Stalin's only daughter and the Kremlin's first insider witness to defect to the West
In a 2010 interview she said of her father: "He broke my life" — when he refused to let her study literature and when he had Aleksei Kapler arrested.
The only daughter of Joseph Stalin, she defected to the United States via India in 1967 and caused an international sensation with the first insider memoir of Kremlin life. Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967) exposed her father's private character and the world of the Soviet ruling elite; she returned to the USSR in 1984, left again in 1986, and spent her life unable to escape Stalin's shadow.
Career Timeline
- 1949Graduated History Faculty, Moscow State University
- 1954Awarded Candidate of Philological Sciences degree
- 1956–1967Researcher and translator, Institute of World Literature
- 1967Defected to the US via India; published Twenty Letters to a Friend
- 1978Naturalized US citizen as Lana Peters
- 1984–1986Returned to the USSR, then left again for the United States
Related historical events
The 1967 Defection
Svetlana Alliluyeva's defection was one of the Cold War's most dramatic personal ruptures. In December 1966, she received Soviet permission to travel to India (her first trip abroad) to scatter the ashes of her partner, the Indian communist Brajesh Singh, in the Ganges. The Soviet leadership was deeply uneasy; Prime Minister Alexei Kosygin warned her that "orthodox Hindus sometimes burn the widow along with the husband." She refused to be deterred.
On the evening of March 6, 1967, while staying at the Soviet embassy in Delhi, Alliluyeva hailed a taxi with a single small suitcase and drove to the American embassy. Though the chancery was closed, she told the Marine guard on duty: "I am Stalin's daughter, and I am requesting political asylum." Ambassador Chester Bowles, summoned urgently from his sickbed, handed her a lined notepad and asked her to write down who she was and why she wanted to go to the United States. She produced a fluent, sixteen-to-eighteen-page statement in excellent English. Bowles cabled Washington: "Unless you instruct me to the contrary by midnight, I am putting her on the one a.m. plane for Rome." No reply came.
When Bowles asked whether she was certain, she fired back: "If this is your decision, I shall go to the press tonight and announce that democratic India would not take me and now democratic America refuses to take me." Shortly after midnight, escorted by a CIA officer, she boarded a Qantas flight to Rome. The Soviets raged at the Indian government; after transiting through Rome and Switzerland, Alliluyeva arrived in New York in April 1967 and immediately held a press conference denouncing her father's legacy and the Soviet regime. The first defection of a Kremlin insider to the West was an international sensation, and the publication that same year of Twenty Letters to a Friend amplified its impact.