Lana Peters | Stalin's daughter, 85

Lana Peters, 85, the daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose defection to the West during the Cold War embarrassed the ruling communists and made her a best-selling author, died Nov. 22 in Wisconsin.

Ms. Peters, known internationally by her previous name, Svetlana Alliluyeva, died of colon cancer, Richland County coroner Mary Turner said Monday.

Her defection in 1967 - partly motivated by the poor treatment of her late husband, Brijesh Singh, by Soviet authorities - caused an international furor and was a coup for the United States. But Ms. Peters, who left behind two children, said her identity involved more than just switching from one side to the other in the Cold War. She moved back to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, only to return to the United States more than a year later.

When she left the Soviet Union in 1966 for India, she planned to leave the ashes of her late third husband, an Indian citizen, and return. Instead, she walked into the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and asked for asylum. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the United States.

Ms. Peters carried a memoir she had written in 1963 about her life in Russia. Twenty Letters to a Friend was published within months of her arrival in the United States and became a best-seller.

In the book, she recalled her father, who died in 1953 after ruling for 29 years, as a distant and paranoid man.

Raised by a nanny with whom she grew close after her mother's death in 1932, Ms. Peters was Stalin's only daughter. She had two brothers. Jacob was captured by the Nazis in 1941 and died in a concentration camp. Vasili died an alcoholic at age 40.

Ms. Peters graduated from Moscow University in 1949, worked as a teacher and translator, and traveled in Moscow's literary circles before leaving the Soviet Union. She was married four times, the last time to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. They were married from 1970 to 1973 and had one daughter.

- AP