Svetlana About Svetlana (2008)

Svetlana Parshina was deeply moved by her childhood reading of Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva Joseph Stalins daughter Years later learning that the now 82yearold 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 now82yearold 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 CIAassisted defection to the US 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