Stalin's daughter Part III - Conclusion

(From PART II)……Her first greeting to the crowd at the airport was: "Hello there, everybody. I'm very happy to be here...I believe that one's home can be anywhere that one can feel free." Unfortunately, "happy" and "free" are two words that Svetlana would struggle with for the rest of her life.

Leaving her Motherland was a big risk for her as she had also left her children, Joseph and Katya, behind. This was her only bitter regret. Their relationship would be forever estranged after that. In fact, her son Joseph wrote to her and the relevant extract here caused Svetlana to weep uncontrollably: “…You must admit that after what you have done, your advice from afar to take courage, to stick together, not to lose heart and not let go of Katya (daughter), was, to say the least, strange…I consider that by your action you have cut yourself off from us and therefore, please allow us to live as we see fit…Since we have endured fairly stoically what you have done, I hope from now on we shall be allowed to arrange our own lives ourselves…Joseph.”

After she arrived in America, the Communist Party started an anti-Svetlana campaign calling her a “morally unstable person”, “a sick person”, “a cuckoo bird”, and “an escaped convict.” And when she published her second book “Only One Year” discrediting her own country, she was stripped of her Soviet citizenship in December 1968, and was charged with “misconduct, defaming the title citizen of the USSR.” Ironically this was a crime her father had invented in 1938 during the Great Terror.

It was in America that her next drama unfolded. She married her fourth husband, one Wesley Peters. Here is a little background leading up to it. Svetlana made her living in America by selling her first book entitled “Twenty letters to a friend.” The book received sterling reviews and she got a huge advance of $1.5 million for it. She started a Charity Fund and used part of the proceeds to build a hospital in remembrance of her Indian prince, Brajesh Singh, and the rest of the money was disbursed in monthly installments of $1500.

Needless to say, everywhere Svetlana she went, she was well received. She gave interviews and went for book tours. Her popularity was that of a Hollywood star. Sometime in November 1969, one Olgivanna Wright (picture inset) invited to her estate in Taliesin, Arizona. Olgivanna was the widow of the famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright who singlehandedly built the Taliesin West Estate to experiment in utopia-like communal living. Like her father, Olgivanna ruled Taliesin estate with an iron-fist and she sets the rule for everything and for everyone.

Her invitation to Svetlana was mainly motivated by rumors that Stalin had gold and millions of rubles stashed in some Geneva accounts and only Sveltana had access to it. This however remained a rumor as Svetlana would die “broke, homeless, stateless, restless, pensionless.”  Spoilers aside, Svetlana accepted the invitation and later stayed in Taliesin for about two years before leaving in despair.

What happened in between was her marriage to Wesley Peters. She was 44 then and Wes was 59. Now here comes the uncanny part. Wes actually married “Svetlana” when she was 16 years old sometime in 1935 (when Stalin’s Svetlana was only 9). The confusion here is warranted because Olgivanna’s daughter was also named Svetlana. Wes and Olgivanna’s daughter subsequently had three children but the marriage ended in a fatal crash when Svetlana and her son was killed in September 1946.

And now, fast forward to April 1970, under the crafty manipulation of Olgivanna, Wes and Svetlana were married again – so to speak. Most called it a “whirlwind courtship” of about five months. But it would be a marriage made in Taliesin hell.

Svetlana would be emotional strangled between a compulsively spendthrift husband and an obsessively controlling matriarch of Taliesin. She had to struggle with paying for Wes’ debt which eventually depleted her savings and she had to live in fear and hatred of Olgivanna. She once told Wes this: “Why does that dictator always interfere with human lives? Well, of course, because that is the nature of all dictators.” In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “Taliesin was ruled, suppressed, dominated, and indoctrinated in the most dictatorial Slavic (Montenegrin) way by the old woman (69) who is a good politician, who has very sharp common sense, and a tremendous desire to RULE.” The parallel between Stalin and Olgivanna was truly uncanny.

The only good that came out of the tumultuous union was their daughter, Olga M. Peters, born on 21 May 1971. It was Svetlana’s third child from her fourth marriage. But Olgivanna was furious with Svetlana as a child would only financially burden the estate and their highly structured communal lifestyle. This further drove a wedge between them.

The last straw that broke the camel back for Svetlana was recounted by a friend in a brutal dinner. The book described it as such: “Svetlana began to complain, slightly hysterically about Wes’ work schedule. “He works too hard all the time; he’s going to die.” Olgivanna replied through clenched teeth in a tone of steel: “So are you.””

