Original subtitles

Moscow, during the Cold War.

It was '67.

It was the time of the beginning of all this Brezhnev frost.

On the evening of 6th March,

a Russian woman walks into the American Embassy in New Delhi

and asks for political asylum.

There was nobody who really spoke Russian in the embassy,

and she said she wanted to defect

and she was Stalin's daughter.

But they weren't sure she really was Stalin's daughter.

I mean, she could be a fake Stalin's daughter.

It really is Svetlana Alliluyeva.

She is flown out, escorted by an agent from the CIA.

Nobody really believed

she'd left Russia of her own free will.

Everyone thought the CIA was behind it.

Or the KGB.

For the Soviet authorities,

it is an embarrassing setback

in the propaganda war with the USA.

They tried to do everything to prevent this with Lana.

One possibility was to kill her.

The arrival of Stalin's daughter in New York

is a sensation.

They saw it as a victory.

"Here she comes for freedom, and freedom to be herself."

Svetlana, the Kremlin princess.

How did the favorite child of the Red Czar

become the most famous defector of the Cold War?

She didn't want to live under this

shadow of an umbrella of this monstrous history.

The empire of the Red Czar, Joseph Stalin,

worshiped by many, feared by even more,

responsible for the death of millions.

He is the father of two sons and one daughter, Svetlana.

It was her very name, you might say,

that interfered with her life.

It pursued her everywhere she went.

People were pointing fingers at her, saying,

"Look, that's her!"

Here, the human face

of the bloody dictator is revealed

as the proud father of his beloved daughter, Svetlana.

You know, in Chekhov's "The Seagull,"

there's a very wise saying.

"Learn how to carry your cross and keep believing."

Svetlana carried that cross.

It was very difficult, especially for a person like her.

She was very delicate, clever.

A subtle and insightful person.

That makes the cross twice as heavy.

The people of the Soviet Union

call the bloody dictator who rules them Father Stalin.

The personality cult surrounding him knows no limits.

Stalin was a myth.

He turned into a myth a long, long time ago.

He was a harsh man. A quite brutal man.

I think he lived a life

that shaped his character in a certain way.

And that life and everything that went with it,

Marxism joining the party and so on and so forth,

his exiles, escapes, arrests,

these things began to play a role,

molding something different in the man.

Ioseb Jughashvili is born in Georgia,

the son of a shoemaker.

As Joseph Stalin, the Steel One,

he rises to become a member of the inner circle

of Marxist revolutionaries.

He is not among the most prominent of them.

But that will change.

In January 1924,

the leader of the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin,

is carried to his grave.

Only a short time before,

he had warned about Stalin's ambitions.

The potential successors gather around the coffin.

The struggle for Lenin's legacy has begun.

He was scarcely visible.

A pale figure against the backdrop

of such bright, charismatic figures as Lenin, Trotsky,

the chieftains of the revolution.

He was a quiet, cunning, unobtrusive functionary.

Stalin's rise to the position

of undisputed head of the Kremlin

is partly due to Svetlana's mother.

Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva,

was a close confidante of Lenin's, as well as his secretary.

It was very useful to Stalin

that she worked in Lenin's secretariat.

He knew everything that was going on there.

Svetlana's mother, Nadezhda,

is only 16 years old when she falls in love with Stalin,

more than 20 years her senior.

He is a friend of the family.

He loved her. Confided in her a great deal.

Consulted with her.

And, up to a certain point in time,

she was very close to him.

In 1921, their son Vasily is born.

Then, in 1926, Svetlana.

In one of her first interviews in the USA, she remembers.

The same person who was merciless

to his political enemies, he could be, at the same time,

rather kind and tender with his favorite child.

Everything was there.

Cruelty was there and sending fruits.

And writing tender letters to his daughter was also there.

In Moscow's central archives,

the blueprints of unknown letters

from Joseph Stalin to Svetlana have come to light.

They indicate that the relationship

between father and daughter was tender.

In 1931, for example.

In order number three,

Svetlana, then five years old,

instructs her father to take her to the movies.

An American comedy.

The dictator scribbles his reply.

"I obey my lady, Joseph Stalin."

Behind the walls of the Kremlin,

the leaders of the young Soviet Union

live in close proximity.

Svetlana's mother, Nadezhda,

wants to be more than Stalin's wife.

After the birth of their daughter, she begins to study.

