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Svetlana Iosifovna Dzhugashvili
Svetlana with father Josef Stalin in 1940.
Born	February 28, 1926 (1926-02-28) (age 83) Moscow, Russia (then Soviet Union)
Nationality	United States (naturalized)
Other names	Lana Peters
Known for	Daughter of Joseph Stalin

Lavrentiy Beria with Stalin (in background) and the young Svetlana Alliluyeva.

Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (sometimes Stalina, later Lana Peters) (born February 28, 1926, Moscow, Soviet Union) (Russian: Светлана Иосифовна Аллилуева) is the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva (Stalin's second wife). A writer and naturalized United States citizen, Alliluyeva caused an international furore by defecting to the United States in 1967.^[1]

[edit] Early life

Stalin with his children: Vasiliy and Svetlana.

Like most children of high-ranking Soviet officials, Alliluyeva was raised by a nanny and only occasionally saw her parents. Her mother Nadezhda Alliluyeva died on November 9, 1932, when Svetlana was six. Nadezhda's death was officially ruled as peritonitis resulting from a burst appendix. While there were various other theories as to the cause of her death (murder on the orders of Stalin, or that she was killed by Stalin himself), it now appears the real cause of death was suicide. ^[2] According to Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin was very abusive toward Alliluyeva in the latter part of their marriage. In his memoirs, Kruschev recalled an occasion when Stalin, during a drunken rage at a party, dragged a crying Alliluyeva onto a dance floor by her hair.^[3]

At the age of 16, Svetlana Alliluyeva fell in love with a Jewish filmmaker Aleksei Kapler (who was 40 years old). Her father vehemently disapproved of the romance. Later Kapler was sentenced to ten years in exile in the industrial city of Vorkuta near the Arctic Circle, and it is speculated that the real reason was this romance.

[edit] Marriages

At 17, Svetlana fell in love with a fellow student at Moscow University, Grigory Morozov, also Jewish. Her father grudgingly allowed the couple to marry, although he made a point of never meeting the bridegroom. After the birth of a son (Joseph) in 1945, the couple divorced in 1947.

Alliluyeva's second husband was a close associate of Stalin's, Yuri Zhdanov (son of his right-hand-man, Andrei Zhdanov). They were married in 1949, and had a daughter, Yekaterina, in 1950, but this marriage also dissolved soon afterward.^{[citation needed]}

Though press reports (such as TIME Magazine^[4]) sometimes claimed that Alliluyeva was married a third time, in 1951, to Mikhail Kaganovich, the son of Lazar Kaganovich, another primary Stalin associate, Alliluyeva denies this. In "Only One Year" (p. 382) she says Kaganovich had only one daughter, her friend, and an adopted son who was ten years younger than she. Alliluyeva reports: "he, when he grew up, married a girl student of his own age."^{[citation needed]}

[edit] The Death of Stalin

After her father's death in 1953, Alliluyeva adopted her mother's maiden name and worked as a teacher and translator in Moscow. Her education was in United States history and she had studied English, however she had little opportunity to speak it at this point. Alliluyeva was a Party member and, based on her parentage, remained in contact with the highest levels of the Soviet government and enjoyed the privileges of the nomenklatura. She had been granted a pension with which she supported herself after she quit working to care for her children.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Relationship with Brajesh Singh

In 1963, while in hospital for the removal of her tonsils, she met an Indian communist visiting Moscow, Brajesh Singh. Singh was mild-mannered and idealistic but gravely ill with bronchiectasis and emphysema. They continued and cemented their relationship while recuperating in Sochi, on the Black Sea. Singh returned to Moscow in 1965, to work as a translator, but they were not allowed to marry. Singh died in 1966 and Alliluyeva was allowed to travel to India to take his ashes back, for his family to pour them into the Ganges. She stayed in the family home in Kalakankar on the banks of the Ganges for two months and became immersed in local customs. At an interview on April 26, 1967, she referred to Singh as her husband, though stating that they were never allowed to marry officially.^[5]

[edit] Political asylum and later life

On March 6, 1967, after first having visited the Soviet embassy in New Delhi, Alliluyeva went to the U.S. embassy and formally petitioned Ambassador Chester Bowles for political asylum. This was granted; however, owing to concerns that the Indian government might suffer from possible ill feeling from the Soviet Union, it was arranged for her to leave India immediately for Rome and when the Alitalia flight arrived in Rome Alliluyeva immediately went to Geneva where the Swiss government arranged a tourist visa and accommodation in Switzerland for 6 weeks before proceeding to the United States.^{[citation needed]}

