Svetlana Alliluyeva, Daughter of Stalin, adoptive Cheesehead, dies at 85

Did you know she lived in Wisconsin?

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s daughter, whose defection to the West during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author, has died. She was 85.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, who was known as Lana Peters since 1970, died of colon cancer Nov. 22 in Wisconsin, a state where she lived off and on after becoming a U.S. citizen, said Richland County Coroner Mary Turner.

She lived in Richland Center, about 40 miles from me. I wonder if she liked football?

“People say, ‘Stalin’s daughter, Stalin’s daughter,’ meaning I’m supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans. Or they say, ‘No, she came here. She is an American citizen.’ That means I’m with a bomb against the others. No, I’m neither one. I’m somewhere in between. That ‘somewhere in between’ they can’t understand.”

It’s complicated.

Her birth name was Svetlana Iosifovna (daughter of Joseph) Stalina. Alliluyeva was her mother’s maiden name. Hallelujah. Odd to think of someone in Soviet Russia having that name.