Stalin’s Daughter Became an American Citizen… and Wisconsin Cheesehead?

And we continue with our American Stories, and we love telling stories about history. Our next story comes to us from a man who’s simply known as The History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages over on YouTube. The History Guy’s also heard here at our American Stories. Here’s The History Guy with a real beauty: The story of Stalin’s Daughter.

On November twenty-second, twenty eleven, an eighty-five-year-old woman named Lona Peters passed away in Wisconsin from complications due to colon cancer. Eventually, her death made it into some newspapers, but it seemed to go largely unnoticed by an American public that seemed to have largely forgotten who she was and all the attention that she had gained during one of the seminal events of the Cold War that happened on March ninth, nineteen sixty-seven. Lona Peters, otherwise known as Svetlana Alyeva, represented the contradictions of the era of the Cold War and was witness some of the greatest crimes of that era. She’s most known because of her famous father, but is perhaps most notable because of how very different she was from him. The defection of the woman whose birth name was Svetlana Stalina, the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, deserves to be remembered. Born Josef Yukoshvili in the Imperial State of Georgia and then part of the Russian Empire in eighteen seventy-eight, Joseph Stalin already had a reputation for brutality when he was arrested and exiled by the Zirous government in nineteen oh eight. He had purportedly been responsible for a bank robbery in nineteen oh seven that had killed some forty people, and had, as one historian put it, established himself as Georgie’s leading Bolshevik. It was sometime during this period that he started using the name Stalin, meaning roughly “man of steel.” After the October Revolution, Stalin became a trusted supporter of Vladimir Lenin and a vocal supporter the brutal period of political repression and mass execution called the Red Terror. Appointed People’s Commissar for Nationalities in nineteen nineteen, he took Sergeiyanoga’s daughter, Nadezhda, who had worked as a clerk in Lenin’s office as his secretary. The two married later the same year. At the time, Nadezhda was eighteen and Stalin was a forty-year-old widower, his first wife having died of typhus in nineteen oh seven. Stalin and Alueva had two children, Vastly, born in nineteen twenty-one, and Svetlana, born in nineteen twenty-six. At the time of her birth, Stalin was General Secretary of the Soviet Union, had largely gained the upper hand in the struggle to replace Lenin following his death in nineteen twenty-four. As intreagues continued in the Soviet Union, Stalin’s daughter was feted by both the Soviet people and her father, who showered her with gifts and called her “Little Sparrow.” She became a celebrity in her country, compared to Shirley Temple in the United States; thousands of babies were named Svetlana, so it was a perfume. But being the daughter of the “man of steel” did not lead to an easy destiny. While she was being treated like Shirley Temple. So the collectivization of the agricultural sector, essentially forcing peasants onto collective farms, was resulting in various periods of famine over the period of collectivization, and estimated fourteen million people died due to starvation. On November night, nineteen thirty-two, Josef and Nadejda had a public argument about collectivization policy at a dinner party. When they got home that evening, she went into a separate room and shot herself. To prevent scandal, her death was reported as because of an appendicitis. Her children, Vasily was eleven and Svetlana, just six, were told the same lie for fear if they knew the truth, that they might accidentally reveal it. Svetlana did not know the truth of how her mother died until she read it in an American newspaper in nineteen forty-two. Nearly six decades later, she was quoted saying, “I do regret that my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.” While she still enjoyed her father’s favor with a notoriously unsentimental Stalin, even playing little games with her. She and her siblings were also under great pressure of examples to the Soviet people, and even Svetlana was not free from the brutality of her father’s regime. In December nineteen thirty-four, when Sergei Kirov, a fellow revolutionary and close friend of Stalin’s, was assassinated. Stalin used the event as a provocation for the Great Purge. In fact, some historians argue that it was Stalin who was behind Kiro’s murders, pretext for the repressive effort to purge what Stalin called “enemies of the people,” including counter-revolutionaries and essentially anyone who was a threat to Stalin’s power. Among the as many as one and a quarter million victims of the purge was Alexander’s Vanitch, the brother of Stalin’s first wife, whom Vetlana knew his a favorite uncle. More relatives were removed, as well as some of Svetlana’s school friends, whose once privileged lives were shattered when their parents were deemed untrustworthy. When she protested to her father on behalf of one of her friends, her father replied to his fourteen-year-old daughter, “sometimes you are forced to go against even those you love.” She later said that it took her years to grasp the extent of her father’s crimes. In nineteen forty-three, Svetlana met and fell in love with