No Svet

Lana Peters, aka Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, aka Stalin’s little girl, has died of colon cancer at the age of 85. Rather than humanizing one of history’s greatest mass murderers, the lone daughter of Joseph Stalin offered the world a rare view from her front row seat, starting with her own mother, who committed suicide rather than standing by her madman. While visiting India in 1967 to dump her boyfriend’s ashes in the Ganges, Alliluyeva was approached by the U.S. State Department and offered the chance to jump the immigration line as a Cold War PR stunt. She obliged and refudiated her father’s regime and the Soviet government in press conferences and in a memoir. She later married Frank Lloyd Wright’s protégé at the urging of Lloyd’s widow, a mystic who believed Alliluyeva to be her own daughter, also named Svetlana, reincarnated. Deciding that the Wright cult wasn’t much better than hanging behind the Iron Curtain, she left the States for Cambridge, England, then became the world’s most public double agent by returning to the Soviet Union to engage in a staring contest with Sarah Palin across the Bering Strait. Learning the error of her ways after watching Rocky IV and Red Heat, she returned to the United States in 1986, where to avoid homesickness, she moved to the coldest, bleakest, most depressing place she could find: Wisconsin.