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Svetlana Alliluyeva

Alliluyeva, Svetlana (svyĕtläˈnä äl-lĕlōˈyəvə) [key], 1926–, only daughter of the Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Originally Svetlana Stalina, she took her mother's surname after her father's death (1953), and was a teacher and translator in the Soviet Union. In 1966, while returning her third husband's ashes to his native India, she defected to the West; she left a grown son and daughter from earlier marriages behind in the USSR. She settled in the United States in 1967, and published a memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967), and Only One Year (1969). In 1970 she married an American architect, William W. Peters, and afterwards used the name Lana Peters; they had a daughter but divorced in 1973. Now a U.S. citizen, she returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 and renounced her defection, but she left again in 1986 and subsequently lived in the United States and Europe.


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