Svetlana Alliluyeva, Russian, Soviet, And CIS History, Biographies

Related Category: Russian, Soviet, And CIS History, Biographies

Svetlana Alliluyeva[svyetlA´nA Al-lelOO´yuvu] Pronunciation Key, 1926–, only daughter of the Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. After her father's death (1953), she was a teacher and translator in the Soviet Union. In late 1966, while in India, she defected to the West. She left a grown son and daughter from two earlier marriages in the Soviet Union. She settled in the United States in Apr., 1967, and published her memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, (1967), and later Only One Year (1969). Becoming a U.S. citizen, she married (1970) an American architect, William Peters, but separated from him after having given birth to a daughter. She returned to the Soviet Union in 1984 and settled in Tbilisi. In 1986 she again left the USSR, returned to the United States, and during the 1990s settled in England.

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