Svetlana Alliluyeva
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Svetlana Alliluyeva Stalina (born February 28, 1926, Svetlana Iosifovna Dzhugashvili) (Russian: Светлана Иосифовна Сталина) is the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. A writer and naturalized United States citizen, Alliluyeva caused an international furore by defecting to the United States in 1967.
Like most children of high-ranking Soviet officials, Svetlana was raised by a nanny and only occasionally saw her parents. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (Stalin's second wife), died on 9 November in 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.
Svetlana fell in love at the age of 16 with a Jewish filmmaker, Alexei Kapler (of age 40). Her father vehemently disapproved of the romance. Later Kapler was sentenced to ten years in exile in an industrial city of Vorkuta near the Arctic Circle, and it is speculated that the real reason was this romance.
At 17, she fell in love with a fellow student at Moscow University, Grigori 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.
Svetlana'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, Ekaterina, in 1950, but this marriage also dissolved soon afterward.
Though press reports (such as the German magazine 'Stern') sometimes claimed that Svetlana was married a third time, in 1951, to Mikhail Kaganovich, the son of Lazar Kaganovich, another primary Stalin associate, Svetlana 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. Svetlana reports: "he, when he grew up, married a girl student of his own age."
After her father's death in 1953, Svetlana 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. Svetlana 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.
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 Svetlana 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.
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 Switzerland, via Rome. She stayed in Switzerland for 6 weeks before proceeding to the United States.
Upon her arrival in April 1967, 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.
Due to the high profile of Alliluyeva's defection, her outspokenness, her connections as daughter of Stalin, etc., the Soviet Union demanded and received from the United States, in December 1967, an assurance that any future Soviet defectors would be debriefed by Soviet officials before being granted asylum.
In 1970, Alliluyeva answered an invitation from Frank Lloyd Wright's widow, Olgivanna 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 Svetlana 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. Amazingly, 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.
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 now lives in a retirement home in Wisconsin.
[edit] Books by Svetlana Alliluyeva
- Twenty Letters To A Friend (autobiography, published 1967, London, written 1963) ISBN 0-06-010099-0
- Translated by Paul Chavchavadze, Only One Year, Harper & Row (1969), hardcover, 444 pages, ISBN 0-06-010102-4
- Faraway Music (1984, India, 1992, Moscow)
