February 28, 2023 • 38 mins
As the daughter of Josef Stalin, it's safe to say Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva was never destined for a normal life. Still, no one could have predicted the bizarre globe-trotting adventures she would take as she escaped the Soviet Union and became the world's most famous defector. In today's episode, the guys sit down with award-winning playwright and screenwriter Dan Kitrosser to learn more about his newest project, a deep dive into the story of Svetlana -- much of which remained untold until today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's give it up for the one
and only super producer, mister Max Williams. Yes, they called
me ben Uh George Noel. Still still we try to
be consistent with our our our names. I guess we've
(00:47):
got that going for us. Personalities different story, but yeah,
names remained the same they are. Zeppelin might say they didn't,
that was the song. They remained the same for them.
But you get the out there, and today we are
bringing a very special story to the world. This is
something that one of our colleagues, our pal Maya, had
(01:09):
introduced us to a while back. There's a brand new
podcast out in the world of iHeart. If you love
Ridiculous History, you're gonna love this. And we decided instead
of just us talking about it, we would talk to
the source, Noel, the person who made the whole thing happen.
(01:30):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians join us in welcoming Dan kit Roster.
Oh wow, what an entrance. Thank you so much, what
an introduction. I'm so I'm very happy to be here.
I have to add too, you didn't do this alone.
(01:50):
You have some help from our former superproducer, Casey Pegram.
That's right, Casey brings it every time. I am merely
the announcer, but Casey is the whole football team getting
the podcast to the end zone. And thus that's a
great sports metaphor. I totally understand what you mean. Thank you,
(02:12):
thank you, thank you. More sports metaphors to come from
this homosexual throughout the podcast. Look, I learn all my
sports metaphors from listening to podcasts on the Ringer Network
where they talk about movies but can't help themselves but
make everything relating back to sports. So that's how I learned.
The lingo is from listening to the watch. Oh that's great,
(02:33):
And I am going to recuse myself from the sports
conversations because our pal Max has gotten me weirdly into
curling and that's the only thing I know about now. Yeah,
it's don't worry about We've got a two part episode
on it. Everything you want to know. I want to
know everything about curling I could get into. I like
being the other guy. I really want to be the
(02:54):
other guy. I like sports where there's somebody is definitely
the athlete and then there's like another guy you know,
and that I feel like that's me and I appreciate
that relationship. Now, now it's it's interesting that you're talking
about team sports and there's a cool analog there with
your latest projects, feed Lana's fed Lana. But what some
(03:16):
people might not know is that before you ever got
into podcasting, you were you were and are an award
winning playwright as well as screenwriter. Could you tell us
maybe a little bit about whose fed Lana is and
how you encountered this story and what led you to
explore this in multiple formats? Well, um, I would be
(03:40):
happy to um so because otherwise, okay, otherwise I just
you know, would I don't know, talk about my dog.
So stet Lana Alieva was the first and only daughter
of Joseph Stalin, who your listeners might know as Joseph
Stalin Um and the guy who was Stalin remember, the
(04:05):
Secretary General of the Soviet Union. So uh. Stet Lana
was born in the twenties, it's the nineteen twenty six
or nineteen twenty four, forgive me, and she was the
pride and joy of Joseph Stalin Um. And she also
had a mother, as you know, it tends to happen,
(04:25):
and her mother was Nadia Nadeshda Allelujeva and she committed
suicide when stet Lana was but six years old. Stealana
didn't know this. She was told at the time that
it was a pendicitis and she would find out ten
years later, and that would sort of start at the
beginning of sort of distancing from her dad, but she
(04:47):
would still pinball back and forth. And it wasn't until
you're saying Joseph Stalin wasn't entirely honest, So you know,
he was known to being kind of an ass but
to everybody, and in fact, you know, stet Lana wrestled
with that in her writing. And that's one of the
things that's so interesting about her as as a as
(05:09):
a person in history is that she knew the ills
and the terrors, and she also had this father figure
who she did love, and she wrestled with that and
she was very honest about that. That led her defection
when she finally left the USSR in nineteen sixty seven. Now,
the fun, weird, crazy dare I say, bizarre story about
(05:31):
stet Lana that got me really interested is. You know,
she had come to the United States. It sort of
right in the midst of the Cold War, and she
was an instant celebrity. She had a one point five
million dollar book deal. Her name was in all the papers,
and then she started receiving ovations, letters, telegrams, even gifts.
(05:53):
Very strange, very mysterious woman all the way from a
magical place called scott Still, Arizona. This woman really wanted
Speltlana to come and visit. And her name was Olgavana
Lasovich Hinsenburg Lloyd Wright, and she was the widow of
(06:15):
the deceased famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. And she really
wanted spel Lana to come and visit their desert compound.
And this is where Frank Lloyd Wright's disciples as architects
still lived in communion, making art and having a blast.
It's a little culty. Well this, I mean, you could
say one could say that, and one could get in
(06:36):
trouble saying that. I think that's like, that's a big word,
and I've got certainly got in trouble for saying it
as well. But pretend you didn't know that word. Pretend
you it come without judgment, and you show up, you're
in the You've you've fled Soviet Russia, and you are
now in the middle of the desert, in the middle
(06:58):
of Arizona. And there is a woman named Olga Vanna
who believes then you are the reincarnation of her dead daughter,
because her dead daughter's name was also spet Lana and
old and spet Lana's grandmother's name was Olga, and Olga
Vanna actually is Olga Ivanova. And so Frank Lloyd Wright's
(07:18):
widow is believes that Joseph Stalin's daughter is the reincarnation
of her dead daughter, and then lures her into her
architecture compound and then marries her off to her dead
daughter's ex husband named William Wesley Peters, and so she
then becomes spet Lana Peters. Not that spet Lana Peter
is not the first one, the second one. So it
(07:39):
gets very it gets it gets very confusing. This whole
thing is just an exercise and confusion, and that confusion
is what I've spen like close to a decade immersed in.
So that's sort of that's that's that's the overarching story,
and it must have been this I imagine that led
(08:00):
that led you to recognize set Lana as your greatest
muse is that you read about this and you were like,
I get it. That's everybody's been in that situation. Well, well,
I think it's kind of the opposite, is like I
have I don't get it. I don't get why you
would like flee Soviet Russia only find yourself basically giving
(08:23):
up your identity subsumed inside of, you know, a community
where everybody is living and working together. I mean, you
left socialism to you know, become a success in capitalism,
and now you know her money was drained by it,
so now you're giving it all a way to be
part of this other thing. So I was just mystified
by spet Lana. And I think like as a writer,
(08:45):
you know, you go you walk towards characters and stories
where you just have like the biggest questions, you know,
because if you know the answer, it's kind of like, oh,
I know why someone would do that, Like I know
why someone wading a sandwich, you know, like they're hungry
and so there's no story there. Well, actually getting a
sandwich can be kind of sandwich is pretty good. Let's
(09:07):
stay on that. Sandwich guy for a second. No, but
do you think maybe you ask why, um, going from
the socialist country to a commune, which isn't communism exactly,
but there is a one for all kind of mentality.
Do you think there that was a comfortable thing for Svelana.
