Stalin's daughter Svetlana dies at 85 in the USA
Josef Stalin's daughter, who denounced communism after defecting during the cold war, has died in the US after living out her remaining years there in seclusion. Svetlana Peters, whose quest to find her own identity saw the only daughter and last surviving child of the dictator take on three names, had described her father as "a moral and spiritual monster" after the CIA helped her to escape the Soviet Union in 1967 which caused a diplomatic furore.
Born Svetlana Stalina, she adopted her mother's last name, Alliluyeva, following her father's death in 1953. But she ended her life as Lana Peters – the identity she adopted after claiming political asylum in the US. After living many years in the public eye, she spent her final days in seclusion. She died of colon cancer on 22 November in Richland County, South Carolina, it emerged. She was 85.
Frequently moving countries, sampling religions from Hinduism to Christian science, the four-times married Peters lived a life which could grace the pages of any novel, and saw her tales inside the Soviet Union earn her two best-selling autobiographies..
Peters was the only daughter of Stalin by his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who killed herself in 1932. She graduated from Moscow university in 1949 and worked as a teacher and translator before leaving the Soviet Union. At 18, she defied her father's wishes and married Jewish student Aleksei Kapler. The couple had a son but the marraige was dissolved and her ex-husband was banished to a Siberian labour camp.
Her second husband was Yuri Zhadanov, with whom she had a daughter, but the marriage was dissolved following the wedding to her third husband Brijesh Singh, an Indian communist, in 1964.
NB - the article fails to mention that the defection took place from New Delhi, in 1967, and that an Indian diplomat, Rikhi Jaipal, was sent to Geneva (where she had fled with an official of the US embassy) to interview her and ascertain that she was acting as per her own wishes. The Soviet government had insinuated that the Indians had helped her to leave Delhi. The story as recapitulated by Mr Jaipal is in his memoir, Memories of a Half-life, Allied Publishers, 1991 - Dilip
