Stalin’s Daughter best Non-Fiction Literature for 2016 – wins RBC Charles Taylor Prize

By William Doyle-Marshall

 In the field of Canadian Non-fiction literature “Stalin’s Daughter”  (Svetlana Iosifovna Stalin) by Rosemary Sullivan captured the 2016 $25,000 RBC Charles Taylor prize earlier this month. Sullivan has been in winners’ row for her work many times in the past and with the awarding of the 2016 Royal Bank Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction, its one more feather in her hat. In September 1957, Svetlana decided to change her name from Stalin to her mother’s name Alliluyeva. She said the metallic sound of the name Stalin lacerated her heart.

    “It’s amazing. It was totally unexpected and wonderful,” Sullivan remarked immediately after being declared winner of the $25,000 prize downtown Toronto at the historic King Edward Hotel. “As you know as a writer you don’t set out to win a prize. You set out to tell a story. If you are lucky as I have been, this extraordinary sequence of things happen. You can’t know what the life of a book will be.” Once you sit at your computer or your typewriter you don’t know how the story will evolve.

   The author discovered that Svetlana felt that the only man who had been loyal to her in her lifetime was Rajesh Singh whom she met in a hospital where they were both recuperating in 1963 and she believed he gave her the monochrome quality of Soviet life. Svetlana found Singh ‘wonderful’. They talked about Mahatma Ghandi, they talked about various religions. Slowly, she fell in love with him but he was ill. At one point she asked permission from the politburo to marry him because she felt if he could go back to India, he could get better but she was refused permission. Josef Stalin, her father had instituted a law in 1937 saying that Soviet citizens shouldn’t marry foreigners. She was very upset and then by ’66 Rajesh Singh died. To honour  his wish of having his ashes spread in the Ganges, Svetlana sought and obtained permission. She went to India, she fell in love with India. It was the first country she had ever visited outside Soviet Union and wanted to stay and was refused permission. That’s when she defected to the United States.

Rosemary Sullivan

Svetlana wrote a letter to her two children in March 9, 1967 and at a time when we are reading numerous stories about Putin and Russia, this letter written almost 50 years ago offers a hint about life in that country, about which we know very little.

This is the letter: “I am afraid that all sorts of lies will be told to you – and to everybody – about me. Perhaps you will be told that I’d become mad or that I’ve been kidnapped, or that I am no no m ore. Do not believe anything. I want to explain myself how the decision not to return to Russia has come to me. I did never expect to do so when I was leaving Moscow in December. Then I have not even taken your photographs with me.

  I could live in Russia – as many others are doing – being a hypocrite, hiding my true opinions. More than a half of our people live like that. We have no opportunity to criticize, we have no press, no freedoms and also nobody wants to risk. Everyone has a family, children, a job, which is too dangerous to lose. I’ve lived like that for many years and could live still longer – but the fate has made me to do my resolute choice.”

   “My husband’s death changed my nature. I feel it impossible to be silent and tolerant anymore. It is impossible to be always a slave…. My sweet darlings – please keep peace in your hearts. I am only doing what my conscience orders me to do.”

--Your Mother

 The other finalists short listed for the prize were “Dispatches from the Front – Matthew Halton, Canada’s voice at war” by David Halton; Ian Brown, a previous winner of Toronto. His entry is “Sixty: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?, published by Random House Canada; Camilla Gibb for This Is Happy, published by Doubleday Canada; and Wab Kinew -- The Reason You Walk, published by Viking Canada.