It wasn't necessarily comfortable, but she did. And she writes
(09:30):
about this um in an unpublished book that we were
able to find. She writes about how it wasn't necessarily comfortable,
but she recognized it and that was sort of this
that recognition was something I'm sure actually you know, when
she writes about it, it's it's in retrospect, so a
(09:52):
lot of crazy stuff happened, and so she, uh, that
chapter of her life was not one that she looked
on fondly, although there are elements, there are amazing things
that happened, But at any rate, she's critical of tally Esen,
which is the name of the frankly right fellowship world
tally Esen, which literally means shining brow for all of
(10:13):
your Welsh listeners, uh you know, hashtag Welsh listeners, hashtag Welsh.
So you know, um, I think it was probably like
maybe not comfortable, but like if you're in I don't know,
if you've ever dated someone who sucks and then you
go ahead and like date the same kind of person again,
(10:36):
and you're like, I've learned nothing like That was probably
her experience, Like she knew how to be inside of
a subservient universe and she was probably kind of tired
of it. Now we also know, and this is I
(10:57):
hope this isn't too big of a spoiler, but we
also just even from the first episode, from the jump,
as they say that Svetlana is being pursued by a
very powerful intelligence agency, but some what we would recognize
as the KGB. Obviously we referred to that in English.
(11:19):
Do you feel that there was um a serious threat
to her from the KGB? Were they just monitoring her
and if if whether or not that was a real threat.
Did she perhaps feel some sort of sense of protection
by entering this this commune out there in Arizona. Yeah,
(11:39):
I mean, you know, so when she first arrived, So
aside from just getting out of Russia, which is its
own insane story, um, which is an episode one and
it's three continents and it's it's insane. We've got to
hear it though, now that now that you brought it
out there, we got to hear just just like a
just like some of the high level, the high level.
(12:01):
Oh my god. So she has three husbands in Russia
and then she divorces them all, and then she falls
in love with an Indian communist by the name of
Brajesh Singh, and she is not allowed to marry him
for all sorts of fabulous racist reasons. This is in
a period of in Russian history called the Thaw, and
(12:24):
there's anyway Krushchev doesn't let her marry, but she does
marry him spiritually. She feels as though she's married to him,
and I there's some questions whether they actually got married
in a church or not, but at any rate, she
considers him her husband. And and then he dies, and
where the Soviet government was not gonna let her marry him,
(12:48):
they do let her go to his Indian village called
Kalankar Khala lan Kankar at the floor of the Ganches
River in India. This will be the first time that
Stetlan has ever left Soviets oil. So she has been
pushed around by the Soviets a lot in her life.
She has two kids, but she's okay. She's going on
(13:08):
a trip to India, and that's all she thinks about.
She lands in India and she thinks she's going straight
to this village, straight to meet Singh's family, but instead
she's hold up in a hotel room with no telephone
for two weeks. She's pushed around. She really is like,
she's up to here, you know what I mean, Like
I mean, and listeners, I am gesturing to my neck,
(13:31):
so you know, I mean, you don't want to get
a Soviet up to hear. So she finally makes it
to the Gangie sprinkles her lover's ashes, and she is
feeling so at peace in India. She wants to stay there,
but they, the Soviets, want to get her back. She
is still Stalin's daughter, She still is a totem, she
still means something, and so she kind of now just
(13:53):
wants to, you know, get out of there, and so
she toys around with various places to go. Finally lands
on America. It happens to be like a day or
two before she's supposed to leave. She sneaks out of
her hotel room. She hails a cab and she goes
fright up to the US embassy and she says, my
name is Steblana Aliyev, I'm Joseph Stalin's daughter, and I
want to defect to the United States of America. What
(14:16):
ends up happening from that moment is batch or feastings.
I don't know what you're saying, because she ends up
being flown the US doesn't water because they're in the
middle of an arms deal with Russia, so she ends
up being flown to Rome. But then the Romans don't
want her, so she's never actually allowed to touch Roman soil.
(14:36):
So she sits in like this weird apartment for a while,
and then they fly her off to Switzerland. But while
she's the paparazzi is all over her. She's stuck in Switzerland,
and then she finally makes it all the way to
the US un day, where she arrives this instant celebrity,
all the while smuggling this memoir of life growing up
(14:58):
under Stalin called Twenty Letters to a Friend, which winds
up being the way that she gets into the US
under a work visa. It's an even nuttier story than that,
So I A'm gonna say, like, listen, listen to the
pod dude. But you know that is like the that's
I mean, every chapter spell on his life has these
like highs and lows that are just mesmerizing. I mean,
(15:20):
she accomplished a lot in her life. Well, I mean,
you know, you mentioned how doting her father was on her,
and there's pictures you can find online of him like
cradling her when she was, you know, in her like
early teens or maybe you know, a little younger than that.
But this obviously must have been a huge betrayal or
perceived as that from Stalin. Can you talk a little
(15:42):
bit about how he reacted and you know what this
was like and how it kind of up the stakes? Yeah,
I mean, well he was very dead at the time,
but I'm sure that he was pissed, but he's not
gonna let the scheduling of mortality getting no timeline. Like, yeah,
it is okay, of course that was a stupid not
(16:03):
a stupid question, not a stupid question at all. Um. Yeah,
because also, like, while Stalin may have been dead, Stalinism
certainly did not die. Um. And so you know, Stalin
dies in nineteen fifty three, as famously depicted in the
Death of Stalin UM and Uh, it's it's nineteen sixty seven.
(16:24):
Once that wanna makes her way over to the United States,
I might be getting if it's sixty seven and sixty
eight when she it's either sixty seven sixty eight or
sixty sixty sixty seven. Um, better than me. I didn't
even know Stalin was dead. Well well, to your defense,
thole that like that was a closely guarded secret as
we also Yes Stalin, yes, okay, we got the reference
(16:47):
in we were talking about that off air. They got me,
They tricked me. That's I blame the Soviets. But but
the original question was you know, the kg the threat
of the KGB and um. You know, so the KGB
was definitely involved in all aspects of stet Lana's life,
who she could marry, where she could go, who she
could be friends with, um, and certainly after she left.
(17:10):
You know, we don't talk about this much in the podcast.
Excuse me, I just burped on a podcast first time
for everything Ring the Bell SI nickname ding Um. But
you know, one of the unintended consequences of stet Lana
leaving was that she had a lot of very close
friends and stet Lana also partied down with all of
(17:33):
the dissidents. She was interested in people of all walks
of life. She was interested in artists and writers and
academics and thinkers. And so when she left, the people
who who are really targeted were were her close friends
who also didn't have a lot of capital themselves to
sort of stay out of the limelight. So there's this
(17:53):
fascinating I mean, this is a ridiculous history. I'm sure
that I offer because I would love to know more
about her. There is half black, half Jewish tennis champion
ethno musicologist named Lily Golden who love me. Stop by
Lily real quick, because one thing I love about the
(18:15):
natural course of this story is that at points it
does sound like mad lib improv, you know, like we're
pulling from a hat. So could you give us the
rundown of this person again? Their descriptors, So this is
set Lana's who. I believe Set Lana's best friend is
who she refers to as Bertha in her book, which
(18:36):
is a great chosen name. But her name was Lily Golden,
and Lily was Her parents were both American, they were socialists.
