On This Day: Stalin’s daughter Svetlana defects to America

MARCH 6, 1967: The only daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin requested political asylum in America on this day in 1967, after travelling to the U.S. embassy in India.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, 41, defected after officials allowed her to leave Russia to scatter the ashes of her recently deceased Indian lover Brajesh Singh in the River Ganges.

The mother of two, who left her two adult children in Moscow, denounced the Soviet government and her father’s legacy when she arrived in New York the following month.

In a major political coup for America and embarrassment for her homeland, she burned her USSR passport and called Stalin a 'moral and spiritual monster'.

At a press conference – filmed by British Pathé – she said: 'Communist chiefs should also be held be responsible for the same things for which [Stalin] alone was accused'.

Revealing her horror at the spate of 'unjust killings' under her father, she added: 'I feel responsibility for this was and is with the party, regime and ideology as a whole.'

She also said she wanted American citizenship and saw her new relationship with her homeland’s bitter Cold War rival as a 'marriage based on love'.

This hinted at the abuse by her father, who refused to let her wed her first love at 17, exiled her first husband and arranged her unhappy second marriage to an ally’s son.

Stalin had also driven her mother, his second wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, to commit suicide in 1932 when their daughter was just six years old.

The dictator, who also had two sons, is also said to have been incredibly violent towards his daughter, who originally had the surname Stalina.

[On This Day: Joseph Stalin dies]

His successor as premier, Nikita Khrushchev, recalled a party where a drunken Stalin dragged her by the hair, sobbing onto a dance floor.

Stalin also refused to allow his teenage daughter to follow her passion and become a writer – instructing her to study languages and politics instead of literature.

Even after his death in 1953, when Svetlana assumed her mother’s maiden name, she lived in the shadow of the tyrant who killed nine million in purges and famines.

[On This Day: Stalin's body is buried after being removed from Lenin's public tomb]

The new regime, which denounced Stalin, watched his daughter closely and barred her from marrying Singh, with whom she lived in Moscow and Sochi, due to his race.

When he died from a severe bout of bronchitis at the end of 1966, she seized her chance to flee the Soviet Union and become the most famous defector to the West.

She was given permission to travel to India, which was officially neutral during the Cold War, to return the descendant of royalty’s ashes to his home town.

After immersing his remains in the river Kalakankar – following a sacred Hindu tradition - she asked the Indian government if they would grant her assylum.

But they refused, fearing the repercussions from the Kremlin, which until then had good relations with the former British colony.

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Alliluyeva, who was staying at the Soviet embassy in New Delhi, took a taxi and drove straight to the American embassy, which was a short distance away.

She revealed who she was to the duty officer, who was guarding the premises as the consulate was closed at the time, U.S. Ambassador Chester Bowles was summoned.

After the two discussed her possible asylum, Mr Bowles cabled the U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and gave him a midnight ultimatum to reject the defection.

After 12am passed and he recieved no answer, the ambassador sent CIA agents to escort her on a flight to Italy.

Alliluyeva retraced her dramatic escape and the reasons she gave for defecting in the first of four books she published while living in America.

There, she assumed the name Lana Peters after marrying William Peters, the former chief apprentice and son-in-law of renowned architecht Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1970.

In 1971 she gave birth to a girl, Olga, who is 26 years younger than he son Iosif and born 21 years after her other daughter, Yekaterina.

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She left the U.S. in 1982 and travelled to Britain after becoming involved with her then ex-husband’s Taliesin Fellowship, which she felt was like a cult.

In 1984, Alliluyeva sensationally returned to the Soviet Union - but she only stayed two years before returning to the UK and settling in Bristol.

She acquired British citizenship, but in 2009 moved back to America, where she died of colon cancer aged 85 in a Wisconsin care home in 2011.