The Life Of Stalin’s Daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva

Svetlana Alliluyeva was probably the only person who melted the heart of the fearsome Joseph Stalin. This happened when she was a little girl. At that time, of course, she failed to establish a link between the loving man who played with her and the Russian leader who had sown terror in his own territory.

This woman surprised the world in the 60’s when she left the then Soviet Union and asked for asylum in the United States. Remember that this country was one of his father’s biggest opponents. From that moment on, she was used as a propaganda prize for the famous Cold War. They used her to discredit the regime led by her father.

The pain and contradictions that Svetlana Alliluyeva experienced explains why she changed her name several times. She was born Svetlana Iosifovna Stalin and she then changed her father’s surname and became Svetlana Alliluyeva. Eventually, she stopped using that name as well and ended up as Lana Peters.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, a paradoxical childhood

Svetlana Alliluyeva was Iosif Stalin’s only daughter. He had two other sons, one from his first marriage and another from the second, with Svetlana’s mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Cinemas who have studied Stalin’s life point out that only three people softened the heart of this leader. One of them was his mother, Yekaterina Gueladze.

Another person who melted his heart was his first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze. He was really in love with her, but she died of tuberculosis very young. Some say that Stalin was never the same after losing Ekaterina. Another that this leader really loved was his daughter Svetlana. She had no idea that the man who pampered her every day was one of the most cruel men in Russia’s history.

Svetlana Alliluyeva received her education in the Kremlin in Moscow as if the rest of the world did not exist. She lived in a kind of ivory tower and completely ignored what was happening in the outside world. She was raised by a babysitter. Her father did not spend much time with her, but he always managed to tell her how much he loved her. In fact, Svetlanana’s mother seemed the most distant.

An absent mother

When Svetlana Alliluyeva was six years old, her mother died suddenly. Official sources said she developed a fatal appendicitis.

Although this has always been a mystery, there is enough evidence to suggest that the death of Nadia, Svetlana’s mother, was not natural. She had fallen wildly in love with Stalin, that’s for sure. However, when she left for college, she was disappointed to see what he was doing with Russia.

Nadia was one of the few people who shouted “executioner” in Stalin’s face. The day before she died, she had a heated public discussion with the leader. There are testimonies claiming that he was physically aggressive towards her in public.

The next day she was found lying on the bed with a bullet in her heart. Most thought she had committed suicide, while others thought her husband had killed her. Svetlana Alliluyeva was forced to believe the official version.

The sad awakening

When Svetlana Alliluyeva grew up, she also began to perceive that things in her country were not as she thought up until then. She had a close and loving bond with her father until she turned 16 years old. At that age, Svetlana had already learned English. One day she had access to an article in this language which indicated that her mother had committed suicide.

This news triggered a great disagreement with him who until then had been a loving father to her. Later she fell in love with a film director who was much older than her. Stalin did not approve of this relationship. To end it, he ordered some of his people to arrest him and take him to Siberia. When she was only 19 years old, she married and had a child. Maybe she just did this to rebel against her father. This was the first of four short marriages that left her with two other daughters.

When her father died, she was not allowed to talk about the leader’s private life. Her feelings towards her father were always ambivalent, she loved and hated him at the same time. About 14 years later, she went on a trip to India all alone. She left her 19 and 16 year old children alone. She arrived in the United States in April 1967, where she began working as a writer. They paid her three million dollars for her autobiography.

She remarried and had a daughter, Olga. After her recent divorce and various avatars, all caused by the political shadow that followed her, Svetlana tried to commit suicide in 1991, but was unsuccessful. She died of cancer in 2011 and asked everyone not to send her body back to Russia after her death.