Svetlana Alliluyeva

Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (née Stalina; 28 February 1926 – 22 November 2011), later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

In 1967, she became an international sensation when she defected to the United States and, in 1978, became a naturalized American citizen. From 1984 to 1986, she briefly returned to the Soviet Union and had her Soviet citizenship reinstated. She was Stalin's last surviving child.

Early life

Svetlana Stalina was born on 28 February 1926.

On 9 November 1932, Alliluyeva's mother shot herself. To conceal the suicide, the children were told that she had died of peritonitis, a complication from appendicitis. It would be 10 years before they learnt the truth of their mother's death.

In 1933, Alliluyeva and Vasily began attending ; although Vasily was transferred to a new school in 1937, Alliluyeva would stay until 1943, when she graduated from the 10th grade. At the school, Alliluyeva was given no special treatment, and was regarded simply as another student.

Several other relatives of Alliluyeva were killed in the aftermath of the Great Purge, including her aunt Anna, and Anna's husband, Stanislav Redens, who was shot in January 1940.

On 15 August 1942, Winston Churchill saw Alliluyeva in Stalin's private apartments at the Kremlin, describing her as "a handsome red-haired girl, who kissed her father dutifully". Churchill says Stalin "looked at me with a twinkle in his eye as if, so I thought, to convey 'You see, even we Bolsheviks have a family life.' "

At the age of 16, Alliluyeva fell in love with Aleksei Kapler, a Jewish Soviet filmmaker who was 22 years her senior. Her father vehemently disapproved of the relationship and Kapler was sentenced to five years of exile in 1943 in Vorkuta and was then sentenced again in 1948 to five years in labour camps in Inta.

Marriages Alliluyeva was first married in 1944 to Grigory Morozov, a Jewish student at Moscow University's Institute of International Affairs. Her father did not like Morozov, though he never met him. They had one child, a son named Iosif, who was born in 1945. The couple divorced in 1947, but remained close friends for decades afterwards.

Alliluyeva's second marriage was arranged for her to Yuri Zhdanov, the son of Stalin's right-hand man Andrei Zhdanov and himself one of Stalin's close associates. The couple married early in 1949. Alliluyeva lived with Zhdanov's family at this time, though felt herself dominated by his mother, Zinaida, which was something Stalin had warned her of. Yuri was devoted to Zinaida, and busied himself with Party work, so did not spend a lot of time with Alliluyeva. In 1950, Alliluyeva gave birth to a daughter, Yekaterina. The marriage was dissolved soon afterwards. They went against Soviet policy by marrying in a church. Svanidze was not healthy, owing to difficulties of his internal exile in Kazakhstan, and the marriage ended within a year.

From 1970 to 1973, she was married to the American architect William Wesley Peters (a son-in-law of Frank Lloyd Wright), with whom she had a daughter, Olga Peters (later known also as Chrese Evans).

After Stalin's death After her father's death in 1953, Alliluyeva worked as a lecturer and translator in Moscow. Her training was in History and Political Thought, a subject she was forced to study by her father, although her true passion was literature and writing.

Relationship with Brajesh Singh In 1963, while in hospital for a tonsillectomy, Alliluyeva met Kunwar Brajesh Singh, an Indian Communist visiting Moscow. The two fell in love. Singh was mild-mannered and well-educated but gravely ill with bronchiectasis and emphysema. The romance grew deeper and stronger still while the couple were recuperating in Sochi near the Black Sea. Singh returned to Moscow in 1965 to work as a translator, but he and Alliluyeva were not allowed to marry. He died the following year, in 1966. For her first trip outside the Soviet Union, she was allowed to travel to India to take his ashes to his family to pour into the Ganges river. In an interview on 26 April 1967, she referred to Singh as her husband, but also stated that they were never allowed to marry officially.

Political asylum and later life

Alliluyeva asked to have official permission to stay in India through the Soviet ambassador, Ivan Benediktov. However, her request was not accepted, and instead, she was ordered to return to the Soviet Union.

Alliluyeva accepted. The Indian government feared condemnation by the Soviet Union, so she was immediately sent from India to Rome. When the Qantas flight arrived in Rome, and then to Wisconsin. her children claimed that this is because of her complex character. In 1983, after the Soviet government had stopped blocking Alliluyeva's attempts to communicate with her USSR-based children, her son Iosif began to call her regularly and planned to visit her in England, but was refused permission to travel by the Soviet authorities. Alliluyeva herself stated that she gave away much of her book proceeds to charity and by around 1986 had become impoverished, facing debt and failed investments. In 1978, Alliluyeva became a US citizen as Lana Peters,

In October 1984, during a time when Stalin's legacy saw partial rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, she moved back together with her daughter Olga, and both were given Soviet citizenship.

The British journalist Miriam Gross, with whom Alliluyeva conducted her final interview before moving back from England to the Soviet Union in 1984, described Svetlana's increasingly fragile state of mind in a series of letters she wrote to Gross following the interview:

In April 1986, she again moved back from the Soviet Union to the US with Olga, and after her return denied anti-Western comments she had made while back in the USSR (including that she had not enjoyed "one single day" of freedom in the West and had been a pet of the Central Intelligence Agency). where she had spent time while visiting from Cambridge.

Olga Margedant Peters (born 21 May 1971), Alliluyeva's daughter with Peters, now goes by the name Chrese Evans and lives in Portland, Oregon. Her older daughter, Yekaterina, is a volcanologist in Siberia's Kamchatka Peninsula. Alliluyeva's son Iosif, a cardiologist, died in Russia in 2008. Iosif's son Ilya Voznesensky was previously in a relationship with Boris Berezovsky's daughter Elizaveta, with whom he has a son, Savva.

Religion Alliluyeva was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church on 20 March 1963. During her years of exile, she experimented with various religions. She then turned to the Eastern Orthodox Church and is also reported to have thought of becoming a nun.

Works In July 1962, Alliluyeva had met French journalist and first laureate of the International Lenin Peace Prize, Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, and asked him if anyone would read her memoir. Alliluyeva wrote a memoir in Russian while still in the Soviet Union. The manuscript was carried safely out of the country by T. N. Kaul, Indian Ambassador to the Soviet Union, who returned it to her in New Delhi. Alliluyeva gave her memoir to a CIA agent, Robert Rayle, at the time of her defection. Rayle made a copy of it. It was the only thing other than a few items of clothing taken by Alliluyeva on a secret passenger flight out of India. In 1967, the book was published as Twenty Letters to a Friend ("Dvadtsat' pisem k drugu"). Raymond Pearson, in Russia and Eastern Europe, described Alliluyeva's book as a naïve attempt to shift the blame for Stalinist crimes onto Lavrentiy Beria, and whitewash her father's life.

Her earlier book, Only One Year, describes the events of the year of her defection to the United States.