filmmaker Alexey Kapler, who was married in twenty three years. Her senior Coppler leader said that he was drawn to Vetlana by the freedom within her. Stalin disapproved for numerous reasons, but Setlana suspected he was most insulted by the fact that Capler was Jewish. Tapler was arrested in charge with being a British spy, although it was assumed the actual crime was the indiscreet affair with Stalin’s daughter. Stalin destroyed the letters that two had written each other. He banished Vetlana from his house because of moral depravity, and even punished her brother, at whose home she had met Kepler, and her grandparents for failing to intervene. Capler was event so imprisoned for ten years. When Stalin’s purchase continued after the war, they instired more of the Setlana’s family, including her mother’s sister. When she tried to intervene with her father on her aunt’s behalf, Stalin made it clear to her that she also could be accused. On March second, nineteen fifty-three, she was called from class. Her father had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and was dying. Stalin lingered for four days, as she believed God grants an easy death only to the just. The family had difficulty blaming the man who had been both patriarch and villain. Even as family members returned from the Gulag, they became convinced that it wasn’t Stalin’s fault, that someone else was responsible for making them a political target, that Stalin had been poisoned against them, but the prisoners returning from the Gulags were compelling evidence of the crimes of Stalin. The new leader who was consolidating power, Nikita Krushchev, saw bringing down the cult of Stalin as critical to retaining the support of the people. By then, Fetlana had had two failed marriages and had two children. In nineteen fifty-seven, to escape the stigma of her father’s name, she went to her mother’s maiden name and became Setlana al Ueva. She wandered through love affairs, flirted with different religions, spent another year on another failed marriage. A friend later said of her, “she was a very kind and warm-hearted person, but it was impossible to escape her terrible heritage.” She couldn’t trust anyone. How could you if you were Stalin’s daughter? She alternatively had to deal with people who sought to associate with her in hope of getting some favor, and others who loathed her for her father’s crimes. In nineteen sixty-three, well in the hospital for a tons eectomies, Fetlana met an Indian national named Brajes Singh. She sought to marry him, but that required state permission, and once again she suffered from the curse of being Stalin’s daughter. Singh died from impisima in October. In nineteen sixty-six, Fetlana was allowed to travel to give seeing his traditional funeral as long as she did not talk to any foreign reporters. She was staying at the guest house of the Soviet Embassy in Delhi, and on March ninth, nineteen sixty-seven, no one apparently suspected her motives when she went outside, held a cab, entered the U.S. Embassy in India, presented her Soviet passport, and asked for asylum. The request took the Americans completely off guard. Chester Bowls, the U.S. Ambassador to India, didn’t even know Stalin had a dollar or less that she was visiting India. Bulls put Veetlana on the next plane to anywhere but Moscow, and sent her with a diplomat, actually a CIA agent, as escort to Rome. The assessment by the CIA at the time was, “Our own preconceived notions of what Stalin’s daughter must be like. Just didn’t let us believe that this nice, pleasant, attractive, middle-aged Hofstrow could possibly be who she claimed to be.” Sveetlana Alieva’s defection reques fired a lot of political maneuvering. She had spent time both in Italy and then in Switzerland before she could finally go to the United States. The Soviets tried to portray her as crazy, calling her “Kukshuka” or “cuckoo bird.” Later it was revealed that the KGB had made plans to either kidnap her or assassinate her, but they decided not to because it would be too easy to trace back to them in the United States. She married one last time between nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy-three, to an architect named William Peters. They had a daughter named Olga. She went by the name Lana Peters for the rest of her life. In nineteen seventy-eight, she became a U.S. citizen, but in nineteen eighty-four, she and her daughter Olga returned to the Soviet Union, but she found she was shunned there, and she and Olga returned to the United States in nineteen eighty-six. When author Nicholas Thompson decided he wanted to interview her for a book he was doing on U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War in two thousand and six, he had to do a public record search to find her. She was living in Wisconsin when she passed away in November twenty eleven. The New York Times found it difficult to even confirm her death, which wasn’t even reported in the local newspaper. But it does seem that the woman who was so unlike her father had finally escaped her father’s shadow.

And a special thanks as always to Greg Hangler for the production and especial thanks as always to The History Guy. Please subscribe to his YouTube channel, The History Guy. History deserves to be remembered. The story of Lanna Peters. He becomes an American citizen in nineteen seventy-eight, but never ever, I would guess, is ever truly home anywhere. Her story here on our American Stories.