My father studied with her.

She would get out of the car

several blocks away from the university, continuing on foot.

Therefore, many didn't know who she was.

And he even told me that, for a long time,

he knew her only as Nadenka.

She was also very beautiful and feminine,

so men were attracted to her.

Svetlana's mother intends to be active

in the construction of the socialist state.

One of her friends at university

will one day succeed Stalin

as the head of the Communist Party.

Nadezhda introduces Nikita Khrushchev to her husband.

My father became the party secretary,

so he was supervisor,

and she came here asking advices from him,

what she has to do and how to behave.

And when he was invited to the Stalin home,

he found that she's very different person at home.

From 1927 on, Svetlana's father

is the sole ruler of the Soviet Union, with unlimited power.

Joseph Stalin ruthlessly pushes forward

with the forced collectivization of agriculture.

Any resistance is brutally suppressed.

Millions of people starve to death.

In the Kremlin itself,

any mention of the actual situation

was confined to whispers.

But when Nadezhda was permitted to go to university

and discovered that starving children

were begging in the streets

and that people were dying of hunger, she approached Stalin

and took him to task about the situation.

And he completely flew off the handle.

People who saw Nadezhda at that time,

by the end of the '20s,

said that she seemed to be in a deep depression.

She was always silent when there were people around,

sat huddled in a shawl.

Looked at Stalin with horror.

And there is evidence that he used to beat her.

On 8th November, 1932,

Soviet dignitaries celebrate the anniversary

of the Revolution.

Svetlana's mother mingles with the common people.

She went with a group of workers,

and when she came up to Stalin,

she stepped out of the group,

and who was standing up there with Stalin?

The children.

And then that evening in the Kremlin, there was a big party.

Stalin is very drunk

and flirts with all the ladies around him.

He drank a little,

while she sat silently as always.

That sent him into a fury.

He started throwing things at her.

Some people say orange peels. Some say bread balls.

And then he said to her, "Hey, drink!"

And whatever he was throwing hit her in the eye.

She said, "Don't 'hey' me!"

And a fast, short, insulting squabble ensued

between the two of them.

It is the last time Nadezhda is seen alive.

In the morning,

her maid entered to bring her breakfast

and found her lying on the floor with a shot to the temple.

And then strange things began to happen.

Some witnesses say that it took Stalin

a long time to come out of his bedroom,

they slept in separate rooms,

emerging only at 10:00 in the morning,

which is rather strange,

because people were running all about,

there was a huge uproar.

The doctor was called. People came running.

And he only came out at 10:00 in the morning.

And he kept repeating

that he had not spent the night at home.

Nadezhda's body is laid out in the Kremlin.

A ruptured appendix is the official cause of death

stipulated by Stalin.

The doctors refused to sign one of those,

I don't know what it's called, I guess, a death certificate,

saying that the cause of death was appendicitis.

And later, these doctors were arrested and shot.

At Nadezhda's grave,

Joseph Stalin reveals his true nature.

He said such a terrible thing

as he approached the coffin.

He gave it a shove and said, "She left as an enemy."

Svetlana will be told that her mother died

after surgery to remove her appendix.

Exactly what Stalin did that night

has never been fully explained.

Before her death, Stalin lived normal personal life.

Nadezhda's death

really

changed Stalin nature to the worse.

Svetlana and Vasily are left motherless.

They also have a half-brother, Yakov,

from Stalin's first marriage.

His mother died of typhoid.

From now on, Joseph Stalin will only be wedded to power.

Stalin often arranged it

so people would eat dinner with him at night,

sometimes up to three or four in the morning.

It was well known that he always arranged it that way.

He might invite someone new,

but basically, it was always a small circle

nearly every day.

Everybody was afraid.

Stepan Mikoyan knew Stalin's children

since their childhood together in the Kremlin.

Later, he makes a career for himself

in the Soviet Air Force, together with Vasily.

My father was a member of the government,

a Politburo member for many years,

first deputy chairman of the council of ministers.

And he said, "You never know where you'll be going

"when you leave Stalin, home or to prison."

Life in the Kremlin

is dominated by fear and uncertainty.

In the mid-1930s, Stalin's Great Purge begins,

and not even the members of the inner circle are safe.

Svetlana and Vasily experience all this at close quarters.

Stalin spends most of his time in his dacha outside Moscow.