Her her father was black, her mother was Jewish. I
guess during like uh, you know, the at some point,
like during a Red scare in the thirties, they ran
(18:58):
off to Russia. Had Lily she became like a Soviet
tennis champ and then became like an ethno musicologist and
what and then became Joseph Stalin's daughter's best friend. And
she's just one of you know you look, uh. Spetlana
was also like dear dear friends with Pulstoy's grandson um
(19:19):
and all sorts of really interesting people that intersected with
history and a lot of fascinating ways. And so these
were the people who the KGB targeted, like Lily Golden
like wasn't able to get on a flight after spet
Lana defected, and certainly speed Lana's children. She left a
twenty year old son and a sixteen year old daughter, um,
and she didn't give them any warning. They found out
(19:43):
like uh from the KGB that the that their mother
had defected. So they were also targeted and watched, and
that was a horrible unintended consequence um that you know,
for spet Lana to flee, you know, she did leave
people sort of vulnerable. And then you know there's stories
(20:05):
that we hear it, and they don't feature so heavily
in our podcast, and not because they weren't true, but
they're sort of hard to verify. There was shortly after
she had come to the United States. She was staying
at the house of George Kennon, who was an ambassador
(20:25):
to Russia during Stalin's era, and Kennon was considered the
architect of the Cold War. He is a major figure
in history, and he kind of became spelt Lana's godfather
when she arrived in America. And so he is no
longer alive. He's just as dead as Stalin is, but
his daughters are very much alive. Joan and Grace, and
(20:46):
I got to have a couple of zooms with Joan
and Grace who each had wild stories and they're like
they both had very different relationships with Spetlana. Joan was
like buddy buddy, Grace had this like, uh, Stetlana sort
of treated her a little bit like the maid m
(21:06):
So it's funny to hear like the different experiences. But
both Grace and Jone told me that while Stetlana was
staying with them, on one day in particular, you know
this farm in the middle of central Pennsylvania. All of
a sudden, these men in black coats just started like
coming to the door and knocking on it, and they
asked if stet Lana was there, and and then quickly
(21:28):
like fled back. So Stelana was always sort of haunted
by the prospect of KGB agents, And certainly later in
the podcast, we're going to get to a period of
time where stet Lana gets wrapped up in a KGB plot,
which is on internet and in history and certainly featured
in Rosemary Sullivan's amazing book Stalin's Daughter, which everyone should read.
(21:51):
But I'm not going to spoil it for our podcast.
You'll have to tune in. Not yet. You have to
go on the ride with this. Also also peek behind
the curtain. Okay, I know we gotta get to the the character,
but peak behind the scenes then, folks, we also hear
ridiculous history. We don't know how all the story shakes out.
(22:14):
We are going to be riding along with you, but
I like, I like where you're going with that, Noel,
because we talked about it a little off air. There's
a thing. There's a part where you describe dan Um.
You describe speed Lana as like the most famous defector
at least as far as as the Western world is concerned,
which makes sense, you know, it's it's the daughter of
(22:37):
a ruler basically. Uh, but what what was the typical
I don't know what's the best way to phrase this, Noel.
What do we need to know about the island? Maybe
just a little scene setting for the time, um as
to what it would have meant um to be a defector,
h and why maybe someone less famous than speed Lana
would have defected, And it's what relations were like and
(22:59):
kind of this historical period we're talking about. Yeah, I
mean I want to say that, like when it comes
to I just want to preface my own ignorance, which
I think is important in life. I know a bit,
but that's our whole thing on this show. So I
want to preface my own ignorance and also my own subjectivity. Right.
So I'm coming to this as like an American who
(23:21):
was like schooled in the fact that like America is good,
Russia is bad. America win and Russia is lose, you know.
But to be fair, there were a lot of terrible
things about the Stalinist regime and essentially coming out of
life from the Czars. So this is going back a
(23:43):
little bit in nineteen seventeen or nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen,
when the Bolsheviks the Revolutionaries took power and knocked out
the Czars, people's lives were really really terrible. Nicholas A
consolidated power in a way that like gave such little
freedom to the average Russian. UM. And they were, I
(24:04):
mean the peasant they were starving, UM, they were uneducated,
even though they were they were very literate, but there
there was not schooling and it was it was a
very horrible place to grow up. UM. And so the
Bolsheviks really wanted to share the wealth. And I have
to say, like, as like, you know, as a lefty, progressive,
socialistic kind of kind of person, I'm like, that's awesome.
(24:27):
But what ended up happening is um, in order to
lead you know, more than a hundred countries with more
than a hundred languages and uh and uh consolidate like
the ussr UM, they really everyone had to. They realized
the way to do it is through you know, fascism,
were not fascism really but like totalitarianism and falling behind
(24:50):
one big face and that one big face with Stalin
and um that was built by Stalin and also by
as Politburo. So there's all these people who our feature
and hilariously and Death of Stalin who are also like
the reason that we know Joseph Stalin and that we
think communism is really bad because there was the currency
(25:11):
was betrayal. If you were a dissident, if you spoke
out against the government, you were sent to the gulags,
you were killed, your family was watched, they were killed.
And not to mention the fact that they're just also
it was there were a lot of people. There was
a ship ton of people, and so in order to
make sure that there was like a potato for everybody,
(25:33):
Stalin made sure there was a potato for sometimes nobody.
So there were just famines everywhere in order to make
sure that Moscow was able to lead this communism for
the first time. So it was nineteen eighty four. It
was neighbors spying on neighbors. Information was this currency that
(25:54):
you could use against people, and so even folks who
who made it inside of the government were subjected to this.
And so you see it in Death of Stalin, but
you also see it inside of Stalin's own family, so
stet Lana's uncles and aunts are subject to being locked
up in the gulagh or even murdered. Um. Stet Lana's brother,
(26:18):
her older brother who she loved the most, named Yakov,
enlisted in the Russian Army during World War Two. He
was captured by a Pow camp when Stalana was sixteen
in nineteen forty two, and Stalin was given the option
to trade for him, and Salm was like, no, definitely not.
I don't want anyone thinking that I treat my family
any differently. And Yakov was murdered in the Pow camp,
(26:42):
you know, and you know that's something. Maybe there's some
honor there, maybe maybe there's not, but you just get
the sense that you know, Stalin was there was paranoia,
there was vindictiveness, and the country was sort of ruled
out of for you know, for better or for worse.
(27:03):
It was ruled out of his image and his likeness
to the point where when he dies, there's like, uh,
there's I forget how many people want to be killed.
But like there was a a march, you know, in
honor of Stalin Um, but there's there was some traffic
jam and like thousands of people were killed in this
(27:25):
traffic jam, and it wasn't even a protest against him.
It was just like these people are everywhere, to kill them, um.
And so it's something really hard to imagine. But what's
fascinating about also such a suppressive government is that nothing
breeds art like suppression. And there are artists who are
(27:49):
making work, who are smuggling stories out, um, not on
mass I'm not saying that, like, I'm not saying that
it's like, oh, there's all this great Soviet era descendent
art like there isn't but there. But people were writing things,
as they said, for the drawer. So Stelana was one
of them. She wrote this memoir about growing up under
(28:12):
Stalin's rule and coming to terms with the fact that
her horrible was that her horrible huh yeah, that her
horrible was you know, a father um. And that to
me is also really interesting. You know that, like there's
a resilience amongst the Russian people for you know, centuries
of creating creating art in these extreme circumstances, and that
(28:35):
is that is also part of the story. It's interesting too,
just that whole concept, and Casey Pegram would be happy
with this topic. Um. You know, filmmakers, for example, like Tarkovsky,
you know, we're getting financing from the government to make
(28:57):
these films that were supposedly insert us of the state,
you know, in terms of the image that they were projecting,
but secretly there were these hidden messages you know in
films like Stalker or even the Silaris that that were
kind of patently anti uh Russia. Uh. And they eventually
kind of caught on and then he had to get
(29:18):
out of dodge as well. Yeah, I mean, well, and
that's also you know, and and that's what Tartakowsky has
when is he the fifties, sixties, like like through the seventies,
I mean through yeah, you know, yeah, into the eighties. Sorry,
you even think of like Nilosh Foreman, who was you
know in uh he was? Who is check? I think?
