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

An intriguing look at Stalin's regime, marred by pedestrian writing and shallow insights. Richardson, a British journalist, follows Stalin's career through the eyes of the Alliluyev family, whose connection to Stalin spanned the generations--Sergei Alliluyev, father of Stalin's second wife Nadya, ranked among the future dictator's oldest Bolshevik colleagues. Unlike most of his comrades, Sergei died peacefully in his bed; but he went to his grave tormented by the knowledge that the rest of his family, into which he had invited his old friend, had been less fortunate. Nadya herself--an awestruck teenager half Stalin's age when they married--committed suicide as the dictatorship gathered strength; and her brothers, sisters, relatives and friends were subsequently swept up almost without exception into either death or imprisonment. Its protagonists' intimacy both with suffering and with the instigator of their tribulations could have lent this terrible tale great force; Richardson, however, is an inadequate chronicler. The core of her book, inspired by a friendship with Svetlana Stalin, is in personal interviews (through interpreters) and family reminiscences, many of these repetitive or contradictory. Richardson's seemingly superficial knowledge of Soviet history and sketchy research prevent her from setting her anecdotal material into a comprehensible historical relation. Her most irritating trait, though--beyond even the drab journalese of her prose--is the incessant psychological speculation: for all her claims that this family's reminiscences can supply the dimension missing from more standard assessments, she rarely transcends the level of crude Freudianisms or banal claims that Stalin was a ``disempowered child'' who found in the Party a ``political family.'' Despite the material's innate fascination, readers must look elsewhere for a life grounding Stalin's psychological compulsions persuasively in historical context--for instance to Alan Bullock's massive and authoritative 1992 dual biography, Hitler and Stalin. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.