On 28 February 1926, a little girl was born in Moscow in the Soviet Union. Her name was Svetlana Iosifovna Stalina and she was the youngest child Stalin fathered. Svetlana was also her dad’s only daughter. Svetlana was cherished by both of her parents, especially her dad who called her his “little sparrow” and treated her extremely well. It is said that Svetlana was the only person Stalin took orders from and was, in many ways, the closest person the Soviet Union had to America’s Shirley Temple.

For the first ten years after the death of her mother, Svetlana was told alongside her siblings and the wider Soviet population that her mother had died of an issue with her appendix. This lie was to conceal the “potentially anti-Stalin truth” that her mother died by her own hand but as if Stalin would let anyone know about that during his lifetime so he told everyone it was peritonitis, a side effect of appendicitis. Though he didn’t hold back on how the age gap between him and his second wife was enough to suggest (take a mint for this one) that she was old enough to be his kid. EW! Stalin could excuse age gaps but drew the line of his wife’s true cause of death, especially since he had Kremlin staff who knew the true cause arrested or dismissed and the suppression of authentic accounts about what happened continued for many years. That didn’t stop an English journal article from revealing the truth to Svetlana in 1942 and that changed her perspective of her dad from loving to a lying sadistic man.
It was that same year that British Prime Minister came across Svetlana and described her as “a handsome red-haired girl, who kissed her father dutifully” and how the look Stalin gave Churchill as having “looked at me with a twinkle in his eye as it, so I thought, to convey “You see, even we Bolsheviks have a family life”.

As Svetlana matured, her father decided to boss her around. He demanded that she study history instead of literature (something he found too “bohemian”) and that she should never marry Aleksi Kapler, an older Jewish film-maker. He later had Kapler packed off straight to a gulag where the film-maker perished. He was keen however to let her marry a nephew of his first wife but that marriage crumbled within a year but that was only because it happened after Stalin died so he wasn’t actually saying much about that decision.

That all changed in 1967, 14 years after Joseph Stalin kicked the bucket as that was when Svetlana walked into an American Embassy during a trip to India and defected from the USSR. By that point, she had adopted her mother’s maiden name of Alliluyeva It is said to have happened when she was scattering the ashes of another doomed lover, an Indian communist by the name of Brajesh Singh who died the previous year and he was her 4th husband. Another reason was as an act of self-expression. Either way, she was out of there! She embarrassed the Soviet communist party by doing this but that didn’t mean much to her now.

After obtaining US Citizenship in 1970, Svetlana took on the name Lana Peters and remarried. She had a daughter named Olga (also called Chrese Evans) with her 5th husband William Wesley Peters. She also wrote two books which became best sellers and that saw her giving many interviews with the media about her days as the “little princess at the Kremlin”. While she found her new life in the USA as “free, gay (as in happy, not homosexuality) and full of bright colours” her frequent moving about in different parts of the country meant that she also felt excluded and lonely. She returned to the USSR in 1984 and settled in Tblisi before returning to The States in 1986. Svetlana was never really free of the label “Stalin’s daughter” at any part of her life and yet even after having changed her view of her dad, she still recalled of how his face “had shone with fatherly pride the first time she learned to drive a car” and that she also loved and respected him. She also took on the responsibility for the atrocities that had happened during her dad’s ruthless and gory rule of Russia and the 14 other Soviet states.

Having faded largely from the public eye, Svetlana spent her final years in Wisconsin but her death in 2011 sparked a final frenzy of media attention. She was played by Andrea Riseborough in the 2017 film The Death of Stalin.