Quotes from Rosemary Sullivan

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.

Vasili was notorious for his pranks. A church had once stood beside Model School No. 25, and the mounds of graves in its abandoned graveyard were still visible. One of Vasili's favorite escapades was to sneak into the graveyard with his buddies to dig up bones.

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.

She stated that the oversight of the Sperres was a very dark chapter: "The Germans threw us a bone and watched with great pleasure how the Jews fought over it among one another.

Her laconic humor helped. She could say, "I don't any longer have the pleasant illusion that I can be free of the label 'Stalin's daughter.' . . . You can't regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn't marry a carpenter."2

She unequivocally rejected his crimes, yet he was the father who, in her childhood memory, was loving—until he wasn't.

Why did Americans smile so often? Was it out of politeness or because of a gay disposition?" Whatever it was, she, who had never been "spoiled with smiles," found it pleasant!

Her reaction was in character. Svetlana was at heart a gambler. Throughout her life she would make a monumental decision entirely on impulse, and then ride the consequences with an almost giddy abandon. She always said her favorite story by Dostoyevsky was The Gambler.

Who can live without personal retrospect? We will always glance back to our childhood, for we are shaped deep in our core by the impress of our parents, and we will always wonder how that molding determined us. Svetlana willfully believed in her happy childhood, even as she gradually understood that it was secured by untold bloodshed. What was it about this strange childhood that she would always turn to it for solace?

In her private life, however, Svetlana continued to feel isolated. A friend at the time, Olga Kulikowsky, described her as "one of the loneliest women I have ever known."37 Another friend, Tatiana Tess, said, "Her search for happiness was boundless."38 A die-hard romantic, she longed to meet someone who wouldn't think of her as Stalin's daughter.

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.

Svetlana was moved when her son, Joseph, kissed the body on the forehead to say good-bye.

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.

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.

Svetlana always said that the notorious brutality of the Orthodox priests, who punished their students with solitary confinement for days in dungeonlike cells, had shaped her father's penchant for cruelty.

What happens when people cannot trust the institutions that are supposed to protect them? What happens when the fundamental laws that constitute and protect decent behavior crumble? The Netherlands in 1940 was like a petri dish in which one can examine how people brought up in freedom react to catastrophe when it is brought to their door. It is a question still worth asking today.

You write that you feel bored. You know, my dear, it's the same thing everywhere. I have nothing to do with anyone in Moscow. Sometimes that looks even strange: in so many years not to develop close friendships, but that depends on character.

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.

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.

I keep trying to bring back what is gone, the sunny, bygone years of my childhood," she would write over thirty years later, as if acknowledging the impossibility of this.40 From the child's point of view, the world may have been undiluted sun, though with a child's intuition, she must already have sensed the cracks in her paradise. From an adult perspective, it was a labyrinthine tangle of pain and

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.

While someone with the first person knowledge is still alive, while records are still available, while relatives of witnesses can come forward, the stories must be told.

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.

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