cover image Stalin's Shadow: Inside the Family of One of the World's Greatest Tyrants

Stalin's Shadow: Inside the Family of One of the World's Greatest Tyrants

Rosamund Richardson. St. Martin's Press, $23 (308pp) ISBN 978-0-312-10493-1

So apparently does British journalist Richardson emerge as a mouthpiece for Svetlana Alliluyeva, who lives in England and is interviewed throughout these pages, it's as if we were reading chapter 21 of Alliluyeva's Twenty Letters to a Friend , which was published in 1967 when she defected. Further, Richardson herself is unread in Soviet history: the Civil War is fought in one paragraph, the Imperial family assassinated in a sentence as the revolution becomes mere backdrop to the introduction of four generations of Svetlana's maternal family. We meet Olga and Sergei Alliluyev, Stalin's fellow Bolsheviks in the underground; their daughter Nadya, who in 1918 at the age of 17 married the widowed 39-year-old Stalin, gave birth to Vasili in 1921 and Svetlana in 1926, and committed suicide in 1932; plus Nadya's brother Pavel and sisters Eugenia and Anna. Svetlana's aunts, who aided their parents in giving refuge to Stalin during his prison escapes, and later frequently enjoyed the family man's hospitality at his dacha, would become victims of his purges, both sentenced to 10 years of solitary confinement. Anna's husband, Stanislav Redens, would be killed and their daughter Katya exiled. Svetlana's half brother Yakov would die a WW II POW after their father refused a prisoner exchange, and her other brother Vasily would drink himself to death. This depressing story is familiar history. Yet the book becomes newsworthy toward its end when Richardson, in Moscow, interviews the elderly Katya, and the third and fourth generations. Terrifyingly, we learn that most of the Alliluyevs remain loyalists, ascribing Stalinism to Beria's influence. The photos reproduced here are haunting. (Feb.)