The dictator’s daughter’s may secrets

LONDON: During the mid-1990s, with memories of the Cold War still fresh, a sensational story was published in a respected Italian magazine and quickly flashed around the world.

Desperate to atone for the monstrous sins of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, his daughter Svetlana, then 70 and thrice divorced, was reported to have converted to Roman Catholicism and become a nun.

Sent to track her down, I discovered this was some way wide of the truth.

While she had flirted briefly with the idea, spending a few miserable weeks at a convent, I found her subsisting on the dole in the Cornish town of Helston.

“I hate religion,” Svetlana, whose death from colon cancer was announced last week, told me bitterly. “I’ve had too much of it. I don’t need it any more.”

She had granted the interview, in a tea shop, on the pre-condition that I would never reveal her whereabouts. Or, as she put it in her curious, Russian-tinged BBC World Service accent: “When we leave here, you go right and I go left.”

But although I kept my side of the bargain – even her neighbours in the charity-run flats where she was hiding never knew her identity – within days of my article being published, Miss Lana Peters, as she then styled herself, packed and quietly slipped away. When I caught up with her again last year, she was in an even more remote place: an anonymous little dairy town in Wisconsin.

She was no longer the stout matriarch who hiked the Cornish cliffs in a duffle coat and beret. Bent double by a painful curvature of the spine, she could barely hobble a few metres and spent her days eating hamburgers and watching Hollywood films.

She had then slipped into the standard garb of a Mid-Western retiree, a sloppy grey tracksuit and cheap pink blouse, and the residents of the retirement flats where she spent her last days will only now find out she was the daughter of the most prolific murderer of modern times.

Svetlana, who was 85 when she died, had spent many years incognito and had become as adept at the art of disguise as any of her father’s KGB agents.

She spent her whole life running away because she couldn’t live with who she was: the daughter of a pathological tyrant who exterminated 20 million people and the only one capable of melting Josef Stalin’s ice-cold heart.

Such is the ignominy of his name that Svetlana’s British-educated second daughter, Olga, 41, has changed her identity to Chrese Evans and works as a clothes shop manager in Portland, Oregon.

“Of course my mother abhors what Stalin did. But at one stage so many people held her responsible for his actions that she started to think maybe it was true. It’s so unjust.”

Olga’s half-sister, Katya, 61 – the product of Svetlana’s failed second marriage to Stalin’s deputy, Yuri Zhdanov – holds no such sympathy. Abandoned as a teen in 1967 when Svetlana famously left her and her half-brother Josef to escape to the West, Katya never saw her mother again and removed herself to the frozen, farthest reaches of eastern Russia, where she lives reclusively in a wooden hovel earning R376 a week as a volcano scientist.

When I met her there, six years ago, she said of Svetlana: “She is such a selfish, cruel woman. She didn’t seem to care whether she hurt me.”

In my own conversations with Svetlana I found her feelings towards Stalin ambiguous. She seemed unwilling to blame him for his notorious purges and the horrors that took place in his Siberian labour camps.

She blamed Stalin’s sinister secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, for Stalin’s mass killing programmes.

How, then, will history come to regard her – as his “selfish and cruel” apologist, or the unjustly maligned victim of a brutal heritage?

To even begin to answer this we must recount her dysfunctional early life.

Born in 1926, when Stalin was tightening his grip on power, Svetlana had an older half-brother, Yakov (by his first wife who died of leukaemia at 22) and a full brother, Vasili, five years her senior.

But her father never cared for them. When Yakov was captured by the Germans in World War II, his father left him to die in a POW camp. He dismissed Vasili, who served in the Soviet Air Force, as inept and he died of alcoholism at 41.

His freckly, red-haired daughter was the only apple of his eye. But relations between father and daughter soured when she was 16 because he objected to her wearing a skirt (good Bolshevik girls wore long trousers) and wanting to study art, not Marxist history.

A decade earlier, Svetlana’s mother, Stalin’s second wife Nadya, had shot herself after a row over his philandering but their daughter was told she died of a burst appendix – something she never forgave her father for.

The rift was cemented when Svetlana fell for Alexei Kapler, a married playboy 22 years her senior, and, worst of all in Stalin’s eyes, a Jew. Stalin had him arrested and sent to a notorious work camp in the Arctic Circle, where he died. Svetlana was heartbroken, and later said Kapler was the only man she ever loved.

Her retaliation was the attempted seduction of Beria’s son, Sergo, a childhood friend, but his mother ended it, fearing for Sergo’s life.

Svetlana married for the first time at 19, to Jewish student Grigori Morozov. Stalin refused to attend the wedding and later had Morozov’s father imprisoned. The couple divorced within two years.

But when Stalin died slowly and painfully after a stroke in 1953, Svetlana, then 27, was by his side. His death brought a change of fortune.

Once the Soviet princess, Svetlana became a lowly Moscow teacher, hiding behind her mother’s maiden name, Alliluyeva. She is rumoured to have married an Indian communist politician based in Moscow, Brajesh Singh, and when he died in 1966, she escaped to India, applying for asylum at the US embassy.

With the Cold War at its height and the Vietnam War raging, the Americans feted her as she proclaimed the iniquities of communism. The Soviets said she had lost her mind.

Svetlana was 44 when she married for the third time, to architect William Wesley Peters, with whom she had Olga. But she and Peters also parted within two years.

She lived out her last three decades in poverty.

Disillusioned with the West, she returned to Russia for two years in the 80s during the dying days of communism but fled again, first to America, then to Cornwall, then back across the Atlantic again, where she died last week.

“You know, my father loved me,” she said last time I saw her. “And he always wanted me to be with him.” – Daily Mail