The Red Daughter

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Her face was staring up at me from the front page of The New York Times. On the right edge of the grainy black-and-white photograph taken at Kennedy Airport that day forty-four years earlier, I could just make out the crescent-shaped smudge that had been the tip of my elbow, before I’d been digitally amputated from the frame. For years a copy of the original picture, with me still included, had hung on the wall of my law office, signed “To Peter with love.” Clients would frequently remark on it, such was her fame in those days.

“She’s really the daughter of Joseph Stalin?”

“Yep, she really is.”

“Jesus. Can you imagine what that must’ve been like?”

No, actually. The Great Famine, the Great Purge, the Great Terror… Stalin guilty of the murder—it’s clear now, if it wasn’t fully so at the time—of more than twenty million of his people through mass political executions, Gulag labor camps, enforced starvation, deportations, and other means. Of course, through much of this his daughter, Svetlana, had been just a girl—Daddy’s Little Housekeeper, as the dictator used to call her with tender affection. Many of her own family members had disappeared with the others.

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