Tales of the Bizarre: Whatever Happened to Stalin’s Daughter, the Cold War’s Most Famous Defector?

Zhanna Slor August 13, 6:48 pm

1967 Wire Photo Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva in NYC — Public Domain

A better question might be what didn’t happen to Stalin’s daughter? After four husbands, three children (two of whom she abandoned in the USSR upon emigrating), two bestselling memoirs, near bankruptcy, a brief return to the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s and too many cities and countries she called home to name them all, Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina, who changed her name first to Svetlana Alliluyeva then later to Lana Peters (a logical decision on her part; who on earth would possibly want to go around with the surname Stalin these days?) ended up in Wisconsin, of all places.

CAMBRIDGE, WI - APRIL 25: A cow walks toward a barn for milking on Hinchley's Dairy Farm on April 25, 2017 near Cambridge, Wisconsin. President Donald Trump today tweeted "Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult. We will not stand for this."

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As a fellow Soviet immigrant who also ended up in Wisconsin, I’m not sure how I lived my whole life not knowing that the only child of Stalin to live to middle age also chose America’s cheese state to reside in, much like the elders of my family did in the 1990s (I can only guess it has something to do with the comparable weather?). As weird as it is that she would spend her last years in Richland Center, WI, it pales in comparison to the rest of her life story.

A Brief Biography of “The Kremlin’s Little Princess” and Her Siblings

Young Svetlana Stalina being carried by her father in 1935

Public Domain

Widely considered the Cold War’s most famous defector, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana was truly one of the oddest characters to come out of the 20th century. And what would one expect, with a surname like that? How does one stomach the fact that their father was responsible for murdering almost as many people as Hitler? Well, it’s impossible. And judging from her nomadic lifestyle and inexplicable choices, it surely did a number on her.

That she even lived as long as she did was a feat on its own, so let’s just start there.

Yakov

Stalin’s first son, Yakov, was born in 1907 to his first wife, Kato Svanidze, who died nine months after Yakov was born (from typhus, not anything nefarious, shockingly). Stalin left Yakov with her relatives for 14 years before sending for him, as Stalin was not yet Stalin in 1907, and was still called Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili. (Yeah, try pronouncing that a couple times!) By the time Yakov reached the Kremlin, Stalin had not only instigated one of the biggest failures of modern civilization — the Soviet Union — he had also remarried and fathered two more kids, Svetlana and her brother Vasily, with a woman who was only a few years older than Yakov. By all accounts, Stalin was quite hostile to the poor motherless teen, perhaps because Yakov looked so much like his first wife. In 1928, Yakov fell in love with the daughter of an Orthodox priest, but his father wouldn’t allow him to get married. Yakov responded by attempting suicide, shooting himself in the chest and just barely missing the heart. Stalin is reported to have brushed off the attempt by saying, “He can’t even shoot straight.”

1936: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, 1879 - 1953), addressing the Extraordinary 8th All Union Congress of Soviets on the draft of the USSR's constitution.

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Yakov did end up marrying the woman, and they had a child, who died of pneumonia as an infant. They eventually divorced, and after a pretty active romantic life, he married a Jewish dancer from Odessa named Yulia, and in 1938 had a daughter named Galina. Yulia was already married at the time, but her husband “coincidentally” got arrested and executed not long after Yakov met her. Their marriage didn’t last long, however; WWII was on its way, and five years later, Yakov died in concentration camp at the age of 36, after he was captured by Germans and his father refused to make a deal for his release, allegedly saying, “I will not trade a marshal for a lieutenant.” And you thought your parents were bad!

Vasily

Stalin’s youngest son, Vasily, did not fare much better. At the age of 25, he was made the youngest major-general in the Red Army. But as the son of the Soviet leader, Vasily was hated by most of his fellow soldiers, who felt he was an informant for his father. He was also described as short-tempered and irritable. After Stalin’s death in 1953, he began to get into various troubles with Russian authorities and ended up in prison, then died from excessive alcohol abuse at the age of 40.

The absence of Svetlana and Vasily’s mother, Nadezhda Sergeyevna Alliluyeva, who died by suicide in 1932 when they were both quite young, did not help matters.

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (1878 - 1953, right) with his son, Vasily (1921 - 1962) and daughter Svetlana (1926 - 2011) at one of Stalin's dachas, former Soviet Union, June 1935. Both children are by Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. The photograph was taken by Stalin's head of personal security, Nikolai Vlasik (1896 - 1967).

