Stalin’s youngest child
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva was born in 1926, the daughter of Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Her mother died in 1932, and the official explanation was illness, though it is widely accepted that she took her own life. Svetlana grew up within the Kremlin circle, close to her father but also shaped by his suspicion and the family tragedies that followed. Relatives on her mother’s side were imprisoned, and her father objected to her first romantic relationship, with a Jewish filmmaker, Aleksei Kapler, who was sent to a labour camp.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, she worked as a translator and teacher in Moscow. She disliked the family name and later used her mother’s surname, Alliluyeva. In 1956, following Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech about Stalin’s crimes, she became increasingly aware of what her father had done, and her private views shifted.
Brajesh Singh and the journey to India
In the 1960s she met Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist visiting Moscow, who was ill and was being treated there. They formed a close relationship. Soviet authorities did not allow them to marry, and Singh died in Moscow in October 1966. Svetlana asked permission to take his ashes to India for a Hindu ceremony. The request was unusual, but it was granted, and she travelled to India in December 1966 and stayed in Singh’s family village in Uttar Pradesh.
She was supposed to return after a short time. Instead she extended her stay. Soviet officials increasingly pressed her to go back, and she decided not to.
The embassy in New Delhi
On 6 March 1967, Alliluyeva went to the United States embassy in New Delhi and asked for help. The American ambassador, Chester Bowles, was reportedly caught unprepared. Washington had to decide quickly how to handle a request of such sensitivity. She had not been politically active, and the reasons for her wish to leave appear to have been personal and spiritual as much as political.
The Indian government, which wished to avoid a dispute with Moscow, did not want a public confrontation. She was soon flown to Rome and then to Switzerland. There she stayed for a number of weeks, reportedly at a religious house, while the question of her destination was resolved. It was thought unwise to bring her directly to the United States at the time, and this was not an easy diplomatic matter.
Arrival in America
She arrived in New York on 21 April 1967. Her first press conference, held shortly afterward, drew intense interest. She said that she did not believe in communism or capitalism as such, and that the idea of the state controlling private life was not acceptable to her. She spoke of religious feeling. She also emphasised that she wanted to live quietly. The Soviet government called her actions a betrayal, and the official reaction suggested she was unstable.
Her departure was a propaganda setback for Moscow, which was preparing to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolution in November. The person with the most famous surname in Soviet history had rejected the system. For Washington, it was an opportunity, although American officials generally tried to avoid appearing to use her.
Twenty Letters to a Friend
In 1967 she published Twenty Letters to a Friend. She had written it in the Soviet Union in 1963, and the manuscript reached the West with her help. The book is a series of reflective letters about her childhood and family, her mother’s death, her father as a domestic figure and as a dictator, and her own beliefs. It is more a personal memoir than a political study.
It was a publishing success and reached a large international audience. Reviewers noted that she did not portray her father as a cartoon villain. She described him as intelligent, controlling and capable of great cruelty, and she wrote about the effect of that cruelty on the people around him. A second book, Only One Year, followed in 1969, covering her first year in the West.
Later life
In 1970 she married William Wesley Peters, an American architect associated with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin community, and had a daughter, Olga. The marriage ended a few years later. She moved between the United States and Britain, and lived modestly for periods. In 1984 she returned to the Soviet Union and was given Soviet citizenship again, but she was unhappy there and left in 1986. She spent her final years in the United States, in Wisconsin, and died in 2011.
Her story is often remembered as a defection, but the term fits only partly. She did not leave on a political mission, and she was uncertain about where she belonged. Whatever the motive, her decision brought attention to the human side of Stalinism, and her memoir offered Western readers an unusual personal view of the family at the centre of the Soviet state.