Svetlana Alliluyeva

February 28, 1926 — November 22, 2011

Svetlana Alliluyeva was the youngest of Stalin’s three (legitimate) children and his only daughter. Her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, died when Svetlana was only six years old. Svetlana grew up believing her mother had died of an illness, only learning as a teenager that Nadezhda had in fact shot herself after an argument with Stalin at a dinner party. Svetlana and her father had a difficult relationship. He encouraged her to learn English, but rarely allowed her to interact with foreigners. Winston Churchill saw her only once, remarking that Stalin seemed to be showing off his daughter as a tool to make himself appear more human. When she was sixteen, Svetlana fell in love with a Soviet Jewish filmmaker more than twenty years her senior, Aleksei Kapler. Her father sent him to a labor camp. At seventeen she fell in love with and married a fellow student at Moscow University, Grigory Morozov, who was also Jewish. Stalin refused to meet him. At the time of the Yalta Conference, Svetlana was nineteen and pregnant with her first child. She was, however, there in spirit. She has once sent Sarah Churchill (a fellow redhead) a brooch, which Sarah brought and kept pinned to her uniform throughout the conference as a gesture of goodwill. In 1967, Svetlana defected to the United States and became a naturalized citizen, though her later years were troubled.

Photograph: Wikimedia commons, public domain