Stalin's only daughter dies

By Lee Ha-na Svetlana Alliluyeva, also known as Lana Peters, died of colon cancer on Nov. 22. She was 85. She has lived off and on in Wisconsin after becoming a U.S. citizen, BBC reported, quoting Richland County Coroner Mary Turner. She was born in February 1926 as Svetlana Stalina to notorious dictator Josef Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She took her mother’s last name once her father died in 1953. Peters was famous only for being the child of Josef Stalin. She wrote two memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend and Only One Year, which became international bestsellers. Josef Stalin is infamous for the millions of people murdered under his rule, but he was also known to have been a loving father to Peters when she was a child, calling her his “little sparrow.” This all changed as she grew older and Stalin became occupied with the war with Germany. In her memoirs, she describes parts of her dark past, including her mother’s decision to commit suicide when Peters was only six and her father’s command of sending her first love to Siberia for 10 years. She had already been married twice before defecting to the U.S. in 1967. There she married an American, William Peters, and had a daughter named Olga, although this marriage also ended in divorce. She became a U.S. citizen in 1978 and she ended up moving to the United Kingdom with Olga and then returned to the Soviet Union, where they both were granted citizenship. In 1986, she came back to the U.S., where she lived the remainder of her life. Peters passed away in a nursing home in Richland Center. Throughout her whole life, whether she was living in India, the U.S. or in the Soviet Union, she was unable to escape the negativity associated with her last name. It was reported she never fully forgave her father for his brutality towards her. Her son from her first marriage passed away in 2008. Aside from Olga, Peters is also survived her daughter from her second marriage named Yekaterina Zhdanov.