All I knew about Stalin were from Animal Farm and the documentaries I watched about him when I was in high school. I learned about his regime from history books and other Russian writers, like Solzhenitsyn, but you learn about the man from the distance — as you do most historical figures. Everybody has a preconception about Hitler, Marx, George Washington as they do from history books and from what they are exposed to in popular culture. Stalin to me, as he is to countless others, is a heartless bastard.
I picked up the book not knowing that he had a daughter. Reading from the blurb and an outline of her life, I thought that she was a rebel who hated her father. She moved around quite a lot and it seemed that she shunned her family and motherland, but the facts are otherwise. Svetlana had a complex relationship with Stalin, but she loved him as he loved her. Their relationship in some ways were banal, he loved her as he can for someone who scarcely had time and an abundance of responsibilities. She loved him from the distance and as she got older found it harder to get along with Stalin.
It was most interesting to observe what he was like from the beginning, and what he became towards the end of his life. Early on, Stalin lived a rudimentary life and spurned luxuries. In short, he was principled. Towards the end, Stalin was lost in luxuries to feed the parasitic military honchos around him that he did not even know how much he was spending, and how much of this were used to line the pockets of those around him. Money became valueless.
He was also close to his family and relatives, to his first wife and her husband. Svetlana chronicled these characters nesting around Stalin’s life in some detail — describing their countenances, tempers and dynamics. At times it became almost like a list of jagged memories, pieced together as she wrote. She wasn’t writing to any friend in particular, she was writing for herself, to herself.
Some of the stories of these characters are heartbreaking. Most of them came to an early end. Some of their demise were brought upon by her father. In her mind, she cannot justify how he could cut the cords for the people that he loved once, that he became cold and brutally heartless. The man her father was, and the man who took these actions were not the same. She blamed this change on Beria, Stalin’s most influential secret police chiefs but she cannot blame Stalin. She couldn’t bridge that gap. This for me, was a grey area and muddle the facts.
But I am here to understand better, not to know facts. The book is still a fascinating read and gives another angle to someone who everybody knows as a bastard. There is a human side to Stalin. If anything, his daughter portrayed him as a mere man — not the best father, not the best man, but someone who lives and breathes to make do with what he can until his eventual decay.
