Lana Peters, 1926–2011

As a girl growing up in Moscow, Lana Peters had her famous father in the palm of her hand. Joseph Stalin sowed terror during the day, but when he came home in the evenings he would smother his only daughter with what she later called “overflowing Georgian affection.”

Yet the childhood of Svetlana Stalina, as she was then known, was “punctuated by unexplained disappearances,” said the London Telegraph. She was 6 when her mother died, allegedly of appendicitis; only a decade later did she learn that it was actually a suicide. Her father later dispatched Svetlana’s first lover to a Siberian prison camp, and refused to ever meet her first husband, with whom she had a son. Stalin encouraged a subsequent marriage, which resulted in a daughter but soon ended in divorce.

After Stalin’s death, in 1953, his daughter “lost many of her privileges” in the Soviet Union, said The New York Times, and eventually sought a way out. She fell in love with a visiting Indian communist, who died in Moscow in 1967. She arranged to carry his ashes to India, where she requested political asylum at the U.S. Embassy. As “the most high-profile Soviet exile since the ballet virtuoso Rudolf Nureyev,” Svetlana earned millions writing two memoirs and became “a weapon in the Cold War.” She was briefly married to architect William Wesley Peters, shortened her name to Lana, and had another daughter, but happiness eluded her. She soon embarked on an “odd, formless odyssey”—to England, to the USSR, and finally, in 1986, back to the U.S. She died, impoverished, in rural Wisconsin. “You cannot regret your fate,” she once said. “Although I do regret that my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”

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