The only daughter of brutal Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin - who defected to the United States in 1967 and became a vocal critic of the Soviet Union - has died at age 85, The New York Times reported Monday. Born Svetlana Stalina on February 28, 1926, she led an epic and complex life that ended in obscurity and poverty after decades of wandering.
She died of colon cancer on November 22 in Richland Center, Wisconsin. Her two name changes reflected her shifting fortunes. She took her mother's last name, Alliluyeva, after Stalin's 1953 death and fall from grace. She then became Lana Peters in 1970 after her defection and brief marriage to American architect William Wesley Peters.
But she could never escape her father's shadow. In a 2010 interview with the Wisconsin State Journal, Peters said of her father: "He broke my life." "Wherever I go," she said, "here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever - Australia, some island - I always will be a political prisoner of my father's name."
Known as "the little princess" of the Kremlin, she was a child celebrity in the Soviet Union, where thousands of babies were named Svetlana in her honour. Once in India, Peters evaded Soviet agents and sought asylum at the US embassy in New Delhi. She denounced the Soviet regime at a news conference upon her arrival in New York and earned more than $2.5 million from her autobiography, "Twenty Letters to a Friend," according to the Times. She recounted her defection in a second memoir, "Only One Year," published in 1969.
Peters returned to Moscow in November 1984 - where she denounced the West and said she had been a pet of the CIA - after officials began to rehabilitate Stalin's legacy and allowed her to communicate with the children she left behind. She returned to the United States in April 1986 and disavowed her anti-Western statements. Friends told the Times she spent much of her life wandering from the United States to England, France and even a convent in Switzerland.