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Stalin's only daughter dies in US aged 85
Source: Agencies |
November 30, 2011, Wednesday
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FORMER Soviet leader Josef Stalin's daughter, whose defection to the West during the Cold War made her a best-selling author, has died. She was 85.
Lana Peters - who was known internationally by her previous name, Svetlana Alliluyeva - died of colon cancer on November 22 in Wisconsin, where she lived off and on after becoming a United States citizen, Richland County Coroner Mary Turner said on Monday.
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 furor and was a public relations coup for the US. But Peters, 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.
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 into the US Embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the US.
Peters 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. In the book, she recalled her father, who died in 1953 after ruling the nation for 29 years, as a distant and paranoid man.
"He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel," Peters told the Wisconsin State Journal in a rare interview in 2010. "There was nothing in him that was complicated. He was very simple with us. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him and become an educated Marxist."
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin denounced Peters as a "morally unstable" and "sick person."
"I switched camps from the Marxists to the capitalists," she recalled in a 2007 interview for the documentary "Svetlana About Svetlana."
Peters' 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 with whom she grew close after her mother's death in 1932, Peters was Stalin's only daughter. She had two brothers, Vasili and Jacob. Jacob was captured by the Nazis in 1941 and died in a concentration camp. Vasili died an alcoholic at age 40.
Peters graduated from Moscow University in 1949, worked as a teacher and translator and traveled in Moscow's literary circles before leaving the Soviet Union. She was married four times - the last time to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. They were married from 1970 to 1973 and had one daughter.
Lana Peters - who was known internationally by her previous name, Svetlana Alliluyeva - died of colon cancer on November 22 in Wisconsin, where she lived off and on after becoming a United States citizen, Richland County Coroner Mary Turner said on Monday.
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 furor and was a public relations coup for the US. But Peters, 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.
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 into the US Embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the US.
Peters 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. In the book, she recalled her father, who died in 1953 after ruling the nation for 29 years, as a distant and paranoid man.
"He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel," Peters told the Wisconsin State Journal in a rare interview in 2010. "There was nothing in him that was complicated. He was very simple with us. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him and become an educated Marxist."
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin denounced Peters as a "morally unstable" and "sick person."
"I switched camps from the Marxists to the capitalists," she recalled in a 2007 interview for the documentary "Svetlana About Svetlana."
Peters' 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 with whom she grew close after her mother's death in 1932, Peters was Stalin's only daughter. She had two brothers, Vasili and Jacob. Jacob was captured by the Nazis in 1941 and died in a concentration camp. Vasili died an alcoholic at age 40.
Peters graduated from Moscow University in 1949, worked as a teacher and translator and traveled in Moscow's literary circles before leaving the Soviet Union. She was married four times - the last time to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. They were married from 1970 to 1973 and had one daughter.
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