Upon her arrival in April 1967 in New York City, Alliluyeva gave a press conference denouncing her father's regime and the Soviet government. Her intention to publish her autobiographical Twenty Letters To A Friend on the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet revolution caused an uproar in the USSR, and the government there threatened to release an unauthorized version; publication in the West was therefore moved to an earlier date, and that particular diplomatic problem defused.^{[citation needed]}

Alliluyeva moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and later to nearby Pennington.^[6][7]

In 1970, Alliluyeva answered an invitation from Frank Lloyd Wright's widow, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, to visit Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. As she described in her autobiographical Distant Music, Olgivanna believed in mysticism and had become convinced that Alliluyeva was a spiritual replacement for her own daughter Svetlana, who had married Wright's chief apprentice William Wesley Peters, and who had died in a car crash years before. Alliluyeva came to Arizona, agreed to marry Peters within a matter of weeks, migrated with the Taliesin Fellowship back and forth between Scottsdale and Spring Green, Wisconsin, and adopted the name Lana Peters. The couple had a daughter, Olga, in Marin General Hospital, Mill Valley, California. By her own account Alliluyeva retained respect and affection for Wes Peters, but their marriage dissolved under the pressure of Mrs. Wright's influence.^{[citation needed]}

In 1982, she moved with her daughter to Cambridge, England, and, in 1984, returned to the Soviet Union, where she and her daughter were granted citizenship, and settled in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1986, Alliluyeva returned to the United States, and later returned to Bristol, England, in the 1990s. She is living in Madison, WI; see the interview with Allilueva in Lana Parshina's film Svetlana about Svetlana (2008, Icarus Films).^[8]

[edit] See also

• List of Eastern Bloc defectors

[edit] Bibliography

• Twenty Letters To A Friend - (Autobiography) First published 1967, by Hutchinson (London) and translated from Russian into English by Priscilla Johnson.
• Translated by Paul Chavchavadze, Only One Year, Harper & Row (1969), hardcover, 444 pages, ISBN 0-06-010102-4
• Faraway Music (1984, India, 1992, Moscow)

[edit] Reference s

v • d • e Joseph Stalin Politics Stalin before the Revolution · Stalin in the Revolution and early wars · Stalin's rise to power · The Stalin Era as Soviet Leader · Collectivization in the Soviet Union · Stalin in World War II · Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact · Winter War · Occupation of the Baltic states · Soviet invasion of Poland · German–Soviet Axis talks · Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact · Tehran Conference · Yalta Conference · Potsdam Conference · Cold War · Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship · Eastern Bloc · Tito–Stalin split Concepts Stalinism · Neo-Stalinism · Socialism in One Country · Socialist realism · Stalinist architecture · Aggravation of class struggle under socialism · Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature Controversies Great Purge · Holodomor · Dekulakization · Gulag · Decossackization · Population transfer in the Soviet Union · Forced settlements in the Soviet Union · Soviet war crimes · Rootless cosmopolitan · Doctors' plot · Moscow Trials · Stalin's antisemitism · NKVD prisoner massacres · Katyn massacre · Nazi–Soviet population transfers · Soviet Census (1937) · Soviet deportations from Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina · Operation North · Mingrelian Affair · Leningrad Affair · Lysenkoism · Censorship of images in the Soviet Union · Operation Lentil (Caucasus) · Operation Priboi · Vinnytsia massacre · Kurapaty · Nazino affair · Deportation of Koreans in the Soviet Union · Purge of the Red Army in 1941 Works Ten Blows speech · Alleged August 19, 1939 speech · Falsifiers of History · Stalin Note De-Stalinization Pospelov Commission · De-Stalinization · Rehabilitation (Soviet) · Khrushchev Thaw · On the Personality Cult and its Consequences · Gomulka thaw · Soviet Nonconformist Art · Shvernik Commission Criticism Stalin Epigram · Lenin's Testament · Leon Trotsky · Ryutin Affair · Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · Vladimir Bukovsky · Andrei Sakharov · Anti-Stalinist left Remembrances Stalin Monument in Budapest · Stalin's Monument (Prague) · Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori · List of places named after Joseph Stalin · Yanks for Stalin · Stalin Prize · Stalin Peace Prize Personal Besarion Jughashvili (father) · Ketevan Geladze (mother) · Ekaterina Svanidze (first wife) · Yakov Dzhugashvili (son) · Konstantin Kuzakov (son) · Nadezhda Alliluyeva (second wife) · Vasily Dzhugashvili (son) · Svetlana Alliluyeva (daughter) Category