In the spring of 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter and surviving child of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, defected to the United States, leaving behind two children. On the final leg of her journey west, from Switzerland to New York, a lawyer named Alan U. Schwartz accompanied her. Schwartz’s son, the novelist and screenwriter John Burnham Schwartz, has written a fictional account of Alliluyeva’s life, including her childhood in Soviet Russia, her escape and her peripatetic existence after her stateside arrival. If these sound like the ingredients for a Cold War thriller in the vein of John le Carré, think again. “The Red Daughter” is a meditative novel about regret, trauma and the unenviable fate of history’s castoffs.
