The only daughter of former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin has died at the age of 85, according to media reports.
Lana Peters, born Svetlana Alliluyeva, became a bestselling author after she defected from the Soviet Union to the United States during the Cold War. She died in Wisconsin due to colon cancer.
After defecting to the United States in 1967, Peters denounced the communism she had been taught as a child and her father’s cruelty.
“There was some terrible devil that would take possession of him,” she wrote about her father in her memoir “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” in reference to Stalin’s sending people to death camps and for his propensity for murder, according to The Associated Press.
Some historians estimate that between 20 million and 30 million Russians died under Stalin’s rule due to death camps, famine, and other unnatural causes.
When she arrived in the United States, Peters said, “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia,” according to AP.
