Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s daughter, whose defection to the West during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author, has died aged 85.
Svetlana Alliluyeva, known as Lana Peters since 1970, died of colon cancer in Wisconsin, a state where she lived after becoming a US citizen.
Her defection in 1967 – which she said was partly motivated by the poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, by Soviet authorities – caused an international furore and was a public relations coup for the US.
But Ms Alliluyeva, who left behind two children, said her identity involved more than just switching from one side to the other in the Cold War. She even moved back to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, only to return to the US more than a year later. She carried with her a memoir she had written in 1963 about her life in Russia.
Twenty Letters To A Friend was published within months of her arrival in the US and became a best-seller.
When she left the Soviet Union in 1966 for India, she planned to leave the ashes of her late third husband, an Indian citizen, and return.
Instead, she walked unannounced into the US embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the US.
On her arrival in New York City in 1967, the 41-year-old said: “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia”.
She said she had come to doubt the communism she was taught growing up and believed there were no capitalists or communists, just good and bad human beings.
She had also found religion and believed “it was impossible to exist without God in one’s heart”. In the book, she recalled her father, who died in 1953 after ruling the nation for 29 years, as a distant and paranoid man.
Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin denounced her as a “morally unstable” and “sick person” and added: “We can only pity those who wish to use her for any political aim or for any aim of discrediting the Soviet country.”
The defection came at a high personal cost. She left two children behind in Russia – Josef and Yekaterina – from previous marriages. Both were upset by her departure, and she was never close to either again.
Raised by a nanny to whom she grew close after her mother’s death in 1932, Ms Alliluyeva was Stalin’s only daughter.
She had two brothers, Vasili and Jacob. The latter was captured by the Nazis in 1941 and died in a concentration camp. Vasili died an alcoholic aged 40.