IN death Svetlana had finally achieved what she wanted in life – to escape from the shadow of her tyrannical father Josef Stalin.
The evil Soviet dictator's cherished only daughter died last week from colon cancer as an impoverished, virtually anonymous pensioner in Wisconsin, US.
Known as Lana Peters, the 85-year-old was happy to spend her days in a sleepy retirement home sewing in the sunshine, reading non-fiction and watching TV.
It was a far cry from her amazing past involving defection from the USSR, four failed marriages, an assassination plot and a best-selling book. But she was a prisoner of that past.
In 2010 she told a US newspaper she could never forgive her father's cruelty to her. "He broke my life," she said.
"Wherever I go, here, or Switzerland, or India, or Australia, wherever. I will always be a political prisoner of my father's name."
For Svetlana's early years that name ensured she was adored across mother Russia. Thousands of babies were named after the red-haired freckled little girl.
The youngster, nicknamed "little sparrow" by her father, was closely guarded and even had a perfume launched in her honour.
But as she became loved across the Communist state, her father grew into one of the most feared and murderous dictators in history, responsible for the deaths and exiles to slave labour camps of millions of his countrymen.
The tyrant shielded his unsuspecting daughter from the horrors by showering her with presents and entertained her with American movies. In her eyes he was a giant bear of a man with a tickly moustache but Svetlana's perfect childhood was shattered when she was six by the death of her mother.
In 1932 the body of Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife, was found in bed with a bullet through her right temple, even though she was left-handed. Many believe Stalin had her killed, though officially it was suicide. Svetlana believed for decades she had died of appendicitis.
But perhaps one of Stalin's most ruthless acts towards their family was the dictator's treatment of Svetlana's brother Yakov...........
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/11/30/the-extraordinary-life-of-josef-stalin-s-daughter-svetlana-who-died-in-the-us-as-lana-peters-115875-23598449/Shared using News360 for the iPad. Learn more at http://news360.com
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