Film

Svetlana About Svetlana

2008 · 44m · Documentary

IMDb

5.4

Svetlana Parshina was deeply moved by her childhood reading of Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter. Years later, learning that the now 82-year-old was living incognito in a Madison, Wisconsin retirement home, Parshina phones and requests an interview. After repeated denials, and only after insisting upon certain conditions, the now-82-year-old Alliluyeva finally consents to a rare filmed interview in which she discusses her education, marriages, her children, the development of her own humanistic philosophy, her CIA-assisted defection to the U.S., and her skeptical views on the competing Cold War ideologies. In more intimate moments, she discusses her childhood, her nanny, the suicide of her mother, her brothers Vasily and Yakov (who died in a Nazi concentration camp) and, of course, her famous father, who most Soviets saw as "a living God."

Svetlana Alliluyeva

Stalin's daughter

Lana Parshina

Interviewer

Joseph Stalin

(archive footage)

Nadezhda Alliluyeva

Svetlana's mother

Stephen Fode

Warden

• Lana ParshinaDirector · Writer
• Svetlana AlliluyevaWriter
• Dmitriy RozinEditor

Release date

July 24, 2008

Status

Released

Original language

English

Runtime

44m

Genres

Documentary