For weeks on end,

the only contact he has with his daughter is by letter.

The tone of the correspondence is affectionate.

It appears that his daughter has forgotten about her father.

He requests further instructions.

Inquiries about her health.

"You are offending your father.

"I kiss you and wait for your letter. Papa."

Stalin came to visit Gorky, my grandfather,

and brought Svetlana with him.

And he really wanted her to become sort of friends with me.

There were some children here,

whereas where she lived, at the dacha,

she only had her nanny to keep her company.

An old lady.

Well, of course, the bodyguards,

but, in general, she had nobody to talk to.

The granddaughter of the writer Maxim Gorky

and Stalin's daughter become the best of friends.

Marfa Peshkova is probably the only person still alive

who witnessed Joseph Stalin

as an affectionate father in his private surroundings.

When she was little,

yes, he loved her dearly.

He loved her...

You know how it is with a little child.

Loved to hug her, tickle her, make her laugh.

See, he really loved her and called her his darling.

His little sparrow.

For the first time,

the Kremlin princess has a friend who is the same age.

I remember very well when she arrived

in a little white cap.

She went over to the mirror and took her cap off,

releasing a cascade of completely golden, curly hair.

I've never seen such a beautiful color.

That's the first thing that struck me.

I've never seen anything like it.

Svetlana and Marfa

are in the same class at school.

They often spend the weekends together in Stalin's dacha.

Marfa dreads dinners together with Joseph Stalin.

His first question to me was,

"Are there a lot of boys running after you?"

I was, of course, immediately embarrassed,

being still a schoolgirl.

Svetlana said, "Wah, there you go again, Papa."

And suddenly, he gave me such a malicious look.

"How's your old lady making out?"

I couldn't understand what he was talking about.

"What old lady?"

"Who do we have at home that could be called that?"

And Svetlana, whispered to me,

"He's talking about your grandmother."

It is because she has such a close relationship

with Stalin's daughter

that Marfa witnesses the way Svetlana,

as a young girl in Moscow,

discovers the truth about her mother's death.

And suddenly,

she shows me a magazine in English and says,

"Look at this picture."

I'm looking, and there's a woman lying in a coffin.

She says, "It's my mama."

And the article, Svetlana had already studied English,

and so she read the article,

which said that she'd committed suicide,

whereas Svetlana had been told

that she'd died of appendicitis.

Svetlana and her father

never speak about the lie.

Her brother, Vasily, also suffers from this loss.

And on top of that,

he gets little attention from their father.

He was very able, energetic,

not at all stupid, but spoiled.

If he had been in good hands, as they say,

he would have given great mileage,

but he'd had no mother since childhood.

He was taken care of by some Chekist.

But, of course, that was not the same thing.

He was very afraid of his father.

Svetlana even told me that when he called him,

he would just stand there shaking.

That's how scared he was.

The devoted father of the Russian people,

sacrificing himself for them.

This is the picture created by the propaganda

around Joseph Stalin.

The new Moscow, it is all to his credit.

In school, children are taught the superiority of socialism.

I didn't think of Stalin as a family man.

I mean, we knew he was like a god, almost.

In math, we learned the difference,

how many days between Lenin's birthday

and Stalin's birthday and things like that.

The daughter of the American diplomat

George Kennan, attends a normal school in Moscow.

She participates in everyday life in the Soviet Union.

We went to a restaurant and they had dancing

and a Russian army officer came over and asked me to dance.

And then one of the people from our embassy

went up and said, "This is the daughter

"of the American ambassador," and he turned white.

I could see it myself. He was absolutely terrified.

In 1937, the terror of Stalin's purge

reaches a climax throughout the country.

Millions of people are exiled or murdered.

Stalin's cruelty can be turned upon anyone,

even those closest to him.

In the peak of these purges,

my father told that it was very dangerous time

because Stalin just brought him to the Kremlin

and looked his eyes.

Very straight, he told, "You are not Khrushchev."

And my father was really nervous,

and he told Comrade Stalin,

"You can ask all my neighbors in my village of my name."

"I'm Khrushchev."

And Stalin, who looks in his eyes,

trying to fix his reaction of these words,

"Ah, it was Yezhov, the head of secret police, was drunk."

The dictator regards everyone

as a potential spy and traitor.

Even comrades who fought side by side with Stalin.

