Samizdat typescript of Svetlana Allilueva’s Twenty Letters to a Friend, approximately 1967

Typescript copy of Twenty Letters to a Friend, a personal memoir about growing up inside the Kremlin by Svetlana Allilueva, daughter of Joseph Stalin. The original manuscript, written in 1963, was smuggled out of Russia in 1967 when Alliluyeva defected to the United States. It was published the same year. This 116-page Russian-language typescript reproduction of the memoir is an example of samizdat (“self-published”) literature, a form of dissident activity in Eastern Bloc countries which allowed individuals to evade censorship laws by manually copying censored materials and circulating them in secret.