Lot 1145
Stalin, Joseph [né Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili] (1879-1953), Soviet Leader and dictator (1929-1953), Letter Signed "Today, I Stalin", one page, 5½ x 7½ December 22, 1938, signed toward the bottom of this playful note in red pencil from his daughter Svetlana or, "Setanka" as he called her: "Order N 8 I order you to take me to the movies now, to see the film ‘Volga-Volga’; SETANKA/ OWNER/ PROPRIETRESS", Stalin approves the "order" signing below in the same red pencil "Today, I Stalin". Very Fine.
Estimate 4,000 - 5,000
A wonderfully intriguing piece in which Stalin reveals a tenderness and lightheartedness one rarely associates with the person responsible for the exorbitant criminalities of the gulags. Born on February 26, 1926, Svetlana was Stalin's youngest child and only daughter: apparently very close, the two began to fall out when Svetlana, aged 16, fell in love with Alexei Kapler, a Jewish film maker. Stalin was so vehemently opposed to the romance that he sentenced Kapler to ten years in a Siberian labor camp, where he died. Svetlana provoked an international storm in 1967 when she defected to the U.S. So high profile was the defection that the Soviet Union demanded an assurance that any future Soviet defectors would be debriefed by Soviet officials before being granted asylum.
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