Polina, wife of his closest associate, Molotov,

is banished to the gulag.

I think he was absolutely ruthless.

Absolutely.

Just imagine it.

They'd bring him a list of the wives of people

who'd already been arrested or shot

and he would write next to their names

that they should be shot as well, without a trial.

From 1941,

the Soviet Union is at war with Nazi Germany.

Not long after the war begins,

Stalin's firstborn son, Yakov, is captured by the Germans.

After Stalingrad,

the Nazis offered to exchange him for Field Marshal Paulus.

Stalin responds,

"I'm not going to exchange a private for a field marshal."

Svetlana's brother commits suicide

in the concentration camp.

Yakov flings himself onto an electrified fence.

He certainly was in a tough position.

He would have returned if he could have.

Maybe his father had treated him badly.

But it was tough for him.

Night after night, there are arrests in Moscow.

Stalin drives Svetlana's uncle on her mother's side

to his death.

Her aunts and cousins are seized by the secret police.

Svetlana could no longer turn a blind eye.

She overheard her father saying on the phone,

"We'll disguise it as an accident."

She once said, "The worst thing about my father was

"that he didn't even spare his own family."

Stalin's oldest grandson, Svetlana's nephew,

is the Russian theater director Alexander Burdonsky.

He was born in 1941, the son of Vasily,

followed two years later by his sister, Nadezhda.

Neither of them will ever experience

their grandfather in a family setting.

We were raised rather strictly.

And it somehow never occurred to me

that Stalin had some sort of relationship to me.

Vasily and Svetlana on a journey to the Crimea.

As they grow older,

they have less and less contact with their father.

My father could not

get through to Stalin directly.

He had to phone.

And once they knew who was on the line,

he had to go through a couple of people

to find out whether it was okay to dial the number

so that his father would pick up.

So I think that with Svetlana and with us,

it was obviously a sense of fear, that's for sure.

Vasily makes a career for himself

in the Air Force.

He rises to the rank of general.

This is one of the rare public appearances

of Stalin's children.

Svetlana seems almost uneasy to be paid so much attention.

Svetlana was not used to that.

Vasily, more so.

At the same time, they were afraid

that if there was some kind of indiscretion,

their father would find out about it,

and then they would really get it.

They were frightened in that sense.

Vasily's excessive alcohol consumption

has long been an open secret.

He owes his career in the air force

to the absolute power of his father.

He was the awful person because he had no brakes.

When I did something wrong, my mother told,

"You mustn't do this,

or you will be like Vasily Stalin."

And I told her, "I don't want to be like Vasily Stalin."

Svetlana wants to study literature,

but Joseph Stalin forces her to study history.

Well, it all started

as soon as she'd grown up,

with her first, you might say, interest in the opposite sex.

Maybe he was jealous.

Or maybe he just didn't like her partners.

Svetlana yearns for a normal life.

A group of friends who have nothing to do

with the intrigues of power.

Her first great love is a Jewish filmmaker

20 years her senior, Aleksei Kapler.

She had gotten to know him

and was, of course, very interested in him.

You can imagine what it was like for her,

being surrounded with no one she could talk to,

learn interesting things from.

And then it just gushed out.

All these interesting stories about everything.

Svetlana is in love.

She goes to see her father in their dacha.

Stalin's reaction shocks Svetlana.

And, of course, he had been informed

that this was not the first time the two of them had met.

But they would just meet, take a walk.

They didn't, you know, go anywhere special.

And to this story, so joyful for her,

he just shouted, "Why couldn't you find a Russian?"

Joseph Stalin has his daughter's lover arrested

and banished to a gulag for 10 years.

Svetlana refuses to be intimidated.

A year later, she is again in love with a Jew.

Grigory Morozov.

Of course, that first marriage

was an expression of defiance, in my view,

because she knew very well what attitude

her father had to Jewish men, to Jewish people.

Svetlana's marriage collapses.

But during that brief period,

she becomes a mother for the first time, at the age of 19.

When she came with her first child,

whom she had also named Joseph, her first son,

Stalin never even came out

and didn't want to see his grandson.

How could she love a father like that?

After their divorce,

Svetlana's husband loses his job,

and her father-in-law is arrested.

Now Joseph Stalin attempts to find a husband for Svetlana

who meets with his approval.

Stepan Mikoyan is one of the candidates on the shortlist.