Or I forget, But like even our modern filmmakers were
(29:40):
still running away from it and like inserting their messages inside.
And yeah, I mean there's a kind of bravery that
I you know that as an American artist, um, in
the twenty first century, you know that I take in
my in my place of freedom, there's there is pushback
and there are people who don't like your work. But
(30:02):
I haven't experienced that that kind of suppression coming at
me and finding those ways to still get my voice
and my story out there. And so you know, I
looked at those writers and those artists with real admiration. Absolutely,
I mean, how well said, because that's something where, you know,
it always strikes me. One of my old professors a
(30:23):
long time ago, I don't always say how long ago
told me that told me that it. How did they
put it? They said? You know, I've always found it
hilarious that Russian authors are better writers in English than
most English authors. And that's and that's because many times
(30:45):
they had a life on the line situation like one
could die or be a race for the sin of
creative expression? Does that Russian pros also like translate really
well into English in a sort of unusual or uncann
art form. Man, for sure, I mean all translation is
and fellow ridiculous historians, I think, uh, null you and
(31:09):
Max and I are we're having a little bit of
a tough time with this because we don't like, we
don't know the strokes of the story that have yet
to been have been told. Uh, And we're having a
hard time, not asking for spoilers, right, So we have
to say, you know, this is something that a lot
(31:30):
of a lot of people are not aware of, and
it's so strange to realize, you know, how close history
is to the present and how many you know, to
look back and say, okay, the most famous defector in
the world at the time, and now you know what.
I first heard about this story. It was through your
(31:51):
podcast and I thought, okay, who is fed Lata. I
didn't even know, you know, I had I understood that
Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin was a bad guy, you know,
but that was like my Wikipedia paragraph of knowledge. Well
interesting enough, when spelt Lana defects in India, she goes
(32:12):
up to you know, she goes up to them, to
a marine at the US embassy and she's like, I'm
Joseph Stalin's daughter, and like, does Joseph Stalin have a daughter?
They didn't know? I mean, it's like they didn't know then,
we don't know now. Um. You know, I find myself
to be really grateful to be part of like a
(32:32):
small group of people who are excited by the story
of Joseph Stalin's daughter. So plugging Rosemary Sullivan and her
book Stalin's Daughter, plugging Roger Friedlan and Harold Dalman's book
The Fellowship, which covers Tally Essen and they and their
encounter with spelt Lanaum. But also like just two days ago,
I got a DM because now I'm on Instagram, I know,
(32:54):
I'm like, yeah, just it's uh, yeah, you know, she's
this thing I do. UM. But I got a DM
from like a playwright in San Francisco who was like,
I love your podcast. I wrote a play that had
spel Lana and it years ago. And so there's this like,
you know, I'm not I am not the first person
(33:14):
to be interested in spe Lana, but we are like
a small little tribe, and it's really fun to you know,
be meeting people who also encountered her or or also
think that the story is worthy. So oh and also
a huge plug to the first article that I ever
read about it, which is by a guy named Nicholas
(33:35):
Thompson who was who was a freelance writer at the
time and now as the editor in chief of The
Atlantic magazine, which is really cool. And I got to
meet him. You know, it's like it's like, oh my God,
like everybody loves Spelana. Um so, and now we have
joined that tribe. You are in it. You are set
one nights. Here we go nights and we want we
(33:58):
want you, we want you to check out this show
to folks, because I think it's safe to say that
Dan tells the story unique way, in a way that
personally I never could. So along for the ride, Dan,
Can you tell people where to learn more about your work,
where to where to find you, perhaps on that shiny
(34:19):
new Instagram and uh and can you tell people maybe
where to find the podcast as well? Yeah, So the
podcast is called set Lana stet Lana. The name is
so nice. We say it twice and it's got exclamation
points after each name because I'm loud. Um and uh.
And you can find that on Iheartraate, the iHeartRadio app,
(34:40):
Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You can
follow me on Instagram at Dan's Stories. Um and more
about my work I have UM. I'm working on the
adaptation of Eduard Louise memoir History of Violence that was
just announced that it's a beautiful, powerful mem and that's
(35:00):
going to be a shot at the end of this year.
It'll be in German, and so that'll be a thing.
And I don't speak German. I don't speak German, but
someone's translating it and I'm gonna imagine that they're gonna
do it a decent job. And what else am I doing?
I don't know. I do a lot of theater. I
moved to Philly and which is my hometown, and I'm
(35:24):
just excited to like meet other writers and theater artists
who are just trying to like understand the universe by
bringing us all together through stories. So I'd like to
connect to people and say I and you can DM me,
and my husband Jordan is getting me to respond, so
(35:45):
you know, if you don't hear from me, Jordan is saying, damn,
respond and I'm saying, yes, I will, and then he's saying, no,
you're gonna do it now or later. And he's probably
listening to me right now because he's downstairs and I
love him very much and just he's a part of this.
So if you're messaging me your message, Jordan, you know,
and that's that's your choice. Well, um, I for one,
I'm excited to dig in to the podcast. I think
(36:07):
what is episode three is publishing Round about the time
of this episode, episode five. So we are we are
five of ten and then we're gonna take a week
off and then we'll be back with UH with with six, seven, eight,
and nine and ten um afterwards. I imagine it probably
ends on a pretty there's a cliffhanger there, so I'm
(36:29):
excited to experience that for myself as well. Um. Well,
thanks again for for joining us and sharing Svetlana story
with us and UH and the world. Dan, Kate roster
Uhtlata Lata, you can find it anywhere. As Dan said,
we want to thank you Dan, and we also want
(36:50):
to thank our super producer, mister Max Williams. We gotta
thank the one and only Casey Pegrom. I'm so glad
that like, we can't get away from him, Noel, we can't.
We can't get away from k Casey is perpetually on
the case. Well we're not around. Yeah, he can't get
away from us. I guess if we're being fair, we're
probably the pursuers in that, in that relationship. But but
(37:14):
thank you to everybody tuning in. We'd love to hear
your opinions of the show. Yeah, and if you want
to give us your opinions. We're still in kind of
social media limbo for the show, but you can find
me and Ben and Max as individuals. I am exclusively
an instagrammer. You can find me at how Now Noel
Brown and I am calling myself in a burst of
(37:34):
creativity at Ben Bolan on Instagram and Eppen bollin hsw
on Twitter. That's where you can get it beside behind
the scenes, look at the various ill advised secret projects
misadventures I'm always cooking up. As Elon Musk would say,
the biggest advantage of Twitter, of course, is that Max
Williams is on it, and that's where you can find. Yes,
(37:55):
you can find my technically not dead Twitter account at
etail on to score Max Williams. There. It is more
sports metaphors for for the people who bring it home
hal halftime Dubs. That's my new nickname for you, curly
get it in the hole. There we go. Do do
the do the sports so well? Do the sports. That's it.
