Editor’s Note: Rosemary Sullivan is a Canadian creator. She has revealed 16 books, most lately “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary ad Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (2015)” and “The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation (2022).” The views expressed on this commentary are her personal. Read extra opinion on Mahaz News.
Mahaz News
—
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un was again within the highlight final week after showing at two lavish navy occasions in Pyongyang. In one {photograph}, he’s seen together with his generals reviewing a midnight parade of ballistic missiles. Beside him stands his roughly 9-year-old daughter.
Ironically, the photograph precisely mirrors one taken virtually 100 years in the past of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin standing on the same balcony in Moscow reviewing a navy parade with a younger woman standing beside him.
Both kids look enraptured to have the dictator’s consideration. And I feel: The predicament of the dictator’s daughter! What will Kim Ju Ae’s future be?
In my biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, “Stalin’s Daughter,” I quoted Svetlana’s touch upon her destiny in her personal memoir, “Only One Year.” She writes: “You are Stalin’s daughter. Actually, you are already dead. Your life is already finished. You can’t live your own life. You can’t live any life. You exist only in reference to a name.”
On a prolonged go to to Moscow in 2013, I used to be in a position to interview Stalin’s grandson Alexander Burdonsky, who informed me that life within the Soviet military felt like a liberation after life at dwelling. Like his aunt Svetlana, he took his mom’s title to flee his lineage.
Of Svetlana, he mentioned: “I admired her as a woman and as a human being. I cannot say that of all my relatives. I loved her very much.”
He defined that his father Vasily Stalin was “a product of the freeloaders and leaches who surrounded him.” But Svetlana was her father’s daughter. “She had his organized intelligence, his unbelievable will, but she did not have his evil.”
During her childhood, Svetlana was the “beloved daughter.” Stalin referred to as her his little hostess, little fly, little sparrow. She was the one one who may cease his rages towards her mom by wrapping her arms round his Cossack boots.
After her mom’s suicide, her letters to her father are poignant. At age seven, she wrote: “Hello my dear Paposhka, How are you living and how is your health. … I wait for you in Sochi.” In a sport he invented for her, Stalin suggested his daughter that she ought to by no means ask for issues; she ought to give orders. He was her Secretary No. 1.
All this modified when Svetlana was 16 and had her first chaste love affair with a well-known filmmaker Aleksei Kapler, who was 39 (the identical age as Stalin when he married Svetlana’s mom.) Stalin exiled Kapler to the Gulag for 10 years for having the audacity to romance his daughter. This was when Svetlana started to know who her father was. Her standing as beloved was conditional.
Stalin died in 1953. And Svetlana ultimately defected to the US in 1967, however found that she nonetheless carried her father’s shadow; she was anticipated to cooperate with the CIA. When she was seduced again to Russia in 1984 to see her son who was supposedly unwell, the federal government there supplied her luxurious dachas, residences, automobiles. She refused them. She slipped again into the US and ended her life in digital poverty.
She summed up her life in her memoir: “Wherever I go, whether to Australia or some island, I will always be the political prisoner of my father’s name.”
Burdonsky informed me that the youngsters of dictators have both to completely reject their heritage or to comply with of their father’s footsteps. He mentioned Svetlana was caught in between. She didn’t defend her father’s murderousness, however she thought he had been become a sinkhole for all of the evil of his regime.
“He knew what he was doing,” she mentioned of her father in her memoir. “He was neither insane nor misled. With cold calculation he cemented his power, afraid of losing it more than anything else in the world.” But a dictator wants accomplices. He was the top of a homicidal system she had the braveness to reject.
This makes me consider Russian President Vladimir Putin in the present day. We know nearly nothing about Kim Jung Un’s daughter, however we all know slightly about Putin’s two daughters, Mariya and Katerina. As kids of the “first person,” persons are cautious not to discuss them; to take action could be harmful.
Shrouded in secrecy, they attended college beneath assumed names (classmates had no thought who they have been); they’d guards to go to the films and safety particulars at dwelling. Told that Putin loves his kids and spoils them, a journalist as soon as requested if the women had Putin wrapped round their little fingers. Their mom Lyudmila replied: “Nobody can wrap Papa around their little finger.”
It seems that Putin’s daughters have chosen their father’s facet. It is reported that Katerina is head of a brand new AI institute at Moscow State University and is claimed to be price a number of billion. Mariya leads a state funded genetics program that has obtained billions from the Kremlin, based on US officers. Supposedly neither have political ambitions, which is reportedly the best way Putin desires it.
But it will appear that Kim Jong Un would possibly certainly be grooming his daughter to hold on his dynasty. North Korea simply launched a brand new postage stamp carrying images of the dictator and his “beloved daughter” standing collectively watching the test-firing of the Hwasong-17 intercontinental ballistic missile.
Will she, like Svetlana, inherit her father’s will however reject his murderous legacy? Or will she show a well-trained apprentice and presumably turn out to be extra harmful than her father? Given the closed universe of North Korea and the seduction of wealth and energy, the latter is extra probably.
Source web site: www.cnn.com