That was once an issue, yes.

When she'd separated, because of him,

from her first husband, a Jew,

that's when Stalin started looking,

as I later learned, for candidates.

But I was already married.

Although he probably didn't know that.

To get tied up with Stalin would have been dreadful.

Really, really dreadful.

Svetlana's second marriage,

to the son of a Politburo member,

collapses just as quickly.

She is left with a daughter.

Now, Svetlana lives with her son Joseph

and her daughter Yekaterina

in an apartment Stalin has arranged.

The children hardly know their grandfather.

Joseph Stalin dies on 5th March, 1953,

from a stroke.

Svetlana is the only member of the family

to be called to his deathbed.

They never spoke to one another again.

Throughout the country, the funeral is a state occasion.

The Russian people are in mourning for Father Stalin.

At this time, Stalin's oldest grandson

is attending a cadet school.

I was brought there on a plane.

I was frightened by these throngs of people walking by

through whom we drove,

and who were walking to the Hall of Pillars.

Everyone was sobbing out loud.

That's how it was.

Crowds filed past Stalin's coffin.

There was a special entrance for us,

and an enormous queue.

But we didn't stand in the queue,

we used the other entrance.

We went there every day because Svetlana was going

and my wife went with her, so I came too.

I didn't go for the whole time but was there every day.

I believe it was for three days.

And the first time I drove to my father's then

for Sunday lunch, I said to him, "I went there every day."

And he said, "Well, you shouldn't have."

And since that time, I began to think more about Stalin.

Although the relationship

between them was difficult,

Svetlana mourns her father sincerely.

She said,

"I know I wasn't always a good daughter,

"and my father wasn't always a good father,

"but my father did love me, and I loved him."

And I think everything else fades away

at the point of death.

Joseph Stalin is carried to his grave.

In 1953, the world is dominated by the Cold War,

but Svetlana dreams of a life

on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

We're standing on the balcony,

talking about something,

and all of a sudden, we see a group of people going by.

And when they come close,

we could hear them speaking English.

And all of a sudden, Svetlana says to me,

"That's where I would like to live."

Not long after Stalin's death,

his daughter decides to use her mother's maiden name.

From now on, she calls herself Svetlana Alliluyeva.

And when Khrushchev's report

against Stalin came out, you know,

after the 20th Congress, my father gave it to me.

I even thought that he gave it to me on purpose

so I would give it to Svetlana.

Nikita Khrushchev,

the old friend of Svetlana's mother

who will later be her father's successor,

breaks with the legacy of the bloody dictator.

All of us believed that Stalin was a god

and he really was the person who

tried to do the best to the people.

I gave it to her, and she read it,

she read it right here in the apartment.

And then she said,

"You know, guys, the most terrible thing is that it's true."

After Stalin dies, Vasily is demoted

and later sentenced to eight years in prison.

In 1961, he dies,

aged just 41, from the consequences of his alcoholism.

He is buried in a grave alongside his mother.

In the late '50s and early '60s,

Svetlana leads a reclusive life in Moscow with her children.

She secretly writes her memoirs.

The Soviet Union has become a prison for Stalin's daughter.

During a stay in hospital in 1963,

Svetlana meets an Indian man, Brajesh Singh,

and falls in love with him.

She really fights for Singh.

Word got around, "Svetlana wants to marry again."

But now she needs permission in order to marry a foreigner.

Brajesh Singh is seriously ill

with a lung condition.

Svetlana requests an audience with the Russian premier,

Alexei Kosygin.

So then she goes back to the Kremlin

for the first time to see Kosygin, who's sitting in the room

that was her father's when he ruled the country.

But Kosygin makes it clear to her

that she shouldn't marry a sick Indian.

She should marry a healthy Russian instead.

Permission is not granted.

On 31st October 1966, Singh dies in Svetlana's arms.

Svetlana wants to take his ashes to India in person.

Since 1964, Leonid Brezhnev

has been ruling the Soviet Union.

By employing her contacts and her cunning,

Svetlana persuades Brezhnev.

In January 1967, he allows her to make the journey.

Then all the senior officials had to agree

that she should be permitted to go to India

for a week or two.

By now, Svetlana is 40 years old.

For the first time,

she is allowed to leave the Soviet Union.

Not long before her departure,

things were pretty nice.

We had quite a large group at our house,

talking about who had gone where and whatnot.