Svetlana took the death threat literally and packed up and left Taliesin with her newborn for good. Broken, Svetlana sought solace in God and distanced herself from the Russian Orthodox community. But her idea of God was an informal one which involved a syncretic mix of many faiths. Later, she divorced Wes and went to live in various parts of America, never having a permanent home for herself and her daughter Olga. One of her friend, who was a Mexican diplomat named Raoul Ortiz, had this to say about Svetlana’s nomadic wanderings, “It is a mistake to think that Svetlana was running from something; rather she was always running towards something, a version of life that would be different, that would meet her expectations of what a contented life could be.” Sadly, her unmoored expectations would bring her to many dead-ends.

Svetlana started drinking and went to a help group for counseling. She actually went against her mother’s advice just before she shot herself in 1932: “Never drink wine.” Unable to cope with the loneliness and depression, Svetlana visited a psychiatrist once a week for a season and even joined Christian Scientist in the hope of finding a way out of her existential stalemate. Before she met Wes, she also got involved with men who were older than her – one was even 71 years old – but the dalliances could not fill the void in her heart. Alas, despite her enduring search, she never found peace of mind.

Although she took the Oath of Allegiance in 1978 and became a US citizen, it was not long thereafter that she left America for the Soviet Union in 1984 to take up Soviet citizenship. She was excited to return because she wanted more than anything to meet up with her son, Joseph, and daughter, Katya. It had been more than 17 years since she defected. But it did not turn up well for her.

Katya never met her mother. In Katya’s mind, her mother remained a traitor to the country. To compound matters, Katya’s husband accidentally shot himself with a rifle and she remained a social hermit after that. Svetlana managed to meet Joseph who had by then remarried with a son. Like his mother, he had a drinking problem. He also suffered from a bad liver.

However, the reunion was emotionally fractured. When Joseph asked her for money, Svetlana lectured him (possibly thinking about how Wes had depleted her savings) and they argued. Joseph saw her concerns as insincere and hypocritical. His indifference towards her was deeply biting and she blamed herself for it. This was where Svetlana realized that her relationship with Joseph was broken. The reality for her was that “all her family relations were dissolving” and she felt that she was “doomed and drowning.”

She then left Moscow after 18 months and returned to America. Her reason for leaving her Motherland for the second time? She lamented to her nephew: “Can you understand this feeling? I walk around Moscow…There is no one here. Just crosses. Crosses everywhere…crosses, crosses, crosses.“ Sadly, Svetlana never found a home for her empty heart and broken soul.

“I read her as a deeply wounded person who was extremely bright,” a friend of hers, a physicist named Philippa Hill remarked. “Her intellect was phenomenal and she was also a great soul. She had such optimism and incredible energy, which of course could get channeled down the wrong alleyway for her and into a lot of anger. To me that’s part of the whole story of her personality. She is both this and that.”

There is no doubt that Svetlana was bright. At 2 years old, in 1928, her father enrolled her into an industrial academy to study synthetic fiber, which was then a new branch of chemistry. And by 6 years old, she was proficient both in German and Russian. She also wrote three books that were well received. She earned her degree majoring in history and lectured in Russian history. But being deeply wounded by her father, even Svetlana’s incredible intellect could not save her from the many “wrong alleyway” she had taken in her life in search of love, contentment and herself. Of course, we must be responsible for our own life and Svetlana responded in ways that led her to the shifting shadows of life instead of its inviting light.

Returning to America, she again wandered like a nomad with Olga – her daughter with Wesley Peters –  from one place to another. And as her finances were depleted, she had to live on handouts, social welfare and in retirement homes for elderly women.

In mid-1988, Svetlana rekindled her passion again. Her quest for love was restless. This would be her last relationship as documented in the book. Her final drama. She confessed to a friend that she had fallen in love with a man who was ten years younger. She was 62 at that time. For the first time she was involved with a younger man. She gushed with these words: “After years and years of “frozen heart” I do love a man – and I cannot tell you what a great joy, regeneration and light this is to me. All is still in the stage of “unfoldment””.

The love of her life was Tom Turner, a Texan by birth who lived in Saint Louis. But the “unfoldment” sadly unraveled. Like Singh, her foreign prince, Tom had terminal cancer and he died about two years later in 1989. Thoroughly spent emotionally, she wrote to a friend telling her that she was “cracking on every seam.”

