Twenty Letters to a Friend

“Stalin had three children, but the one he was closest to when she was young was Svetlana. She was born in 1926, so there are many early pictures of her with him and other members of the Politburo, out at the dacha, and so on. Her mother died by her own hand—evidently after a quarrel with Stalin—when Svetlana was about six. The Letters are written after Stalin’s death, but also after Khrushchev’s dethronement of Stalin in 1956, when he criticized the excesses of Stalinism. Svetlana herself shares these criticisms. But she still loves her father, though she was estranged from him in adult life, mainly. For her, he’s a very problematic father, but also a beloved one.” Read more...

The best books on The Soviet Union

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Historian