Joseph Stalin, with his son, Vasily and daughter Svetlana Laski Diffusion/Getty Images

Svetlana “Little Sparrow”

Svetlana was born in 1926. Considered the “princess of the Kremlin,” she was apparently the only child Stalin really paid much attention to. When she was 16, she fell in love with a 38-year-old Jewish filmmaker named Aleksei Kepler, a union that her father did not approve of. While most fathers might just enforce a stricter curfew or something reasonable, Svetlana’s father was Stalin, and in order to keep them apart, Stalin had the poor guy sent to the Arctic Circle for five years and then to a labor camp for another five. (Svetlana claimed that despite several more relationships and marriages, Kepler remained the love of her life.)

In 1944, Svetlana married a Jewish college student, another pairing Stalin was not happy with because Jews were considered a lower class of people in the extremely antisemitic Soviet Union. Stalin did not go to the wedding, but at least he didn’t send this one to a gulag. By that time, since she’d become an adult, Svetlana claimed that he had lost all interest in her. She and her first husband had one son together, Iosef, before divorcing in 1947, after which Stalin arranged for her to marry one of his close associates, Yuri Zhdanov. They had a daughter named Yekaterina, then they too divorced.

In 1962, she married Ivan Svanidze, the nephew of Stalin’s first wife, Kato Svanidze, but this marriage only lasted a year. (I’m sensing a pattern in this family!)

Svetlana Defects to the United States

Russian writer and lecturer Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 - 2011) speaking to the press at John F Kennedy International Airport, New York, 24th April 1967. She was the daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

Harry Benson/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In the early 1960s, Svetlana was romantically involved with an Indian communist she’d met in Moscow, who was gravely ill and died in 1966. For her first trip outside the USSR, Svetlana was allowed to travel to India to take the ashes to his family to pour into the Ganges River. While here, in 1967, she approached the United States Embassy in New Delhi and told them of her desire to defect, and they helped her immigrate to America the same year. She left her two children, who were now teenagers, behind, and never sent for them. Yekaterina never forgave her for this, though Iosef eventually reinstated contact with her decades later. Though she did not bring her children, she did bring the manuscript for her nonfiction book Twenty Letters to a Friend, published in 1967 to major success, as it was still the height of the Cold War and Americans were unsurprisingly interested in what kind of upbringing she might have had. The royalties from the sales of the book made her a millionaire. She published another memoir in 1969, called Only One Year.

Svetlana married one more time, from 1970 to 1973, to an American architect/widower named William Wesley Peters (an acolyte of Frank Lloyd Wright and also his son-in-law). William had been married to Frank and his wife Olgivanna’s daughter, also named Svetlana. Olgivanna, who was from Montenegro and was born Olga Ivanova, and for some reason combined these names into one, had in fact introduced William and Svetlana, thinking this Svetlana was some kind of reincarnation of her daughter, who’d died in a car accident. They married three weeks after meeting, and had a daughter named Olga Peters, before also splitting up.

(Original Caption) 5/21/1971-San Rafael, CA- Svetlana Stalin, daughter of the late Russian Premier, reportedly is expecting a baby, Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire said, Dec. 18. Miss Stalin, 44, married American architect William Wesley Peters, 58, last April. The couple is shown in a 1970 filer. It was her third marriage, his second.

Bettmann/Getty

One thing that cannot be argued about Stalin’s daughter: She had serious commitment issues. On top of all the marriages and pseudo-marriages, she moved around a lot. During the ’70s, Svetlana and Olga lived in England, among other places. They even returned to the USSR in 1984, and both were given Soviet citizenship, only to leave again in 1986.

Eventually she ended up in Wisconsin because Olgivanna Wright had a summer studio in Spring Green, Wisconsin. She spent her time between the studio and an elderly home in Richland Center, until her death in 2011. Her daughter Olga (who would later also change her name, to Chrese Evans) lives in Portland, Oregon, where she owns an antique store.

“Wherever I go,” Svetlana (now Lana) once told the Wisconsin State Journal, “here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I always will be a political prisoner of my father’s name.” Sad, but sort of true.

All in all, Stalin’s daughter had quite an eventful life. She was clearly troubled, and deservedly so, as has been noted by many who knew her, but at least she was able to live, unlike many of the people who lost their lives under her father’s regime. A character based on her was portrayed by Andrea Riseborough in the 2017 dark comedy The Death of Stalin (pictured below).

THE DEATH OF STALIN, Andrea Riseborough as Svetlana, 2017.

IFC Films /Courtesy Everett Collection