"'Stalin's Daughter' is a poignant look at the..." Topic

… struggles of a dictator's offspring.

""Her father petted and loved her…. How could he already be at the same time one of the world's bloodiest dictators?" asks Rosemary Sullivan in her ever-engaging biography, Stalin's Daughter. And how – this is Sullivan's ultimate challenge – can we sympathize with anyone so closely related to the dictator? From the late 1920s until his death in 1953, Papa Stalin oversaw the ruthless Soviet system imposed on Russia and its neighbors. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens died as a result of famine, war, imprisonment, or execution during his tenure.

But what if he were your father? Svetlana Alliluyeva (nee Stalina) wrestled with this fate throughout her long life (1926-2011). At first she was simply a little girl, raised with the Soviet elite in Moscow, almost as unconscious of her privilege as had been the aristocrats her father's government had recently driven out or murdered. When her mother, Nadya Alliluyeva, killed herself when Svetlana was 6 years old, the girl didn't know it was suicide until 10 years later. Eventually Svetlana knew that "The life of a man depended entirely on a word from my father," and that he could be brutal even to her. At 16, when she announced she was marrying a Jewish writer, her father had him sent to the Gulag.

A dedicated student who never disdained household chores, Alliluyeva shunned special treatment. At the command of her father, she studied the history of the United States and after university became a translator of foreign classics. As she became aware of the injustices committed under Stalin's direction, she deplored them: "[My father] knew what he was doing. He was neither insane nor misled. With cold calculation he had cemented his own power, afraid of losing it more than of anything else in the world."…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Hmmm.

I had always took exception to the oft-told adage, "power corrupts," and have always held the belief that power is a tool like any other – it can be used for good or evil, depending on the individual.

I have always believed it is the character flaw of, "fearing to lose power," that draws the corruption.

Seems Stalin did have that fear, from start to finish.

My first job out of college was as a computer programmer at a psychiatric hospital in the mid 80's. There was an old woman patient that would yell "there's Stalin's son!" Every time she saw me!