This book, all 741 pages of it, truly deserves the description, ''monumental work''.
Sullivan, an emeritus professor at the University of Toronto, has delivered up the most minute details of the long life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, only daughter of Stalin, the insensate monster who destroyed the lives of millions of people.
The author traces in illuminating detail Svetlana's life from cosseted and privileged girlhood in totalitarian Russia to her eventual defection to the United States, later brief sojourns in England, Russia and back to America, where she died in poverty in 2011, aged 85.
In concentrating her impressive descriptive talents upon Svetlana, Sullivan, of course, has to deliver up to the reader chunks of letterpress devoted to the calumnies wrought by Stalin.
Even as a girl, Svetlana understood something: ''The life of a man depended entirely on a word from my father.''
And close family members were not immune to the totalitarian acts that Stalin perpetrated.
She wrote: ''Little by little it became more than obvious not only that my father had been a despot and had brought about a terror, destroying millions of innocent people, but that the whole system which had made it possible was profoundly corrupt; that all its participants could not escape responsibility, no matter how hard they tried. And it was then that the whole edifice, whose foundation rested on a lie, crumbled from top to bottom.''
Svetlana had a succession of four husbands (one was common-law) in the USSR and one in America, as well as having four lovers in Russia.
Svetlana was a highly intelligent, sensitive and attractive woman, constantly racked by memories of her uneasy relationship with her father.
Sullivan's detailed analysis of her life is superb.
• Clarke Isaacs is a former ODT chief of staff.
