Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana Peters, died of colon cancer at her home in Wisconsin yesterday. She was 85. “Over me my father’s shadow hovers, no matter what I do or say,” she lamented in a 1983 interview with the Chicago Tribune. “He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel. There was nothing in him that was complicated. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him.”
In 1967 she defected to America, saying, “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia.” And while she may have switched from Marxism to capitalism, she said her identity was far more complex than that, and that she was never completely understood. “People say, ‘Stalin’s daughter, Stalin’s daughter,’ meaning I’m supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans. Or they say, ‘No, she came here. She is an American citizen.’ That means I’m with a bomb against the others. No, I’m neither one. I’m somewhere in between. That ‘somewhere in between’ they can’t understand.”
Within months of moving to America she published her memoir about life in Russia, entitled Twenty Letters to a Friend, that became an international best-seller. In it, she recalled her father as a distant and paranoid man. “I don’t forgive anything or anybody,” she said. “If he could kill so many people, including my uncles and auntie, I will never forgive him. Never!”
In later life, she was fully immersed in American culture, and admitted that she enjoyed American food, particularly hamburgers, and American films and preferred to speak her adopted language. After developing scoliosis in the 1990s, she went into seclusion in Richland Centre, Wisconsin, and relied on a cane to get around. Her survivors include her daughter Olga, who now goes by Chrese Evans and lives in Portland, Oregon, where she manages a clothing store (LESBIAN). Her second daughter, who was born in 1950, goes by Katya, and is a scientist who studies an active volcano in eastern Siberia. A son, Josef, died in 2008 at age 63 in Moscow, according to media reports in Russia. (via Daily Mail)
