“Being born Svetlana Stalin”, and growing up in the shadow of a dictator father

Published on November 20, 2024 at 9:37 p.m. / Modified on November 21, 2024 at 02:19.

2 mins. reading

Journalist and director, Gabriel Tejedor is the author of three documentaries filmed in immersion between Russia and the territories of the former USSR. In Combine (2020), he was interested in the daily life of a working family in the mining and industrial town of Magnitogorsk. Attracted by common people, eager to observe “the way in which communist ideology infuses into society”, he said, he had never been interested in the figure of Svetlana Allilouïeva (1926-2011), born Stalin , before coming across a book recounting his fate. And to discover that in 1967 she had requested political asylum at the American embassy in New Delhi, then spent six weeks in Switzerland, hidden in a convent, before finally being able to reach the United States, where she would live in exile until his death in total destitution.

“It was while trying to imagine the scene where she asks for asylum at the American embassy that I had the idea for a film. It seemed so surreal that I wanted to see it,” says Gabriel Tejedor. So here is this moment at the heart of Born Svetlana Stalintold in a narration worthy of a spy film through testimonies, archive images and animation. “I am the daughter of Joseph Stalin,” Svetlana simply declared to the consul called to receive her. “THE Stalin?” he will answer. To prove to him that her father was indeed this Stalin, she handed him a manuscript in which she recounted what it meant to have grown up in the menacing shadow of a father who would become a dictator guilty of abominable abuses, and who will not hesitate to have his first lover deported.

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