Staljinova kći: neobičan i buran život Svetlane Alilujeve

"You should not complain about your fate, although I regret that my mother did not marry a carpenter", said Svetlana Aliluyeva, daughter of Joseph Visarionovich Stalin, in an interview for the Independent in March 1990. In her truly unusual and stormy life, full of incredible twists and turns that greatly surpass the plots of spy bestsellers, the short twentieth century is mirrored, the center of which is the conflict between two ideologically and militarily opposed blocs, a conflict in which on the one hand she was treated as "state property" and on the other misused for political and media manipulations. As a little girl, whom her father affectionately called her "sparrow", she ran around the Kremlin, unaware that those cheerful men stroking her hair were organizing mass deportations and murders, whose victims included her closest relatives. Her mother's suicide and the knowledge of Stalin's crimes left an indelible mark on her soul. Having defected to the West in 1967, she got rich selling her memoirs and became world famous; she died alone, poor and anonymous. Trying to escape from "her fate", she tried to find peace in numerous marriages, changing dozens of addresses on several continents. To no avail. But what fascinates in this masterfully narrated biography is the willpower of a fragile and confused human being to oppose both the gruesome family legacy and the monstrous visible and invisible power centers.