(38:17):
That's all. Yeah, that's all everybody can ask for our Well,
we will see you next time, folks. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Let's give it up for the one
and only super producer, mister Max Williams. Yes, they called
me ben Uh George Noel. Still still we try to
be consistent with our our our names. I guess we've
(00:47):
got that going for us. Personalities different story, but yeah,
names remained the same they are. Zeppelin might say they didn't,
that was the song. They remained the same for them.
But you get the out there, and today we are
bringing a very special story to the world. This is
something that one of our colleagues, our pal Maya, had
(01:09):
introduced us to a while back. There's a brand new
podcast out in the world of iHeart. If you love
Ridiculous History, you're gonna love this. And we decided instead
of just us talking about it, we would talk to
the source, Noel, the person who made the whole thing happen.
(01:30):
Fellow Ridiculous Historians join us in welcoming Dan kit Roster.
Oh wow, what an entrance. Thank you so much, what
an introduction. I'm so I'm very happy to be here.
I have to add too, you didn't do this alone.
(01:50):
You have some help from our former superproducer, Casey Pegram.
That's right, Casey brings it every time. I am merely
the announcer, but Casey is the whole football team getting
the podcast to the end zone. And thus that's a
great sports metaphor. I totally understand what you mean. Thank you,
(02:12):
thank you, thank you. More sports metaphors to come from
this homosexual throughout the podcast. Look, I learn all my
sports metaphors from listening to podcasts on the Ringer Network
where they talk about movies but can't help themselves but
make everything relating back to sports. So that's how I learned.
The lingo is from listening to the watch. Oh that's great,
(02:33):
And I am going to recuse myself from the sports
conversations because our pal Max has gotten me weirdly into
curling and that's the only thing I know about now. Yeah,
it's don't worry about We've got a two part episode
on it. Everything you want to know. I want to
know everything about curling I could get into. I like
being the other guy. I really want to be the
(02:54):
other guy. I like sports where there's somebody is definitely
the athlete and then there's like another guy you know,
and that I feel like that's me and I appreciate
that relationship. Now, now it's it's interesting that you're talking
about team sports and there's a cool analog there with
your latest projects, feed Lana's fed Lana. But what some
(03:16):
people might not know is that before you ever got
into podcasting, you were you were and are an award
winning playwright as well as screenwriter. Could you tell us
maybe a little bit about whose fed Lana is and
how you encountered this story and what led you to
explore this in multiple formats? Well, um, I would be
(03:40):
happy to um so because otherwise, okay, otherwise I just
you know, would I don't know, talk about my dog.
So stet Lana Alieva was the first and only daughter
of Joseph Stalin, who your listeners might know as Joseph
Stalin Um and the guy who was Stalin remember, the
(04:05):
Secretary General of the Soviet Union. So uh. Stet Lana
was born in the twenties, it's the nineteen twenty six
or nineteen twenty four, forgive me, and she was the
pride and joy of Joseph Stalin Um. And she also
had a mother, as you know, it tends to happen,
(04:25):
and her mother was Nadia Nadeshda Allelujeva and she committed
suicide when stet Lana was but six years old. Stealana
didn't know this. She was told at the time that
it was a pendicitis and she would find out ten
years later, and that would sort of start at the
beginning of sort of distancing from her dad, but she
(04:47):
would still pinball back and forth. And it wasn't until
you're saying Joseph Stalin wasn't entirely honest, So you know,
he was known to being kind of an ass but
to everybody, and in fact, you know, stet Lana wrestled
with that in her writing. And that's one of the
things that's so interesting about her as as a as
(05:09):
a person in history is that she knew the ills
and the terrors, and she also had this father figure
who she did love, and she wrestled with that and
she was very honest about that. That led her defection
when she finally left the USSR in nineteen sixty seven. Now,
the fun, weird, crazy dare I say, bizarre story about
(05:31):
stet Lana that got me really interested is. You know,
she had come to the United States. It sort of
right in the midst of the Cold War, and she
was an instant celebrity. She had a one point five
million dollar book deal. Her name was in all the papers,
and then she started receiving ovations, letters, telegrams, even gifts.
(05:53):
Very strange, very mysterious woman all the way from a
magical place called scott Still, Arizona. This woman really wanted
Speltlana to come and visit. And her name was Olgavana
Lasovich Hinsenburg Lloyd Wright, and she was the widow of
(06:15):
the deceased famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. And she really
wanted spel Lana to come and visit their desert compound.
And this is where Frank Lloyd Wright's disciples as architects
still lived in communion, making art and having a blast.
It's a little culty. Well this, I mean, you could
say one could say that, and one could get in
(06:36):
trouble saying that. I think that's like, that's a big word,
and I've got certainly got in trouble for saying it
as well. But pretend you didn't know that word. Pretend
you it come without judgment, and you show up, you're
in the You've you've fled Soviet Russia, and you are
now in the middle of the desert, in the middle
(06:58):
of Arizona. And there is a woman named Olga Vanna
who believes then you are the reincarnation of her dead daughter,
because her dead daughter's name was also spet Lana and
old and spet Lana's grandmother's name was Olga, and Olga
Vanna actually is Olga Ivanova. And so Frank Lloyd Wright's
(07:18):
widow is believes that Joseph Stalin's daughter is the reincarnation
of her dead daughter, and then lures her into her
architecture compound and then marries her off to her dead
daughter's ex husband named William Wesley Peters, and so she
then becomes spet Lana Peters. Not that spet Lana Peter
is not the first one, the second one. So it
(07:39):
gets very it gets it gets very confusing. This whole
thing is just an exercise and confusion, and that confusion
is what I've spen like close to a decade immersed in.
So that's sort of that's that's that's the overarching story,
and it must have been this I imagine that led
(08:00):
that led you to recognize set Lana as your greatest
muse is that you read about this and you were like,
I get it. That's everybody's been in that situation. Well, well,
I think it's kind of the opposite, is like I
have I don't get it. I don't get why you
would like flee Soviet Russia only find yourself basically giving
(08:23):
up your identity subsumed inside of, you know, a community
where everybody is living and working together. I mean, you
left socialism to you know, become a success in capitalism,
and now you know her money was drained by it,
so now you're giving it all a way to be
part of this other thing. So I was just mystified
by spet Lana. And I think like as a writer,
(08:45):
you know, you go you walk towards characters and stories
where you just have like the biggest questions, you know,
because if you know the answer, it's kind of like, oh,
I know why someone would do that, Like I know
why someone wading a sandwich, you know, like they're hungry
and so there's no story there. Well, actually getting a
sandwich can be kind of sandwich is pretty good. Let's
(09:07):
stay on that. Sandwich guy for a second. No, but
do you think maybe you ask why, um, going from
the socialist country to a commune, which isn't communism exactly,
but there is a one for all kind of mentality.
Do you think there that was a comfortable thing for Svelana.
It wasn't necessarily comfortable, but she did. And she writes
(09:30):
about this um in an unpublished book that we were
able to find. She writes about how it wasn't necessarily comfortable,
but she recognized it and that was sort of this
that recognition was something I'm sure actually you know, when
she writes about it, it's it's in retrospect, so a
(09:52):
lot of crazy stuff happened, and so she, uh, that
chapter of her life was not one that she looked
on fondly, although there are elements, there are amazing things
that happened, But at any rate, she's critical of tally Esen,
which is the name of the frankly right fellowship world
tally Esen, which literally means shining brow for all of
(10:13):
your Welsh listeners, uh you know, hashtag Welsh listeners, hashtag Welsh.
