I found the daughter of the world's most evil man hiding in a Cornish tea shop
By David JonesLast updated at 12:25 AM on 30th November 2011
During the mid-90s, 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 the former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, his daughter Svetlana, then aged 70 and thrice divorced, was reported to have converted to Roman Catholicism and become a nun.
Sent to track her down, I discovered that this was some way wide of the truth.
While she had flirted briefly with the idea, spending a few miserable weeks at a Warwickshire convent, I found her subsisting on the dole in the small Cornish town of Helston.
Loving bond: Soviet dictator Josef Stalin is seen carrying his beloved daughter Svetlana as a youngster before their relationship deteriorated in later life
‘I hate religion,’ Svetlana, whose death from colon cancer was announced yesterday, told me bitterly. ‘I’ve had too much of it. I don’t need the church any more.’
She had granted the interview, in a conspiratorial corner of a local 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 walk out of here, you go right and I go left.’
But although I kept my side of the bargain — so that even her neighbours in the charity-run flats where she was hiding never knew her identity — within a few days of my article being published, Miss Lana Peters, as she then styled herself, packed the battered suitcase containing her worldly belongings and quietly slipped away.
When I caught up with her again last year, she had taken refuge in an even more remote place: an anonymous little dairy town in Wisconsin, US, and she was no longer the stout, self-reliant matriarch who hiked the Cornish cliffs in a duffle-coat and beret.
Attention: Svetlana answers questions during a press conference in 1984 after publishing her best-selling autobiographies
Bent double by scoliosis, a painful curvature of the spine, she could barely hobble a few yards 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 — thus preserving her anonymity once again.
In all probability, the residents of the retirement flats where she spent her last days will only now be waking up to discover that the stoical but cantankerous old woman on the second floor was the daughter of the most prolific murderer of modern times.
This is hardly surprising, for 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: not only the daughter of a pathological tyrant, who exterminated 20 million of his compatriots, but the one person capable of melting Josef Stalin’s ice-cold heart.
Such is the ignominy attached to his name that Svetlana’s British-educated second daughter, Olga, now 41, has also changed her identity. Now Chrese Evans, she works as a clothes shop manager in Portland, Oregon.
‘My mother’s whole life has been about living this [her association with Stalin] down and trying to lead a new life of her own,’ she told me recently.
‘Of course, she abhors what Stalin did. But there was a period when so many people held her responsible for his actions that she actually started to think maybe it was true. It’s so unjust.’
Perhaps so, but Olga’s half-sister, Katya, now 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 now lives reclusively in a wooden hovel earning £30 a week as a volcano scientist.
The family man behind the horrors: Stalin, right, with Svetlana, centre, during her happy childhood and her brother Vlasik, left
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.’
Mother and daughter: Stalin's second wife Nadiezhda Alliluyeva, who shot herself in despair at her husband's philandering, cradles Svetlana in 1926
During my own conversation 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.
Of course, he must take some responsibility, she said — and she would never forgive him for murdering two of her uncles and an aunt, who disappeared during the Great Purge of 1938, when thousands of intellectuals and perceived political enemies were expunged.
But the man who should really be held to account was Stalin’s sinister, bespectacled secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria who oversaw Stalin’s mass killing programmes.
‘Beria was a terrible man,’ she told me, adding improbably that, though Stalin ruled the Communist party by fear for 30 years, Beria ‘had some sort of hold on my father’.
How, then, will history come to regard Stalin’s fugitive daughter — as his ‘selfish and cruel’ apologist, or the unjustly maligned victim of a brutal heritage? Even to begin to answer the question we must recount her extraordinarily dysfunctional early life.
Born in 1926, when Stalin was tightening his grip on the Soviet Union, Svetlana had an older half-brother, Yakov (the son of the dictator’s first wife who died from 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. Vasili who served in the Soviet Air Force, was also dismissed as inept by his father, and died of alcoholism aged 41.
Stalin’s freckly, red-haired daughter was the only apple of his eye, and would always take pride of place in propaganda photographs; images designed to show that the self-styled Father of the Nation was also a loving father. While other Bolshevik children were made to trudge through the snow to school, Svetlana glided past in a chauffeur-driven limousine.
While their lunches were rationed, she grew fat on imported luxuries such as Swiss chocolate and when Winston Churchill visited Stalin for a war summit at the Kremlin in 1942, it was 16-year-old Svetlana, alone amongst the dictator’s family, to whom the British Prime Minister was introduced.
Relations between father and daughter soured weeks later, however, 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 fed the official lie that 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.
A life running from the past: Svetlana speaks about her memoirs in 1967. Right, Svetlana during her final days in the rural Richland Center, Wisconsin, in April 2010
Incensed, Stalin had him arrested and sent to a notorious work camp in the Arctic Circle which he didn’t survive. 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, with whom she had grown up, but when his mother found out she ended their dalliance fearing Sergo would be skinned alive.
Defiantly, however, she married for the first time at 19, to Jewish student Grigori Morozov. Stalin tolerated ther relationship but refused to attend the wedding and later had Morozov’s father imprisoned. Unsurprisingly, they were divorced within two years, although they did have a son, Josef.
Nonetheless, when Stalin died slowly and painfully following a stroke in 1953, Svetlana, then 27, was by his side. But his passing brought an uncomfortable change of fortune for her and her family.
Within a few years, Soviet history was revised, Stalinism was denounced and his relatives and cronies lost their wealth and power.
Once the Soviet princess, Svetlana became a lowly Moscow teacher, hiding behind her mother’s maiden name, Alleluyeva. She is also rumoured to have married an Indian Communist politician based in Moscow, Brajesh Singh, but she never confirmed this. When he died in 1966, Svetlana escaped the regime going to India before applying for political asylum at the U.S embassy.
‘You know, my father loved me, and he always wanted me to be with him.’
With the Cold War then at its height and the Vietnam War raging, the Americans were delighted to accept her. Soon she was being feted in New York and Washington where 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. The union produced Olga, but Peters proclaimed it impossible to live with the moody dictator’s daughter and within two years they had parted.
At the time, Peters was heavily in debt as a result of failed business ventures, and when I asked Svetlana what had become of the £1.5 million she is said to have made by selling two best-selling autobiographies, she claimed she had used the money to bail him out.
‘That’s how he repaid me: with a divorce,’ she seethed. She was then trying to recoup her losses by selling the final two volumes of her memoirs, but couldn’t find a publisher.
Typically, she saw this as some sort of dark conspiracy between the Russians, Britain and America to censor her writing. However, one London publisher told me her books were too boring as she refused to reveal her father’s secrets.
It meant she lived out her last three decades in poverty. Disillusioned with the West, she returned to Russia for two years in the 80s though Communism was then in its death throes and once again her paranoia resurfaced.
Accusing her son Josef of luring her back at the behest of the KGB, she fled, first to America, then Cornwall — where I found her all those years ago — then back across the Atlantic again.
‘There was a lot of tragedy in my family,’ she told me. So had she forgiven Stalin? She shot me an icy glance. ‘I don’t forgive anybody anything. If he could kill so many people, I could never forgive him.’
But then, almost in the next breath, she was remembering how he adored her red hair and freckles.
‘You know, my father loved me,’ she said, with what looked like adoration in her eyes. ‘And he always wanted me to be with him.’
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