Svetlana Stalina, only daughter of tyrant Josef Stalin died this month of colon cancer aged 85. Her defection to the West during the Cold War was a huge embarrassment to the ruling communist party and in 1970 after her defection, she married an American and became and remained Lana Peters.
She became famous mainly because people were curious to know more about Stalin’s only daughter and she used the infamous Stalin name to write two best-selling autobiographies. Stalin doted on his little daughter and called her his “little sparrow” and showered her with presents. She became the equivalent of Shirley Temple in her country and thousands of babies were named Svetlana after her.
But she was restless and couldn’t settle, always on the move visiting India, England, France, America and she went back to Moscow in 1984. She once lived in a cabin with no electricity in northern Wisconsin, a Roman Catholic convent in Switzerland and in 1992 was living in a shabby part of West London in a home for elderly people with emotional problems.
Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, committed suicide in 1932 and Svetlana, who was 6 at the time was told that her mother had died of appendicitis but later learned the truth. Stalin was ruthless, even with his own family. His son Yakov was captured by the Nazis who offered to exchange him for a German general but he refused and Yakov was killed. Stalin also sent his daughter’s first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia for 10 years.
“You can’t regret your fate,” Ms. Peters once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”
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