Svetlana Alliluyeva

Born in Moscow, Russia, Soviet Union, to Joseph Stalin and his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva on February 28, 1926, Svetlana missed her parents for her entire childhood. As it was a norm with the high ranking Russian families, she rarely saw her parents and was mostly looked after by a nanny. The feelings of loneliness would creep up on her, eventually taking a permanent stay in her consciousness for an entire lifetime. During her childhood, she was unaware of people’s perception of her father.

She loved her father, like any daughter would do, and Stalin too loved her. He would shower her with gifts whenever they met and she struggled to find some time with her father alone, but he being the ruler of an entire Soviet Union, wasn’t able to. Her mother, on the other hand, was facing demons of her own. Stalin did love her as she was his only daughter and took care of all her needs and met her whenever he found the time. For the rest of the world, he might have been one of the cruellest men, but for his lonely daughter, he was just a father whom she missed dearly.

When Svetlana was six years old, her mother committed suicide. Many theories made rounds regarding her death and some even said that Stalin himself killed her, but Svetlana was told that she had died of appendix complications.

Her mother was suffering from serious depression, and had clashed several times with Stalin in public, so her death was shown as result of a suicide. In August 1942, the British leader Winston Churchill visited Russia and met Svetlana. He found her a thing of beauty, and a pretty young girl.

Svetlana Alliluyeva was emotionally destroyed by the death of her mother and as she approached adulthood, her relationship with her father turned bitter by each passing day. At the age of 17, she fell in love with a filmmaker Aleksei Kapler who was more than double her age. When Stalin came to know of the affair, he was raged and disapproved Svetlana’s desire of marrying him. Stalin then imprisoned the filmmaker and Svetlana could do nothing but accept her fate and now she finally realized the fact that her father was not a ‘very nice man’.

She couldn’t hate her father for long, and being an innocent teenager, she thought it was for the best. Somehow, she found another love when a Moscow University’s student Grigory Morozov fell in love with Svetlana and proposed her. She loved him too and seeing her conviction, the father, although disapproved the match, said yes to the marriage and Svetlana married her man at the age of 17. After two years of being together, the couple got a divorce, although they remained friends for a long time after that.

This was a great opportunity for Stalin to get her married to a man of his choice, and he arranged her marriage with Yuri Zhdanov, who happened to be the son of the right hand man of Stalin. They got married in 1949 and Svetlana gave birth to a daughter, before she filed for a divorce.

She was a largely unstable woman, much like her mother. She wasn’t able to find herself loving a man with stability and utter conviction and while being married, she had romantic affairs with many men.

She later married her cousin Ivan Svanidze in 1962 and divorced him a year later. Her last marriage with William Wesley Peters too ended in a divorce after 3 years in 1973.

America wasn’t exactly good friends with the USSR during the 1960s and when Svetlana filed for a US citizenship; it caused a stir in her home country and she had to return to the USSR in 1984 after living in the USA for almost 15 years. Life in Russia didn’t suit her and she left once again in 1986. Most of the Russian high rankers didn’t approve that but she didn’t care, as she was hell bent on living a life which she wanted, not what everyone expected her to lead.

She kept hopping back to the US, then the UK, then Russia then US again for the most of her later life, eventually getting a UK citizenship in the 90s.

She was also known to disapprove of her father’s methods and famously called him a ‘moral and spiritual monster’. She eventually went on to live a life full of uncertain happenings. She wrote several books, sold them well, made millions of dollars, only to lose them again, kept having romantic affairs with men, in an attempt to fill her psychological hole, but to no avail. She was a troubled woman, only taken care of by her daughter Olga, who accompanied her on most of her trips.