Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin’s Daughter, Lana Peters died of Colon Cancer in Wisconsin

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Lana Peters, who had defected to the US while in India at the height of the Cold War died on 22 November 2011 in Wisconsin. At her birth, on 28 February 1926 she was named Svetlana Stalina, the only daughter and last surviving child of the brutal Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin. After Stalin died in 1953, she took her mother’s last name, Alliluyeva. In 1970, after her defection and an American marriage, she became and remained Lana Peters.

Life of Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Lana Peters

She graduated from Moscow University in 1949 with history. She  initially workied as a teacher and translator.
Her defection in 1967 to the US was partly motivated, among other things, by the poor treatment by Soviet authorities of Indian communist Brijesh Singh, with whom she had a relationship. She left the Soviet Union in 1966 for India, where she planned to leave the ashes of Singh who had died in the USSR. Instead of returning to her country, she walked unannounced into the US embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum.

Upon reaching the US in April 1967 she burned her passport, denouncing communism and her father, whom she called a moral and spiritual monster.

She took the name Lana Peters upon marrying architect William Wesley Peters in the US. Peters became a United States citizen in 1978.

She wrote four books, including two best-selling memoirs. Her first memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was published in 1967 and made more than $2.5m (£1.6m). In 1969 she recounted her journey from the Soviet Union in a second memoir, Only One Year.

She returned to the Soviet Union briefly in 1984, renouncing the US. However she left again for Georgia after her feud with relatives.  During the latter years, she constantly moved from America to England, then to France, then back to America, gradually fading from the public eye.

Other famous exiles from USSR: Igor Gouzenko -spy, 1945, Canada; Rudolf Nureyev - ballet star, 1961, France; Anatoly Golitsyn - KGB officer, 1961, Finland; Alexander Solzhenitsyn - dissident writer, 1974, expelled to US; Natan Sharansky, human rights activist - 1986, Israel