Svetlana Alliluyeva
Daughter of Joseph Stalin

I could not continue the same life, the same useless life which I had for fourteen years.

In late 1966, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, walked into the U.S. embassy in New Delhi, India, and announced to Ambassador Chester Bowels her desire to defect to the West. In 1953, Joseph Stalin died, ending nearly three decades of tyrannical rule that brought drastic changes to the Soviet Union while directly causing the deaths of millions of its citizens. Just three years later, Nikita Khrushchev, the new Soviet leader, denounced Stalin and his policies at the Twentieth Party Congress, and by 1966, the man who had led the U.S.S.R. through the crucible of World War II had faded firmly from the Soviet public's favor. Since her father's death, Svetlana Alliluyeva had worked in the Soviet Union as a teacher and translator, but in 1966 defected to the West, leaving behind a grown son and daughter from two previous marriages. In April 1967, she settled in the U.S., where she later became a U.S. citizen and married an American architect.