Svetlana

1936, год запрета аборта

for comparison only:

Born in 1926, Svetlana lived through the purges and the war...[умерла 22 ноября 2011 года]
In 1967, 14 years after Stalin’s death, Svetlana Alliluyeva created an international scandal by defecting to the United States, only to return to the Soviet Union in 1984, then run away again in 1986, each escape taut with cloak-and-dagger suspense worthy of any spy thriller.
She fell in love disastrously and often, had three children from three of her four failed marriages, published several books, made a million dollars, lost a million dollars, moved from home to home with the restlessness of a nomad, abandoning the past again and again, driven by eternal disquiet, “always leaving things all over the globe,” in the words of her younger daughter, Olga, before dying nearly destitute in Wisconsin, at the age of 85, under the anonymous name of Lana Peters. Olga scattered her ashes in the Pacific Ocean.

Sullivan is an eminent biographer, with books on Margaret Atwood [феминистка] and Theodore Roethke [поэт]
the young woman in a hospital contacting her father after a difficult labor only to receive an officious letter stating: “The state needs people, even those who are born prematurely”
In a rather chilling echo of Stalin’s abandonment of his oldest son, Alliluyeva abandoned her own children when she defected, at a time when her defection meant that their futures would most likely be destroyed, not to mention that she would probably never see them again. (In the end, when she did return 17 years later, her tense reunion with her son quickly led to a final estrangement, while her daughter refused to see her at all.)

STALIN’S DAUGHTER
The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
By Rosemary Sullivan
Illustrated. 741 pp. Harper. $35.