And all of a sudden,

I'd never had this from Svetlana before, she said,

"And why not leave?"

"Well, yeah. Motherland this, Motherland that."

But she just said,

"Isn't it really a feeling you take away with you?"

Stalin's daughter travels to India.

Her children, almost grown up by now, remain behind.

It is the peak of the Cold War.

In 1967, the Americans are fighting in Vietnam

to halt the spread of communist regimes.

And the Soviet Union is busy rattling sabers.

In India, Svetlana blossoms.

She would very much like to remain with the Singh family,

but the Indian government won't allow this.

After almost two months,

the KGB tries to force her to return.

But Stalin's daughter decides to make her escape.

She said she wanted to defect

and she was Stalin's daughter,

but they weren't sure she really was Stalin's daughter.

That's when the State Department decided

that they had to have somebody who could authenticate her.

And they picked my father.

That very same night,

accompanied by a CIA agent,

Svetlana is flown out of the country.

She is to meet with George Kennan in neutral Switzerland.

He was quite impressed.

First of all, it was definitely Stalin's daughter.

That was not even a question.

The Soviet leadership

is informed in a secret telegram.

At this point, Svetlana's children

also discover that she has fled.

She was booked on a certain flight,

and her son went to meet her.

Only at the airport did he hear, over the radio,

that Stalin's daughter wasn't coming back.

At the time, Joseph is 21 years old

and Yekaterina is 17.

She will never forgive her mother for abandoning her.

I already knew

that she wanted to leave this country,

which she simply hated.

And I said to everyone who was saying, "Oh, oh!"

"You have no idea what her life was like."

"If you had even the slightest idea

"what she went through here, and how hard it was for her

"to bear the name of Stalin here."

The Kremlin

sets its propaganda machine in motion.

It is claimed that Stalin's daughter went insane

and was kidnapped by the CIA.

Worse things are planned.

One obvious possibility was to kill her.

I don't know did they receive the order to kill her,

because they could not kill her without Brezhnev approval.

On 12th April, 1967,

Svetlana lands in New York.

I was there at the airport.

My sister Joan and I were up in a...

We were up high and looking down,

and we could see snipers on the roof.

We'd never seen snipers on the roof.

You know, there was tremendous excitement when she defected.

A woman once known

as the little princess of the Kremlin,

arrives in America from Switzerland.

Svetlana, the 42-year-old daughter

of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin,

sought asylum here, where one can feel.

Even before her arrival,

Svetlana had sold her memoirs

for a record sum of $3 million.

Communist dogma has lost its significance.

The daughter of the Red Czar

has become a propaganda tool for Western capitalism.

If you defected, it was clear that you will become

manipulated by CIA,

and it became part of the big political game.

At first, Svetlana is hidden on a farm

belonging to George Kennan.

His daughter Grace looks after her there.

He made me feel like we had Trotsky in there.

That she could be, any time, kidnapped or assassinated.

The State Department offered her security

and she turned it down.

I remember her telling me about it. She was twirling around.

She was very physically exuberant.

She was kind of twirling and saying, "I'm free! I'm free!"

And I was thinking,

"Yeah, you're free and I'm worried."

Because I was worried.

Svetlana receives the international press

in a luxury New York hotel

and talks about her future in the USA.

Well, I think that before the marriage, it should be love.

So if I will love this country

and this country will love me,

then the marriage will be settled, but I cannot say now.

The public is surprised by her good English.

The sale of rights to her book makes Svetlana rich.

Stalin's daughter is treated as a media star,

proclaiming the joys of freedom.

I am dreaming about the time when

two countries, two great countries,

Russia and United States, could become really friendly

and people could have free contact

and travel here and there.

Now, Svetlana is invited everywhere.

One of these invitations takes her to Taliesin.

This artists' colony set in the hilly Wisconsin countryside

reminds her of Georgia, her father's homeland.

It is here that she will find new love.

Only a few weeks after her arrival,

she marries Wesley Peters, the closest assistant

of the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Svetlana is already 44 years old

when their daughter Olga is born.

It looks as though her happiness is perfect.

But the reporters who come to talk to her

only ever want to talk about one thing.

Joseph Stalin.

It's ironic that

the granddaughter of Joseph Stalin

is born in capitalistic United States.

Well, I don't know.

