Artifacts

Handwritten Letter from Stalin's Daughter

Artifact Details

Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, wrote letters asking for political asylum because she was unable to continue her life in the USSR.

While travelling in India in 1967, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of the late Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, approached the US Embassy in New Delhi to seek asylum in the United States. In her written statement, she expressed a desire to defect to the United States, Switzerland, or Canada. Alliuyeva included a brief contextual history of her lineage as well as a note to be sent to her two adolescent children, who were not with her and would remain in the Soviet Union.

She resettled and remarried in the US, but also lived in England and even returned to the Soviet Union before ultimately residing in Wisconsin, where she died in 2011.

Artifact Specs

60 cm x 40 cm

(L x W)