a man. She recalled his famous joke. He used to say, “If I’m sitting in a train car with a woman, I have to make her an offer, as a polite human being.” Rozanova added that in a relationship, sexual fidelity “is not important. [This] is not what connects people. Without me he would not be able to work, nor live. To live—it is not the same as making soup.” But she would never forgive Svetlana. Svetlana didn’t seem to understand the sexual double standard that flourished everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s. She was the “sexually deranged” one, while the artist Sinyavsky was forgiven his sexual dalliance, necessary for his work, which had so raised her hopes. The women became rivals and enemies, while the husband stood blithely by. And Svetlana was far from unusual in believing that her only route to a creative life was adjacent to a man.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“They were sitting on a small bench near the Kropotkin Gate when Svetlana mentioned the subject of suicide. Sinyavsky replied, “A suicide only thinks that he is killing himself. He is killing only his body, and the soul after that languishes, for God alone can take the soul.”3 Svetlana may have remembered Grandmother Olga’s words: “You will know your soul when it aches.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

“She was thirty-five. It is not a comfortable age. If one is still alone, one believes one will stay alone. Her children, now sixteen and eleven, were at school. Katya had her compulsory Pioneer meetings, and Joseph had joined the Komsomol. Svetlana recalled, “I was melancholy, irritable, inclined towards hopeless pessimism; more than once I had contemplated suicide; I was afraid of dark rooms, of the dead, of thunderstorms; of uncouth men, of hooligans in the streets and drunks. My own life appeared to me very dark, dull, and without a future.”2 Beneath Svetlana’s carefully controlled exterior, there existed sorrows and suspicions, rages and frustrations, psychic wounds that she did not know how to face, let alone heal.”
― Rosemary Sullivan, Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva