Why did Stalin’s daughter defect to the USA? Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s only daughter, defected to the USA because she was unhappy with life in the Soviet Union, and the government wouldn’t let her marry the person she wanted.
Joseph Stalin had three biological children and one child whom he adopted. Svetlana was his youngest child and his only daughter. Svetlana was born to Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and Svetlana changed her surname from Stalin after her father died. An attempt to hide who she was related to. Stalin was devoted to his daughter, but she had a difficult life, as you would expect. She was born in 1926, when Stalin was 48 years old. She was only 27 years old when Stalin died in 1953. She left the Soviet Union and defected to the USA in 1967. What happened? There are many reasons why she would grow to dislike her father, but these are not necessarily reasons why she left the USSR. After all, her father had been dead for fourteen years when she made the decision to leave.
She disliked her father first and foremost because he destroyed her family. Her mother, Nadezhda, was Stalin’s second wife, and she and Stalin often fought. He was probably not an easy person to fight with, and Nadezhda killed herself in 1933, when Svetlana was only 6. Stalin also had an uncle and aunt whom Svetlana was close to arrested and executed for being enemies of the people. She also lost other family members and friends to Stalin’s purges. Two of her three brothers also died. Her eldest brother was captured by the Nazis during World War 2 and died in a prisoner of war camp when Stalin refused a prisoner exchange. Stalin was embarrassed by his son. The second son became an alcoholic and died in 1963.
She also disliked her father because of the way he controlled her life. He was a very controlling father. He prevented her from studying the subjects she wanted at university. She wanted to study literature and writing, but he made her study history and political thought. He refused to allow her to date certain people. When he discovered she had a Jewish boyfriend, he had the boyfriend sent to a gulag in Siberia for ten years. Svetlana defied her father and married another Jewish man in 1944. They had one son and divorced in 1947. Stalin refused to meet her husband. She married the son of one of Stalin’s associates in 1949. They had a daughter and divorced.
Stalin died in 1953, and his controlling influence was gone. It was possible she could have gone on and lived a quiet life, but that wasn’t to be. She married an academic in 1962 and divorced the next year. She was employed as a lecturer and translator in Moscow. We might never even have heard of her if she hadn’t fallen in love and married her fourth husband, Kunwar Brajesh Singh, who was an Indian Communist in Moscow. They fell in love and tried to marry, but the state blocked it. Svetlana was summoned to the Kremlin, where she was told she would not be allowed to marry Singh, oddly, in an office that used to be her father’s. Sing was scrutinized by the state, and he lost a lot of his work and friends. He was also very sick at the time, and he died a year later, in 1967. He was cremate,d and Svetlana wanted to take his ashes back to India so she could scatter them in the Ganges. The Soviet state refused at first, but they relented, and she was allowed to travel to India.
While she was in India, she decided that she didn’t want to return to the USSR. She applied to the Indian government for permission to stay, but they were too afraid of the Soviet Union, and permission was not granted. Then, as a last resort, and possibly as a sudden decision, she went to the United States Embassy in New Delhi and told them she wanted to defect. At first, they wouldn’t believe that she was Stalin’s daughter because nobody even knew that Stalin had a daughter. Then, once they did believe her, they were unwilling to let her defect because of the damage it would do to US-Soviet relations. Finally, Lyndon Johnson decided to give her political asylum.
At first, having the daughter of Stalin defect was a coup for America and quite a serious embarrassment for the USSR. For a few years, Svetlana was a celebrity, and she wrote some bestselling books. However, people quickly forgot her. She also had two grown children in the USSR who either wouldn’t or couldn’t talk to her. She married again in the US and had a daughter, but she never seems to have been happy or been able to settle. She also went back to the USSR in the 80s, but returned to the US after a year. She died in 2011. She may have had more freedom in the US, but it is doubtful she would have been happy anywhere. Psychologically speaking, growing up the daughter of the person who was responsible for the deaths of millions, can’t have been easy and must have left a lasting impression. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/29/stalin-daughter-svetlana-peters-dies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Zhdanov
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-15936172
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alliluyeva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksei_Kapler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Svanidze
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brajesh_Singh
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