Svetlana Alliluyeva

Svetlana Alliluyeva (born February 28, 1926, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died November 22, 2011, Richland county, Wisconsin) was the Russian-born daughter of Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin; her defection to the United States in 1967 caused an international sensation.

She was Stalin’s only daughter and a product of his second marriage with Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana graduated from Moscow University (1949), where she taught Soviet literature and English language (1953–65) before joining the Progres publishing house as a translator of Russian literature into English (1965–66). After the death of her third husband in 1966, she was permitted to leave the Soviet Union to visit his native India. In New Delhi she circumvented the Soviet Embassy and, with the help of American officials, defected to the United States in the spring of 1967.

She burned her Soviet passport, became an American citizen, signed a lucrative publishing contract, and began translating her memoirs. The resulting work, Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), was a telling account of her life as Stalin’s youngest child. Her follow-up book, Only One Year (1969), described the events surrounding her defection. In 1970 she married architect William Wesley Peters, who had worked with Frank Lloyd Wright; the couple divorced in 1973. In 1982 she left the United States to live in England with her daughter Olga Peters before returning to the Soviet Union (1984), where Soviet officials welcomed her and restored her Soviet citizenship. Her third book, The Faraway Music (1984), outlined her disenchantment with the United States and Great Britain. After clashing with Soviet authorities, she renounced her Soviet citizenship once again and resettled in the United States (1986). She lived alternately in the United States and England.