Josef Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva died in the United States aged 85. In 1967, Alliluyeva became a defector. She went to India to attend the funeral of Brajesh Singh, whom she called her husband in some interviews, and refused to return to the Soviet Union. Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers Alexei Kosygin gave her permission to leave the country. On arrival in the United States she denounced the Soviet Union and her Father. She left her children, Katya and Josef, behind. Svetlana’s first husband and the father of her son, Josef, was Vasily Stalin’s classmate Grigory Morozov. Katya’s father was Yury Zhdanov, Svetlana’s second husband.
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Svetlana graduated from Moscow State University’s Faculty of History and completed a post-graduate course at the Academy of Social Sciences under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Later, she worked as a translator from English into Russian and as a literary editor.
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Contemporaries say Svetlana was a very modest girl. Svetlana Alliluyeva agreed to be interviewed for a documentary only on one condition that no questions would be asked about her father. Svetlana Alliluyeva paying last respects to her father.
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Svetlana’s defection to the West and her book Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), in which she talks about her father and the life in the Kremlin, was a global sensation. Svetlana spent some time in Switzerland and later moved to the United States. In 1970, she married U.S. architect William Wesley Peters and adopted the name Lana Peters. The couple soon divorced. They had a daughter.
In November 1984, Svetlana Alliluyeva unexpectedly arrived in Moscow with her daughter Olga who did not speak Russian. After causing a new sensation, Svetlana held a news conference where she said that she “had not enjoyed a single day of freedom” in the West. Consequently, she had her Soviet citizenship restored. But soon delight gave way to disappointment as she could not mend relations with her son and daughter whom she had abandoned in 1967. Photo: Svetlana Alliluyeva meets with Soviet and foreign journalists.
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After spending nearly two years in the United States, Alliluyeva wrote a request asking for permission from the Communist Party Central Committee to travel abroad. Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, personally intervened in the case. In November 1986, Svetlana Alliluyeva was permitted to return to the United States. She held dual citizenship in the Soviet Union and the United States.
