Svetlana about Svetlana

plays with A King in Milwaukee

(Russia, 2008, 44 mins, digital video)

Midwest Premiere

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 in a Madison, Wisconsin retirement home, Parshina phones and requests an interview. After repeated denials, and only after insisting upon certain conditions, Alliluyeva finally consents to a rare filmed interview in which she discusses her education, marriages (including Taliesin architect William Wesley Peters), her children, the development of her own humanistic philosophy, her CIA-assisted defection to the United States, 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.” Her poignant and often candid reminiscences, and a few humorous anecdotes, are combined with archival footage and photos, including numerous family snapshots.

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