Even her relationship with Olga was coming apart. The timing couldn’t be worse. In January 1989, Olga at aged 18 ran away with her hippie boyfriend; seemingly following in her mother’s footstep who got pregnant with Joseph at around that age. Although Olga finally returned to Svetlana after her mother talked some sense into her, Olga later admitted that “as much as she loved her mother, it was clearly impossible for them to live together.” Olga then made this observation recorded in the book which just about sums up Svetlana’s endless, restless struggles: “I think it was living that was the hard part for her. My mother never mastered that one…surviving but not living.”

In the last chapter of the book entitled “Final Return”, Svetlana gave her last interview in 2010 to a journalist who had been tracking her down in America. He asked her whether she’d forgiven her father and she answered with contempt: “I don’t forgive anything or anybody! If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and auntie, I will never forgive him. Never! …He broke my life. I want to explain to you, he broke my life!” One year later, on November 22, 2011, Svetlana passed away at 85. It was the month of misery for her since her mother also died in the same month.

At the very end, she instructed the hospital not to inform Olga about her condition. Her reason was that she didn’t want her daughter to see her dead body. As such, the only person at her deathbed was Kathy Rossing. Kathy was a daughter of a friend she knew in Taliesin.

This was how the author of the book described Svetlana’s final moments: “...She squeezed Kathy’s hand and stared at her with a strange look in her eyes. Kathy wrapped Svetlana’s hand around the scapular medal she always wore, yet it seemed “she wasn’t ready to go.” Kathy asked a nurse to call a local clergyman. When he came, he gave Svetlana words of peace to comfort her, and “it wasn’t but a matter of minutes and then she was gone.” I think it was more than a coincidence. Once he said some words over her, she passed peacefully.” Unlike her father to the end, she didn’t struggle. “Her breathing just got shallower and shallower.” How difficult it is to perform one’s death. She did it gracefully.” Svetlana finally found peace. Cheerz.

                                                  " The End "

The tragic life of Stalin's daughter

Recently I bought a book about Stalin's daughter. It is a book about her tragic life. Imagine a life which took 84 years to live was read by me over a few days – all 623 pages of it. The author, Rosemary Sullivan, a professor emeritus, poet and literary critic, did a sterling job documenting her life from her birth in 1926 to her death in 2011. Some may consider it a long life but it was hardly a life lived for herself. In fact, after Stalin died in March 1953, his daughter lived a life of a fugitive running away from one place to another to find peace. But wherever she went, Svetlana Alliluyeva (refusing to adopt her father's name Stalin to keep the ghosts at bay) could not escape from the hold her father had on her even after his death. In an interview, she said: "You are Stalin's daughter. Actually you are already dead. Your life is already finished. You can't live your own life. You can't live any life. You exist only in reference to a name."

Stalin was a dictator and an extremely paranoid and cruel one. He ruled by fear and drove everyone who was ever close to him to their death. His mother once asked him  - "Who exactly are you?” - and he proudly replied that he was like the Russian Tsar. "What a pity," she replied, "you never became a priest." Well, priest or no priest, Stalin became a force to be reckoned with; one that is even more revered, gripping, and mysterious than a religious cult. 

In one incident, as recalled by his adopted son, Artyom Sergeev, Stalin scolded his son Vasili (of his second marriage) for exploiting the Stalin name. Vasili retorted, "But I am Stalin too." Stalin replied, "No, you're not. You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and  the portraits, not you, no not even me!" In his obsession to rule, Stalin had turned himself into a concept, a political idea that was both absolute and infallible. This is reminiscent of the ironclad rule of Mao's China when he deferred to communism as an infallible concept and exploited it with bloodshed and impunity. 


After reading a few chapters in the book about Svetlana’s childhood, I note that Stalin's relationship with her can be rather endearing. He was playful with her, calling her names like "little butterfly", "little fly" or "little sparrow". He even invented an imaginary friend for her named Lyolka. They often exchanged love notes with each other.

But in reality, it was a complex relationship, layered by Stalin’s need for control and absolute certainty to rule. Except for Svetlana, he saw almost everyone as a potential threat to him and he kept his distance from all. As such, Stalin became a “prisoner of his own isolation, an isolation he had constructed.” For Svetlana, her father was to be pitied and to be feared.

