Svetlana About Svetlana

44min

Documentary

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."

Production Companies

Independent Film Project

Icarus Films

Cast

Svetlana Alliluyeva

Svetlana Alliluyeva

Stalin's daughter
Lana Parshina

Lana Parshina

Interviewer
Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

(archive footage)
Nadezhda Alliluyeva

Nadezhda Alliluyeva

Svetlana's mother

Release date

24th Jul 2008

Status

Released

Spoken languages

English, Pусский