So you know, um, I think it was probably like
maybe not comfortable, but like if you're in I don't know,
if you've ever dated someone who sucks and then you
go ahead and like date the same kind of person again,
(10:36):
and you're like, I've learned nothing like That was probably
her experience, Like she knew how to be inside of
a subservient universe and she was probably kind of tired
of it. Now we also know, and this is I
(10:57):
hope this isn't too big of a spoiler, but we
also just even from the first episode, from the jump,
as they say that Svetlana is being pursued by a
very powerful intelligence agency, but some what we would recognize
as the KGB. Obviously we referred to that in English.
(11:19):
Do you feel that there was um a serious threat
to her from the KGB? Were they just monitoring her
and if if whether or not that was a real threat.
Did she perhaps feel some sort of sense of protection
by entering this this commune out there in Arizona. Yeah,
(11:39):
I mean, you know, so when she first arrived, So
aside from just getting out of Russia, which is its
own insane story, um, which is an episode one and
it's three continents and it's it's insane. We've got to
hear it though, now that now that you brought it
out there, we got to hear just just like a
just like some of the high level, the high level.
(12:01):
Oh my god. So she has three husbands in Russia
and then she divorces them all, and then she falls
in love with an Indian communist by the name of
Brajesh Singh, and she is not allowed to marry him
for all sorts of fabulous racist reasons. This is in
a period of in Russian history called the Thaw, and
(12:24):
there's anyway Krushchev doesn't let her marry, but she does
marry him spiritually. She feels as though she's married to him,
and I there's some questions whether they actually got married
in a church or not, but at any rate, she
considers him her husband. And and then he dies, and
where the Soviet government was not gonna let her marry him,
(12:48):
they do let her go to his Indian village called
Kalankar Khala lan Kankar at the floor of the Ganches
River in India. This will be the first time that
Stetlan has ever left Soviets oil. So she has been
pushed around by the Soviets a lot in her life.
She has two kids, but she's okay. She's going on
(13:08):
a trip to India, and that's all she thinks about.
She lands in India and she thinks she's going straight
to this village, straight to meet Singh's family, but instead
she's hold up in a hotel room with no telephone
for two weeks. She's pushed around. She really is like,
she's up to here, you know what I mean, Like
I mean, and listeners, I am gesturing to my neck,
(13:31):
so you know, I mean, you don't want to get
a Soviet up to hear. So she finally makes it
to the Gangie sprinkles her lover's ashes, and she is
feeling so at peace in India. She wants to stay there,
but they, the Soviets, want to get her back. She
is still Stalin's daughter, She still is a totem, she
still means something, and so she kind of now just
(13:53):
wants to, you know, get out of there, and so
she toys around with various places to go. Finally lands
on America. It happens to be like a day or
two before she's supposed to leave. She sneaks out of
her hotel room. She hails a cab and she goes
fright up to the US embassy and she says, my
name is Steblana Aliyev, I'm Joseph Stalin's daughter, and I
want to defect to the United States of America. What
(14:16):
ends up happening from that moment is batch or feastings.
I don't know what you're saying, because she ends up
being flown the US doesn't water because they're in the
middle of an arms deal with Russia, so she ends
up being flown to Rome. But then the Romans don't
want her, so she's never actually allowed to touch Roman soil.
(14:36):
So she sits in like this weird apartment for a while,
and then they fly her off to Switzerland. But while
she's the paparazzi is all over her. She's stuck in Switzerland,
and then she finally makes it all the way to
the US un day, where she arrives this instant celebrity,
all the while smuggling this memoir of life growing up
(14:58):
under Stalin called Twenty Letters to a Friend, which winds
up being the way that she gets into the US
under a work visa. It's an even nuttier story than that,
So I A'm gonna say, like, listen, listen to the
pod dude. But you know that is like the that's
I mean, every chapter spell on his life has these
like highs and lows that are just mesmerizing. I mean,
(15:20):
she accomplished a lot in her life. Well, I mean,
you know, you mentioned how doting her father was on her,
and there's pictures you can find online of him like
cradling her when she was, you know, in her like
early teens or maybe you know, a little younger than that.
But this obviously must have been a huge betrayal or
perceived as that from Stalin. Can you talk a little
(15:42):
bit about how he reacted and you know what this
was like and how it kind of up the stakes? Yeah,
I mean, well he was very dead at the time,
but I'm sure that he was pissed, but he's not
gonna let the scheduling of mortality getting no timeline. Like, yeah,
it is okay, of course that was a stupid not
(16:03):
a stupid question, not a stupid question at all. Um. Yeah,
because also, like, while Stalin may have been dead, Stalinism
certainly did not die. Um. And so you know, Stalin
dies in nineteen fifty three, as famously depicted in the
Death of Stalin UM and Uh, it's it's nineteen sixty seven.
(16:24):
Once that wanna makes her way over to the United States,
I might be getting if it's sixty seven and sixty
eight when she it's either sixty seven sixty eight or
sixty sixty sixty seven. Um, better than me. I didn't
even know Stalin was dead. Well well, to your defense,
thole that like that was a closely guarded secret as
we also Yes Stalin, yes, okay, we got the reference
(16:47):
in we were talking about that off air. They got me,
They tricked me. That's I blame the Soviets. But but
the original question was you know, the kg the threat
of the KGB and um. You know, so the KGB
was definitely involved in all aspects of stet Lana's life,
who she could marry, where she could go, who she
could be friends with, um, and certainly after she left.
(17:10):
You know, we don't talk about this much in the podcast.
Excuse me, I just burped on a podcast first time
for everything Ring the Bell SI nickname ding Um. But
you know, one of the unintended consequences of stet Lana
leaving was that she had a lot of very close
friends and stet Lana also partied down with all of
(17:33):
the dissidents. She was interested in people of all walks
of life. She was interested in artists and writers and
academics and thinkers. And so when she left, the people
who who are really targeted were were her close friends
who also didn't have a lot of capital themselves to
sort of stay out of the limelight. So there's this
(17:53):
fascinating I mean, this is a ridiculous history. I'm sure
that I offer because I would love to know more
about her. There is half black, half Jewish tennis champion
ethno musicologist named Lily Golden who love me. Stop by
Lily real quick, because one thing I love about the
(18:15):
natural course of this story is that at points it
does sound like mad lib improv, you know, like we're
pulling from a hat. So could you give us the
rundown of this person again? Their descriptors, So this is
set Lana's who. I believe Set Lana's best friend is
who she refers to as Bertha in her book, which
(18:36):
is a great chosen name. But her name was Lily Golden,
and Lily was Her parents were both American, they were socialists.