Many years later, Svetlana wrote this about her father, “My greatest burden lay in the need of everyone to tell me “what a great man” my father was: some accompanied the words with tears, others with hugs and kisses, a few were satisfied with only stating the fact. I could not avoid the subject or the confrontations on beaches, in dining rooms, on the streets…They were obsessed with his name, his image, and, being obsessed, they could not leave me alone. It was torture for me. I could not tell them how complex were my thoughts about my father and my relationship with him. Nor could I tell them what they wanted to hear – so they departed from me in anger. I was continually on edge and nervous.”

Although Stalin’s first wife died one year after he married her, his second wife, (Svetlana's mother) killed herself when Svetlana was only six and a half in November 1932. The night before her suicide, Stalin was holding a party and she caught him flirting with a film actress, who was the wife of the Red Army commander. She then refused to raise her glass to toast to the state and stormed back into her room. "What a fool,” Stalin fumed. A few hours later, she pressed a small Mauser pistol to her heart and pulled the trigger. Svetlana recalled that her mother scrambled to the door, seemingly showing deep remorse for what she had done. But it was too late.

Speculations were rife about why she killed herself until letters she had written to her sister-in-law surfaced after Stalin's death in 1953. In one of the letters, she wrote that she "could not live with Stalin anymore. You take him for someone else. But he is a two-faced Janus. He will step over everybody in the world, including you."

Initially Stalin was shocked by her death. He was in a state of "sporadic fits of rage." However, as mercurial as he was, Svetlana recounted that "Stalin approached the casket and, suddenly incensed, shoved it, saying, "She went away as an enemy."" In the book, the author wrote that "Svetlana believed her father never visited her mother's grave." "Not even once," she said. "He couldn't. He thought my mother had left him as his personal enemy."

With her mother gone, Svetlana admitted in the book that her father "became final, unquestioned authority for me in everything." But this was to be short-lived as a series of tragic events would doom their relationship permanently. These events would lead her to confessed these words of utter disappointment: "I had no feeling left for my father, and after every meeting I was in a hurry to get away."


The first casualty of Stalin's reign of terror in Svetlana's family circle was the persecution of her maternal uncles and aunts, that is, her mother's siblings. They were arrested at the slightest of suspicion and imprisoned for years.

Her uncle Pavel once told his wife Zhenya that "if they come after me, I will shoot myself." Soon after, Pavel died of a heart attack due to the terror Stalin had instilled in him. Zhenya rushed to the hospital and practically ripped off her husband's clothes to check for bullet wound. Zhenya was later accused of spying and poisoning her husband and was kept in solitary confinement for six months. In prison, she tried to commit suicide by swallowing glass.

Another of Svetlana's relative, Stanislav Redens, was arrested and executed on 12 February 1940. An execution order approved by Stalin.  Eight years later, in 1948, his wife, Anna, was arrested for slander and imprisoned for 6 years. Prison changed Anna forever and 10 years after she was released, Svetlana recounted bitterly how her aunt died: "After six years in prison she was afraid of locked doors. She had ended up in hospital, very disturbed, talking all the time. She would walk the corridors at night talking to herself. One night a stupid nurse decided that she should not walk in the corridor, so she locked her into her room, even though it was known that she couldn't stand locked doors. In the morning, they found her dead."

Even Stalin's first wife's brother and his wife were imprisoned and executed by Stalin in 1941 and 1942. This would be relevant to Svetlana because her third marriage was to Ivan, their tormented son – suffering the same fate of his parents under Stalin. More will be revealed about her tragic marriages later. For now, let’s continue with Stalin’s oppressive rule.

On one occasion, in 1940, Svetlana noticed her classmate, Galya, and best friend was crying and Galya told her that Stalin had arrested her father. She begged for Svetlana to plead with Stalin on her behalf. Svetlana agreed to intervene. Initially Stalin dismissed her plea but Svetlana cried, "But I love Galya." A few days later, Galya's father was released. On another occasion, Svetlana had to plead for her beloved nanny's life and Stalin again relented. It was then that Svetlana understood how her father's word was all that stood in the way of whether one lives or dies.

But it was the death of her half brother that was one of the most heartbreaking events in her life. His name was Yakov and here's a little background.

Stalin married his first wife, Kato, in 1906, and she died one year later. The couple had a son, Yakov, born in 1907. Stalin married Svetlana's mother in 1918 when she was only 16 and he was 39. Vasili was then born in 1921 and Svetlana was born in 1926. Among the three children of Stalin from the two marriages, namely, Yakov, Vasili and Svetlana, Yakov was repeatedly bullied by Stalin. He called Yakov "soft" and "worthless".

