MOSCOW, November 30 (Itar-Tass) — The only daughter of Joseph Stalin – Svetlana Alliluyeva has died in the United States in a nursing home in Richland (Wisconsin) at the age of 85. She passed away back on November 22, however, this became known only on the night to November 29, from a report published by The New York Times. Mass media write about the unfortunate fate of the daughter of the “Great Leader” and how the shadow of her father forever warped Svetlana Alliluyeva’a life.
Svetlana’s relations with her father developed in a very difficult way, Rossiiskaya Gazeta writes. As a child she was his favourite. Then something happened: either he was disappointed with the girl or he became sick of all those around him, but his daughter started to annoy him. She suffered and subconsciously was looking for a man who would not only give her freedom, but also would be in some way like her father. But none of her men brought her true happiness. After defection to the West, Svetlana Alliluyeva started to write a book of memoirs called “Twenty Letters to a Friend.” She drew a portrait of his father, who saw enemies everywhere: “It was already abnormal, it was a mania of persecution from exhaustion, and loneliness ... He was extremely bitter against the whole world.”
Novye Izvestiya gives a brief biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva. She was born into the family of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva on February 28, 1926. After graduating from the History Department at Moscow State University and postgraduate training at the Academy of Social Sciences under the CPSU Central Committee, she worked as a translator from English and a literary editor. In 1967 she went to India for the funeral of her friend Brajesh Singh, whom she was going to marry. She never returned to the USSR, moving from India to Switzerland, and then in 1970 – to the United States. The publication of a book of memoirs, according to some sources, brought her $2.5 million.
Svetlana Alliluyeva died in absolute poverty, Moskovsky Komsomolets writes. Her last refuge during three years was a home for the elderly in the county of Richland. Certainly, the formal causes of her poverty were her voracious literary agents, her financial advisors, her nomadic life, her lack of understanding of money. Which is understandable, because Stalin’s daughter had never needed money, and maybe even had not seen it.
Komsomolskaya Pravda notes that Svetlana hated the Soviet regime and her own father, because she never forgave him ruining the life of her mother. She wrote cruel memoirs about her father. And yet she found herself in the shoes of her father – her son Joseph (from her first marriage with a former schoolmate Grigory Morozov) and the elder daughter Yekaterina Zhdanova (born from her second husband, the son of Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party Andrei Zhdanov) who stayed in the USSR, abandoned her. And even do not want to even hear about her to this day.