Her her father was black, her mother was Jewish. I
guess during like uh, you know, the at some point,
like during a Red scare in the thirties, they ran
(18:58):
off to Russia. Had Lily she became like a Soviet
tennis champ and then became like an ethno musicologist and
what and then became Joseph Stalin's daughter's best friend. And
she's just one of you know you look, uh. Spetlana
was also like dear dear friends with Pulstoy's grandson um
(19:19):
and all sorts of really interesting people that intersected with
history and a lot of fascinating ways. And so these
were the people who the KGB targeted, like Lily Golden
like wasn't able to get on a flight after spet
Lana defected, and certainly speed Lana's children. She left a
twenty year old son and a sixteen year old daughter, um,
and she didn't give them any warning. They found out
(19:43):
like uh from the KGB that the that their mother
had defected. So they were also targeted and watched, and
that was a horrible unintended consequence um that you know,
for spet Lana to flee, you know, she did leave
people sort of vulnerable. And then you know there's stories
(20:05):
that we hear it, and they don't feature so heavily
in our podcast, and not because they weren't true, but
they're sort of hard to verify. There was shortly after
she had come to the United States. She was staying
at the house of George Kennon, who was an ambassador
(20:25):
to Russia during Stalin's era, and Kennon was considered the
architect of the Cold War. He is a major figure
in history, and he kind of became spelt Lana's godfather
when she arrived in America. And so he is no
longer alive. He's just as dead as Stalin is, but
his daughters are very much alive. Joan and Grace, and
(20:46):
I got to have a couple of zooms with Joan
and Grace who each had wild stories and they're like
they both had very different relationships with Spetlana. Joan was
like buddy buddy, Grace had this like, uh, Stetlana sort
of treated her a little bit like the maid m
(21:06):
So it's funny to hear like the different experiences. But
both Grace and Jone told me that while Stetlana was
staying with them, on one day in particular, you know
this farm in the middle of central Pennsylvania. All of
a sudden, these men in black coats just started like
coming to the door and knocking on it, and they
asked if stet Lana was there, and and then quickly
(21:28):
like fled back. So Stelana was always sort of haunted
by the prospect of KGB agents, And certainly later in
the podcast, we're going to get to a period of
time where stet Lana gets wrapped up in a KGB plot,
which is on internet and in history and certainly featured
in Rosemary Sullivan's amazing book Stalin's Daughter, which everyone should read.
(21:51):
But I'm not going to spoil it for our podcast.
You'll have to tune in. Not yet. You have to
go on the ride with this. Also also peek behind
the curtain. Okay, I know we gotta get to the the character,
but peak behind the scenes then, folks, we also hear
ridiculous history. We don't know how all the story shakes out.
(22:14):
We are going to be riding along with you, but
I like, I like where you're going with that, Noel,
because we talked about it a little off air. There's
a thing. There's a part where you describe dan Um.
You describe speed Lana as like the most famous defector
at least as far as as the Western world is concerned,
which makes sense, you know, it's it's the daughter of
(22:37):
a ruler basically. Uh, but what what was the typical
I don't know what's the best way to phrase this, Noel.
What do we need to know about the island? Maybe
just a little scene setting for the time, um as
to what it would have meant um to be a defector,
h and why maybe someone less famous than speed Lana
would have defected, And it's what relations were like and
(22:59):
kind of this historical period we're talking about. Yeah, I
mean I want to say that, like when it comes
to I just want to preface my own ignorance, which
I think is important in life. I know a bit,
but that's our whole thing on this show. So I
want to preface my own ignorance and also my own subjectivity. Right.
So I'm coming to this as like an American who
(23:21):
was like schooled in the fact that like America is good,
Russia is bad. America win and Russia is lose, you know.
But to be fair, there were a lot of terrible
things about the Stalinist regime and essentially coming out of
life from the Czars. So this is going back a
(23:43):
little bit in nineteen seventeen or nineteen sixteen, nineteen seventeen,
when the Bolsheviks the Revolutionaries took power and knocked out
the Czars, people's lives were really really terrible. Nicholas A
consolidated power in a way that like gave such little
freedom to the average Russian. UM. And they were, I
(24:04):
mean the peasant they were starving, UM, they were uneducated,
even though they were they were very literate, but there
there was not schooling and it was it was a
very horrible place to grow up. UM. And so the
Bolsheviks really wanted to share the wealth. And I have
to say, like, as like, you know, as a lefty, progressive,
socialistic kind of kind of person, I'm like, that's awesome.
(24:27):
But what ended up happening is um, in order to
lead you know, more than a hundred countries with more
than a hundred languages and uh and uh consolidate like
the ussr UM, they really everyone had to. They realized
the way to do it is through you know, fascism,
were not fascism really but like totalitarianism and falling behind
(24:50):
one big face and that one big face with Stalin
and um that was built by Stalin and also by
as Politburo. So there's all these people who our feature
and hilariously and Death of Stalin who are also like
the reason that we know Joseph Stalin and that we
think communism is really bad because there was the currency
(25:11):
was betrayal. If you were a dissident, if you spoke
out against the government, you were sent to the gulags,
you were killed, your family was watched, they were killed.
And not to mention the fact that they're just also
it was there were a lot of people. There was
a ship ton of people, and so in order to
make sure that there was like a potato for everybody,
(25:33):
Stalin made sure there was a potato for sometimes nobody.
So there were just famines everywhere in order to make
sure that Moscow was able to lead this communism for
the first time. So it was nineteen eighty four. It
was neighbors spying on neighbors. Information was this currency that
(25:54):
you could use against people, and so even folks who
who made it inside of the government were subjected to this.
And so you see it in Death of Stalin, but
you also see it inside of Stalin's own family, so
stet Lana's uncles and aunts are subject to being locked
up in the gulagh or even murdered. Um. Stet Lana's brother,
(26:18):
her older brother who she loved the most, named Yakov,
enlisted in the Russian Army during World War Two. He
was captured by a Pow camp when Stalana was sixteen
in nineteen forty two, and Stalin was given the option
to trade for him, and Salm was like, no, definitely not.
I don't want anyone thinking that I treat my family
any differently. And Yakov was murdered in the Pow camp,
(26:42):
you know, and you know that's something. Maybe there's some
honor there, maybe maybe there's not, but you just get
the sense that you know, Stalin was there was paranoia,
there was vindictiveness, and the country was sort of ruled
out of for you know, for better or for worse.
(27:03):
It was ruled out of his image and his likeness
to the point where when he dies, there's like, uh,
there's I forget how many people want to be killed.
But like there was a a march, you know, in
honor of Stalin Um, but there's there was some traffic
jam and like thousands of people were killed in this
(27:25):
traffic jam, and it wasn't even a protest against him.
It was just like these people are everywhere, to kill them, um.
And so it's something really hard to imagine. But what's
fascinating about also such a suppressive government is that nothing
breeds art like suppression. And there are artists who are
(27:49):
making work, who are smuggling stories out, um, not on
mass I'm not saying that, like, I'm not saying that
it's like, oh, there's all this great Soviet era descendent
art like there isn't but there. But people were writing things,
as they said, for the drawer. So Stelana was one
of them. She wrote this memoir about growing up under
(28:12):
Stalin's rule and coming to terms with the fact that
her horrible was that her horrible huh yeah, that her
horrible was you know, a father um. And that to
me is also really interesting. You know that, like there's
a resilience amongst the Russian people for you know, centuries
of creating creating art in these extreme circumstances, and that
(28:35):
is that is also part of the story. It's interesting too,
just that whole concept, and Casey Pegram would be happy
with this topic. Um. You know, filmmakers, for example, like Tarkovsky,
you know, we're getting financing from the government to make
(28:57):
these films that were supposedly insert us of the state,
you know, in terms of the image that they were projecting,
but secretly there were these hidden messages you know in
films like Stalker or even the Silaris that that were
kind of patently anti uh Russia. Uh. And they eventually
kind of caught on and then he had to get
(29:18):
out of dodge as well. Yeah, I mean, well, and
that's also you know, and and that's what Tartakowsky has
when is he the fifties, sixties, like like through the seventies,
I mean through yeah, you know, yeah, into the eighties. Sorry,
you even think of like Nilosh Foreman, who was you
know in uh he was? Who is check? I think?
