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.
Svetlana Stalina was born on 28 February 1926. As her mother was interested in pursuing a professional career, Alexandra Bychokova was hired as a nanny to look after Alliluyeva and her older brother Vasily (born 1921). Alliluyeva and Bychokova became quite close, and remained friends for 30 years, until Bychokova died in 1956.
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 Moscow School No. 25; 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.
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.
In 1962, she married Ivan Svanidze, the nephew of Stalin's first wife, Kato Svanidze, soon after meeting him for the first time since his parents' arrest in 1937. 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 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. In a 2010 interview, she stated that his refusal to let her study arts and his treatment of Kapler were the two times that Stalin had "broken her life", and that he loved her but was "a very simple man - very rude and very cruel." When asked at a New York conference about whether she agreed with her father's rule, she said that she was disapproving of a lot of his decisions but also noted that the responsibility for them also lay with the Communist regime in general.
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. Then, on 9 March 1967, Alliluyeva approached the United States Embassy in New Delhi. After she stated her desire to defect in writing, the United States ambassador Chester Bowles offered her political asylum and a new life in the United States.
At about nine o’clock p.m. in India, eleven in the morning Washington time, I said, "I have a person here who states she's Stalin's daughter, and we believe she's genuine; unless you instruct me to the contrary, I’m putting her on the one a.m. plane for Rome where we can stop and think the thing through. I’m not giving her any commitment that she can come to the States. I’m only enabling her to leave India, and we will see her to some part of the world—the U.S. or somewhere else—where she can settle in peace. If you disagree with this, let me know before midnight." No comment ever came from Washington. This is one advantage that non-career Ambassadors have; they can go ahead and do unorthodox things without anybody objecting, where a Foreign Service officer might not dare do it.