Biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva

Svetlana Alliluyeva was the only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. She defected to the West after his death.

Alliluyeva was born February 28, 1926 in Moscow. Her mother was his second wife. She was raised by a nurse and only occasionally saw her parents. Her mother died when Svetlana was only six. (There are various theories as to how the mother met her death).

Svetlana’s first love was a Jewish filmmaker Alexei Kapler. Her father disapproved of the romance and Kepler was sentenced to ten years in a labor camp in Siberia. A year later, when she was 17, she fell in love with Grigori Morozov, a fellow student at Moscow University. They married and had a son, Joseph, in 1945 but divorced two years later.

She married her second husband, Yuri Zhdanov, in 1949 the same year she graduated from Moscow University. They had a daughter, Ekaterina in 1950 but divorced soon afterwards.

In 1953 her father died and Svetlana adopted her mother's maiden name. She worked as a teacher and translator in Moscow. She first met Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist when he visited Moscow in 1963.

He returned to Moscow in 1965 to work as a translator. Although the two became close they were not allowed to marry. A year later he died and she was allowed to travel to India to take his ashes back so that his family could scatter them in the Ganges River.

On March 6, 1967 she went to the US Embassy in New Delhi and formally asked the American Ambassador for political asylum. She left India immediately and moved via Switzerland to the United States. Upon her arrival in April 1967 Alliluyeva gave a press conference denouncing her father's regime and the Soviet government.

She settled in the United States in April 1967 and published her memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, (1967), and later Only One Year (1969). She later became a United States citizen and married William Wesley Peters, an American architect in 1970.

Shortly after giving birth to a daughter, Lana, the couple separated. She moved to Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1982 but two years later returned to the Soviet Union and settled in Tbilisi.

She left again in 1986 and returned to the United States. In the 1990s she moved back to England but unable to settle she returned finally to the United States. She lived in a retirement home in Wisconsin until her death on November 22, 2011 at 85.