Or I forget, But like even our modern filmmakers were
(29:40):
still running away from it and like inserting their messages inside.
And yeah, I mean there's a kind of bravery that
I you know that as an American artist, um, in
the twenty first century, you know that I take in
my in my place of freedom, there's there is pushback
and there are people who don't like your work. But
(30:02):
I haven't experienced that that kind of suppression coming at
me and finding those ways to still get my voice
and my story out there. And so you know, I
looked at those writers and those artists with real admiration. Absolutely,
I mean, how well said, because that's something where, you know,
it always strikes me. One of my old professors a
(30:23):
long time ago, I don't always say how long ago
told me that told me that it. How did they
put it? They said? You know, I've always found it
hilarious that Russian authors are better writers in English than
most English authors. And that's and that's because many times
(30:45):
they had a life on the line situation like one
could die or be a race for the sin of
creative expression? Does that Russian pros also like translate really
well into English in a sort of unusual or uncann
art form. Man, for sure, I mean all translation is
and fellow ridiculous historians, I think, uh, null you and
(31:09):
Max and I are we're having a little bit of
a tough time with this because we don't like, we
don't know the strokes of the story that have yet
to been have been told. Uh, And we're having a
hard time, not asking for spoilers, right, So we have
to say, you know, this is something that a lot
(31:30):
of a lot of people are not aware of, and
it's so strange to realize, you know, how close history
is to the present and how many you know, to
look back and say, okay, the most famous defector in
the world at the time, and now you know what.
I first heard about this story. It was through your
(31:51):
podcast and I thought, okay, who is fed Lata. I
didn't even know, you know, I had I understood that
Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin was a bad guy, you know,
but that was like my Wikipedia paragraph of knowledge. Well
interesting enough, when spelt Lana defects in India, she goes
(32:12):
up to you know, she goes up to them, to
a marine at the US embassy and she's like, I'm
Joseph Stalin's daughter, and like, does Joseph Stalin have a daughter?
They didn't know? I mean, it's like they didn't know then,
we don't know now. Um. You know, I find myself
to be really grateful to be part of like a
(32:32):
small group of people who are excited by the story
of Joseph Stalin's daughter. So plugging Rosemary Sullivan and her
book Stalin's Daughter, plugging Roger Friedlan and Harold Dalman's book
The Fellowship, which covers Tally Essen and they and their
encounter with spelt Lanaum. But also like just two days ago,
I got a DM because now I'm on Instagram, I know,
(32:54):
I'm like, yeah, just it's uh, yeah, you know, she's
this thing I do. UM. But I got a DM
from like a playwright in San Francisco who was like,
I love your podcast. I wrote a play that had
spel Lana and it years ago. And so there's this like,
you know, I'm not I am not the first person
(33:14):
to be interested in spe Lana, but we are like
a small little tribe, and it's really fun to you know,
be meeting people who also encountered her or or also
think that the story is worthy. So oh and also
a huge plug to the first article that I ever
read about it, which is by a guy named Nicholas
(33:35):
Thompson who was who was a freelance writer at the
time and now as the editor in chief of The
Atlantic magazine, which is really cool. And I got to
meet him. You know, it's like it's like, oh my God,
like everybody loves Spelana. Um so, and now we have
joined that tribe. You are in it. You are set
one nights. Here we go nights and we want we
(33:58):
want you, we want you to check out this show
to folks, because I think it's safe to say that
Dan tells the story unique way, in a way that
personally I never could. So along for the ride, Dan,
Can you tell people where to learn more about your work,
where to where to find you, perhaps on that shiny
(34:19):
new Instagram and uh and can you tell people maybe
where to find the podcast as well? Yeah, So the
podcast is called set Lana stet Lana. The name is
so nice. We say it twice and it's got exclamation
points after each name because I'm loud. Um and uh.
And you can find that on Iheartraate, the iHeartRadio app,
(34:40):
Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You can
follow me on Instagram at Dan's Stories. Um and more
about my work I have UM. I'm working on the
adaptation of Eduard Louise memoir History of Violence that was
just announced that it's a beautiful, powerful mem and that's
(35:00):
going to be a shot at the end of this year.
It'll be in German, and so that'll be a thing.
And I don't speak German. I don't speak German, but
someone's translating it and I'm gonna imagine that they're gonna
do it a decent job. And what else am I doing?
I don't know. I do a lot of theater. I
moved to Philly and which is my hometown, and I'm
(35:24):
just excited to like meet other writers and theater artists
who are just trying to like understand the universe by
bringing us all together through stories. So I'd like to
connect to people and say I and you can DM me,
and my husband Jordan is getting me to respond, so
(35:45):
you know, if you don't hear from me, Jordan is saying, damn,
respond and I'm saying, yes, I will, and then he's saying, no,
you're gonna do it now or later. And he's probably
listening to me right now because he's downstairs and I
love him very much and just he's a part of this.
So if you're messaging me your message, Jordan, you know,
and that's that's your choice. Well, um, I for one,
I'm excited to dig in to the podcast. I think
(36:07):
what is episode three is publishing Round about the time
of this episode, episode five. So we are we are
five of ten and then we're gonna take a week
off and then we'll be back with UH with with six, seven, eight,
and nine and ten um afterwards. I imagine it probably
ends on a pretty there's a cliffhanger there, so I'm
(36:29):
excited to experience that for myself as well. Um. Well,
thanks again for for joining us and sharing Svetlana story
with us and UH and the world. Dan, Kate roster
Uhtlata Lata, you can find it anywhere. As Dan said,
we want to thank you Dan, and we also want
(36:50):
to thank our super producer, mister Max Williams. We gotta
thank the one and only Casey Pegrom. I'm so glad
that like, we can't get away from him, Noel, we can't.
We can't get away from k Casey is perpetually on
the case. Well we're not around. Yeah, he can't get
away from us. I guess if we're being fair, we're
probably the pursuers in that, in that relationship. But but
(37:14):
thank you to everybody tuning in. We'd love to hear
your opinions of the show. Yeah, and if you want
to give us your opinions. We're still in kind of
social media limbo for the show, but you can find
me and Ben and Max as individuals. I am exclusively
an instagrammer. You can find me at how Now Noel
Brown and I am calling myself in a burst of
(37:34):
creativity at Ben Bolan on Instagram and Eppen bollin hsw
on Twitter. That's where you can get it beside behind
the scenes, look at the various ill advised secret projects
misadventures I'm always cooking up. As Elon Musk would say,
the biggest advantage of Twitter, of course, is that Max
Williams is on it, and that's where you can find. Yes,
(37:55):
you can find my technically not dead Twitter account at
etail on to score Max Williams. There. It is more
sports metaphors for for the people who bring it home
hal halftime Dubs. That's my new nickname for you, curly
get it in the hole. There we go. Do do
the do the sports so well? Do the sports. That's it.
(38:17):
That's all. Yeah, that's all everybody can ask for our Well,
we will see you next time, folks. For more podcasts
from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History News
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Noel Brown
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