Svetlana Alliluyeva

Russia, 1926 – 2011

Alliluyeva changed her name to Lana Peters after she married architect William Wesley Peters in 1970. They divorced in 1973.

Probably the most shocking defection in the history of the Cold War, Alliluyeva was the daughter of former dictator Joseph Stalin and left the USSR for America in 1967. After the death of her third husband in 1966, she was given permission to visit India, his birthplace. She sought out American officials in New Delhi, burned her Soviet passport and gained US citizenship. She soon wrote two memoirs about her life, Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967) and Only One Year (1969). She returned to the USSR in 1984 and had her citizenship restored, but renounced it again in 1986 after falling out with officials.