Stalin Daughter

Svetlana Alliluyeva was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva.

Stalin daughter was born on 28 February 1926.

Svetlana Mother

On 9 November 1932, when she was 6, her mother shot herself in the head following a public spat with Stalin at a dinner party.

The Stalin told young Svetlana that her mother had died of appendicitis.

Later she read that her mother’s committed suicide in an English magazine given to her in the winter of 1941.

Stalin Attitude towards her Daughter

Until then she had lived a closed, protected life.

She lived first at the Kremlin, and after her mother’s death, at the family dacha at Zubalovo.

Svetlana had always been happiest here and on holidays in the Crimea.

She was surrounded by an affectionate extended family of mother relative.

There is no doubt about Stalin’s affection for Svetlana, his favorite child.

His many touching and affectionate letters to her testify to that.

It was not until she became a woman and fell in love for the first time that she encountered the darker side to his nature.

Due to her love affair her relationship began to change.

Stalin Daughter and Alexis Kapler

During the war, at a party thrown by her brother Vasily, 16 years old Svetlana met the 40 year-old film director Alexis Kapler.

Physically attractive, Kapler was a clever man and a great conversationalist.

He swept Impressionable young Svetlana off her feet.

Their few encounters— walks, trips to the cinema and art galleries—were closely monitored by Stalin’s agents.

Later they gave him transcripts of all their telephone conversations.

A furious Stalin soon found the excuse for getting Kapler out of the way.

Stalin condemning him as an “English spy” after Stalin agents spotted him fraternizing with foreign journalists.

Kapler was sent into exile for five years and a further term of five years of exile after that was completed.

After the affair with Kapler, Stalin daughter became estranged from her father.

Svetlana Marital Life

In 1944, while a student at Moscow University, she married Jewish fellow-student Grigory Morozov.

Later they divorced in 1947, not long after the birth of a son, Josef.

Stalin Daughter tried to patch up her relationship with Stalin by marrying again in 1949 to Yury Zhdanov.

Yury was the son of top Party bureaucrat Andrey Zhdanov, a man of whom she thought Stalin would approve.

The couple, who had a daughter, Katya, divorced in 1952.

Svetlana’s third husband was Indian Communist Brajesh Singh. When he died in 1966 she was allowed an exit visa to travel to India with his ashes.

Defection to United States

She did not return to the Soviet Union and defected in Rome, leaving her children behind in the Soviet Union.

She settled in Princeton, New Jersey, in April 1967, where she wrote Only One Year (1969), about her life in the Soviet Union and the aftereffects of her defection.

In the West, as the daughter of a major Soviet political figure, Stalin daughter was feted by the intellectual glitterati and was frequently interviewed on television and in the press.

Not long after settling in the United States, Svetlana became a U.S. citizen.

She had a fourth, short-lived marriage to American architect William Peters, by whom she had a daughter, Olga, in 1971.

In the years that followed, Stalin Daughter underwent a profound religious conversion, and it was for this reason that she moved to England in 1982 in order to send her daughter to a Quaker school.

Return to Soviet Union

With the improving political climate in the Soviet Union, Svetlana decided to return in 1984, but her now thoroughly Westernized daughter, who spoke no Russian, hated it there.

They had been obliged to settle, with considerable unease but away from public scrutiny, in Stalin’s own home country of Georgia.

But two years later Svetlana and her daughter left Tbilisi, where they had been living, and returned to the United States.

Her stay proved brief, and she moved again to England, determined to keep the press from her door.

Last days of Stalin Daughter

She became increasingly reclusive, although she has since found spiritual comfort in a new and profound religious faith.

Stalin Daughter, for the most part, lived the last two years of her life in southern Wisconsin.

She lived either in Richland Center or in Spring Green, the location of Wright’s summer studio “Taliesin”.

Stalin Daughter died on 22 November 2011 from complications arising from colon cancer in Richland Center, where she had spent time while visiting from Cambridge.