First of all, I don't see any irony

about myself living in this country.

I feel very much at home here.

Her happiness with her new husband

is once again short-lived.

Svetlana feels restricted

by the strict regulations in the artists' commune,

though this is the framework of Wesley Peters' life.

She buys a nearby ranch for her husband's son,

but not even this step can rescue her marriage.

She almost always made poor decisions.

I mean, lots of people told her not to give her money away,

not to invest in, as we were told,

it was in the ranch of her husband's son.

She always did exactly what she wanted to do.

And that was a little bit, maybe,

the princess element I'm referring to.

Svetlana moves to Princeton.

She lived there before this marriage,

but her dream of teaching literature at the university

comes to nothing.

She still has money, though.

A second book about her first year in the USA

is also a financial success.

Svetlana ended up

living alone with her little daughter Olga.

The American girl,

who was to grow up not speaking a word of Russian.

She was to become as American as apple pie.

Back in Moscow,

Svetlana has arranged to be baptized.

Now, in Princeton,

she finds friends among the Anglican community.

She hardly ever appears in public these days.

She feels as though she's being watched,

followed everywhere.

She was very much afraid of other people.

In fact, she would come to our house,

but she would ask us please to not have other people.

She turned down parties

to the president of the United States twice.

She thought she was being manipulated by the CIA, often.

Stalin's daughter

finds it impossible to be at peace.

Svetlana moves around the world restlessly.

Since her escape from the Soviet Union,

she has had no contact with her children.

I was prepared not to see them for a long time.

I was not prepared for the idea that

they will not be permitted even to write to me.

Their well-being depends on the fact

that they are cut off from me.

Homeless and lonely,

Svetlana attempts to find a home for herself

with her daughter.

When she goes to see a Russian film in the cinema

with one of her friends, Svetlana breaks down.

We went together to see "Oblomov."

And a half-hour after everybody else had left the theater,

she was still sobbing uncontrollably.

She said this was her childhood.

This was the earth she remembered.

It brought everything in.

The mother, the love of a mother.

It just took her back to, really, Mother Russia.

New headlines in 1984.

Svetlana returns to Moscow with her American daughter, Olga.

Did her son ask her to come back

on the urging of the KGB and the leaders of the country?

This is what Svetlana believes later.

She soon feels she is being used by the government

for Soviet propaganda.

She once said a very memorable phrase.

"I arrived in Moscow with such nostalgia.

"I arrived in Moscow. I walked the streets of Moscow."

"And I have a feeling that everywhere are crosses,

"crosses, crosses, like in a cemetery."

She was doomed to wander, you see? She was simply doomed.

Because it was still all a part of her.

It was impossible to escape from her inner world.

Even the Soviet leadership

gradually leaves her alone.

After only a year, she is permitted

to travel back to the West without any difficulty.

I remember the last time I saw her.

I was driving on the stone bridge

in the right lane to turn off towards home

and she was walking along the sidewalk.

She saw me, waved, smiled,

and that was the last time I saw her.

Feeling restless, always running,

she lives in England for some time

and then returns to the USA.

Svetlana changes homes more than 40 times.

Each time, the residences are smaller

and there is less money.

Martha Schad meets her at the final stage

of her life's voyage.

We agreed that I would come to see her

in her senior citizens' home.

And when I got there,

Svetlana was standing outside, waiting for me.

The home in Wisconsin accepts the needy.

Once again,

the highs and lows of Svetlana's life are to be depicted.

And what she told me, again and again, was,

"Write about me. Not about my father."

But how is it possible to write about Svetlana

without talking about Stalin?

Land of her father. I came to the room.

Yeah. Dah, dah! "Father!"

All righty. Just stop all this!

I stop it.

I stop it right away. I'm sorry.

I don't want to be-

Okay. I stop it.

I don't want quotations from-

All righty. Russian papers.

All righty.

Okay.

So I turned off the camera

and she settled down.

Then she started speaking.

And what were her first words?

"My father."

"My father."

Svetlana Alliluyeva,

the princess from the Kremlin,

dies in utter poverty in November 2011.

She talked about when she was living in the poor houses

with other people, sharing bathrooms and kitchens.

She was happy about that.

She said, "This was right.

"I started at the top. I should end at the bottom.

"That's the great balance."

Stalin did love his daughter, Svetlana.

But there was no escape for her from the shadow of his life.