Stalin also disapproved of his first marriage.  When Yakov remarried after the divorce and the death of his first child, Stalin had his second wife arrested for a year and a half. When she was released, even her own daughter could not recognize her. She never forgave Stalin for what he did.

In despair, Yakov tried to kill himself but the bullet grazed his chest. He lived on, desperately seeking his father's approval. Later, when Stalin went to war with Hitler, Yakov joined the light artillery regiment as a commander but was arrested as a POW. In 1943, the Germans proposed a prisoner swap, that is, Stalin's son, Yakov, for Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus. But Stalin refused the exchange, dismissing it saying, "All of them are my sons." Whether he meant that or he was just using it as a convenient excuse to get rid of Yakov was unclear. But what is clear was that Stalin had issued an Order called Order 270 which condemned “all who surrendered or were captured as traitors to the Motherland." Based on this Order, and if the prisoner exchange were carried out, Yakov would return to the Soviet Union not as a war hero but a war traitor. For that, he faced imprisonment or execution. Either way, his fate was sealed by his father.

Yakov then languished in prison as a POW and he died under mysterious circumstances. Some reports claimed that he was shot. Others claimed that he had committed suicide…..

** To be cont’d – PART II – tomorrow night **

How do you deal with disappointment?

How do you deal with disappointment? You deal with it the same way you deal with a toothache. You bite the bullet. You grit your teeth. You swallow it down. You bear with it. You ignore it. Dismiss it if you can. But it never lets up. The toothache will gnaw at you. Disappointment will keep you awake for hours. So you just have to fight the pain. Drown the hurt. Think about thoughts that are between happy and sad. Why? Because too happy and the pain 
will hit you like a ton of bricks when the hangover comes. And too sad and you will only commiserate with the pain.

So you strike a balance with disappointment. The pain can only be numbed with moderation, and for a bittersweet duration. You have to let begrudging reality walk you by. It comes and it goes. It is in the interim that you have to struggle with. You can't choose the season for disappointment to set up tent in your broken heart. It comes unbidden, regardless of how you
 are feeling at the moment. It seems that its timing is never right. Disappointment is the definitive gatecrasher. It doesn't RSVP you. It doesn't call in advance. You just have to suck it all in and let it do its wrecking-ball clearance. It will make you miserable. It will keep you down. It will drag you around. It will assign a stormy cloud just to shadow you wherever you go. You will see the world in monochromatic hue. It is going to be 1000 shades of grey, trust me. Disappointment knows your
 buttons and it doesn't need your permission to press them whenever it wants and for however long it takes.

So, how do you deal with disappointment?  You deal with it the same way you deal with life. You can't make it go away. You can't wish for it to vanish.  It is not like a passing cloud or a common cold. You can't inoculate yourself from life. There is no immunity against life. Your birth marks the start of it and your death marks the end of it. You live your life and you don't live outside of it. Like time, you
 are lock-jawed with it. So life comes with everything expected of it; the good and the bad. And amongst the bad is disappointment. Yes, that 14-letter word again! You deal with disappointment by accepting it as part and parcel of life. You don't escape from it but you confront it. You spar with it. You tell it off. You issue this verbal haymaker, "What's your problem?"  Make no mistakes. Disappointment is here to stay. But the question is, "Are you going to let it evict you out of the 
life that you are living in?" And keep in mind this: You are the host of your own life - don't reduce yourself to being a squatter begging for a bed to sleep on and a hole in the ground to piss in. Take a stand. Take charge. Take heart.

So, how do you deal with disappointment? Let me end it this way. The best way I know how is love. Between toothache and life, love is the antidote to transforming disappointments. It is tough love that counts in the end. Love embraces 
disappointment. It is beyond pain and beyond toleration. Love is able to see beyond disappointment. Love has a special scope or line of sight. It doesn't swallow it down or wallow around. It values disappointment as made up of many stepping stones to a viable future and not a millstone hung around one's neck in despair. Love is maternal patience for an eternal future. Love makes the difference. More importantly, love bridges the difference.

I can only deal with disappointment with 
love. That is, a very human love undergirded by the Lover of my soul. I can only love disappointment back to life. I can only turn disappointment into  strength and nurture it from there to greater heights. I cannot end my journey with disappointment. No I can't. No I won't. No I can't afford it. Instead I should journey with disappointment and affirm it from time to time to raise it from strength to strength.  And one day, disappointment shall become a distant but abiding memory with hope, joy and love 
its anticipated future. Cheerz.