Children of Monsters. Jay Nordlinger

Think of Yevgeny, Gulia’s half-brother, or alleged half-brother: He is as great a Stalin defender as there is.

      Consider, too, Vladimir Alliluyev, a cousin of Svetlana’s. Stalin had his father killed. He sent his mother to the Gulag. In the 1990s, Alliluyev wrote a book advocating the return of Stalinism. In a letter to a Russian literary magazine, Svetlana wrote that the book had aroused in her “feelings of revulsion.” It was “a political tract whitewashing 70 years of Soviet history.”

      Relatives who survived the Gulag could not bring themselves to blame Stalin for what happened to them—or to their loved ones who were killed. The guilty party must have been Beria or some other miscreant beyond the great man’s control. “Josef Vissarionovich,” as they called him, lovingly, could do no wrong.

      This was the sort of effect that Stalin had on people, incomprehensible as it may be. But his lone daughter broke through the mesmerism, or “spell,” as she labeled it. Her conscience rose in rebellion against her father and his state. This makes her exceedingly rare among sons and daughters of dictators.