Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva (28 February 1926-22 November 2011) was the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She defected to the United States in 1967 and became a naturalized citizen in 1978.
Biography[]
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva was born in Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union in 1926, the daughter of Joseph Stalin and the sister of Vasily Stalin. Her mother shot herself in 1932. Alliluyeva fell in love with a 38-year-old Jewish filmmaker, Aleksei Kapler, when she was 16, leading to her father sending Kapler to ten years of exile and hard labor. She married another Jewish man in 1944, but they divorced amicably in 1947. She went on to marry the son of Stalin's right-hand man Andrei Zhdanov in 1949, but they divorced in 1950. After her father's death in 1953, Alliluyeva worked as a lecturer and translator in Moscow, and she fell in love with the Indian communist Brajesh Singh, although they were not allowed to marry. In 1967, she defected to the United States at the American consulate in New Delhi, leaving her adult children in the USSR and denouncing her father's legacy and the Soviet government at a press conference in New York City on her arrival in America. She later moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she lectured and wrote, before moving to Pennington, New Jersey and then to Wisconsin. She became a successful author, but she donated most of the proceeds from her books to charity, and she struggled financially during the 1980s. In 1984, she and her daughter moved back to Russia after her citizenship was restored and Stalinism experienced a slight rehabilitation, having come to believe that America and the USSR were morally equivalent. She returned to Wisconsin in 1986 and died in Richland Center in 2011 at the age of 85.