The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan is a tour de force.
The book, a biography of a remarkable woman by an award-winning writer, had been on my reading list since October last year. It just looked so intimidating – more than 700 pages in total filled with footnotes and references – that I found all sorts of reasons not to start reading.
But by mid-December I had run out of excuses and alternatives. By the second page of the preface, I was interested and by the second page of the prologue, Sullivan had me hooked. This, in itself, is astonishing as I am really not a fan of academic and researched biographies. I proceeded to finish it in less than a week.
It is clear that Svetlana’s life story needed Sullivan’s extensive research, verification and references, as there would have been no other way to capture her ever-changing, politically-charged and extremely challenged life. She was the political prisoner of her father’s legacy, from which she could never escape no matter where she found herself or what she did in her long life of 85 years.
To an Afrikaans South African girl growing up in the 50s and 60s, the knowledge of Russia, a secret world behind the ‘Iron Curtain’, and the horrors of communism were propagandised and dished up to us as children to instil fear and hostility, which resulted in a dismal lack of knowledge and perspective. It was one-sided indoctrination that requires a life time of study in order to try and catch up with what actually happened in the rest of the world while we were growing up in our little white cocoon under apartheid on the most southern tip of Africa.
Reading Svetlana’s biography affords some insight into not only the mind of one of the world’s most brutal dictators but also the everyday Russian way of life under the communist regime – and of course the paranoia in the west during the Cold War and the political games that were playing out at the time.
It is an epic of a biography. The story of the most famous defector to the west – of someone who was never allowed to live her own life, who was only ever allowed to exist in reference to her name.
Comments