Twenty Letters to a Friend (Signed copy)

A Christmas card signed by Svetlana Alliluyeva, with the first UK edition, and a Russian language limited edition

Author

Publisher

Printing Details

1. First UK edition, hardback in dustwrapper. 21.5 x14cm, 256pp. 2. Russian limited edition paperback, also printed by Hutchinson, 1967, in order to establish copyright. No limitation stated but believed to be a small print run.

Loosely inserted in the Russia edition is a signed Christmas card from Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter. There is a printed greeting in five languages, plus Svetlana has written "With all good wishes for the Christmas and for the coming New Year, Svetlana Alliluyeva"

Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, his second wife. In 1967, she fled the Soviet Union for India, where she approached the U.S. Embassy for asylum. Once there, she showed her CIA handler something remarkable: a personal memoir about growing up inside the Kremlin that she'd written in 1963. The Indian Ambassador to the USSR, whom she'd befriended, had smuggled the manuscript out of the Soviet Union the previous year and returned it to her as soon as she arrived in India.

Structured as a series of letters to a "friend", Svetlana refused to identify him, but thought to be her close friend, Fyodor Volkenstein and in this astounding memoir she exposes the dark human heart of the Kremlin. After opening with Stalin's death, Svetlana returns to her childhood. Each letter adds a new strand to her remarkable story; some are wistful, romanticized recollections of her early years and her family, while others are desperate exorcisms of the tragedies that plagued her, such as her mother's suicide and her father's increasing cruelty. It is also in some ways a love letter to Russia, with its ancient heritage and spectacularly varied geography.

Condition

The Christmas card is in good condition and probably dates to about the time of the books. The UK edition has a tatty dustwrapper but remains in readable condition. The Russian limited edition is sunned and tanned to the cover's edges and spine, with a few spots of foxing to the page edges but also remains readable.