Lana Peters, Stalin’s only daughter, dies at 85
The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Svetlana Peters, has died from colon cancer, aged 85, in the United States.
She died in Wisconsin, 44 years after defecting to the United States and denouncing communism. She had settled there after marrying architect William Peters, in 1970. The couple had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing.
She also had two children from her first two marriages in the former Soviet Union.
Her 1967 cold war era defection from the Soviet Union, during a visit to India, involved the CIA, who helped her get to the US.
On her arrival, she referred to her father, Stalin, as “a moral and spiritual monster”.
‘Little sparrow’
Stalin died in 1953 after three decades of brutal rule, and was deemed responsible for the deaths of millions.
Peters was once close to her father, who called her his “little sparrow”. Her brother was killed during the Second World War when her father refused to exchange him for a German general.
She wrote two best-selling memoirs, including Twenty Letters to a Friend.