Svetlana Alliluyeva: “My father would have shot me for what I did”
Show "Svetlana"!
In March of this year, in connection with the 70th anniversary of Stalin's death, the American studio iHeartRadio distributed the radio show Svetlana! Svetlana! It enthusiastically tells about the life of the leader's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011) in the United States after her flight from India in 1967. The author of the show Dan Kitrosser, admiring her, called Svetlana his muse.
Kitroser states that “she was a big person, a heroic person. She walked along stories in so many different ways! Alliluyeva, Peters - these were just its different facets. Therefore, the surname is not the main thing here. She, recall, in 1970 changed her name, surname and abandoned her patronymic, becoming Lana Peters.
But it turns out that Alliluyeva was not at all averse to visiting even Stalinist Albania. More precisely, in March 1983, some Yugoslav media briefly reported that Svetlana Alliluyeva requested a visa - through the Albanian embassy in Cuba - to visit Albania.
Apparently, she wanted to visit this country on March 5: as you know, in communist Albania it was a day of mourning from 1953 to 1990. inclusive. But she was refused. Moreover, the refusal was accompanied, allegedly, by the comment of the “Albanian Stalin” - Enver Hoxha, addressed to her:
"We do not forgive children who betray their parents."
Such a harsh assessment of the personality of Svetlana Alliluyeva by the Tirana was due not only to her well-known speeches in the 60s - 80s, with hard-to-explain negativity against her father, with numerous allegations of his direct involvement in the repressions of the 1930s - early 50s. x years.
A combination of special services
Enver Hoxha believed that the so-called "flight" of S. Alliluyeva from the USSR was a Jesuit combination of the KGB, aimed at further discrediting I.V. Stalin. Say, not Khrushchev or Mikoyan with Suslov, but Stalin's daughter herself testifies to "Stalinist terrorism" - how can you not believe her?
This assessment coincides with the FBI dossier on Svetlana Alliluyeva, partially declassified in 2012. This part of the dossier states that
"... the Soviet government, which at that time was engaged in debunking Stalin's "personality cult", calmly reacted to Svetlana's flight to the West, as this would discredit the name of Stalin himself and his family members."
That's why and "there is no evidence that the KGB conducted surveillance of Alliluyeva in the United States." According to Albanian and Chinese sources, the KGB knew that it intended to go to the West through India. But, as Enver Hoxha noted:
“She was still given the opportunity to go to India, and moreover, they actually stopped monitoring her in India. The KGB also knew that she had taken with her a version of the manuscript of her first anti-Stalinist book, soon titled "20 Letters to a Friend."
After the resignation of Khrushchev, the question arose of the "partial rehabilitation" of Stalin, including the return of the name Stalingrad to Volgograd, as well as the installation of a bust of Stalin on his "new" grave. However, the Brezhnev leadership did not seek such solutions. Even by May 9, 1965, a bust of Stalin was not installed on that grave: this took place only in May 1970.
Not a word more
Therefore, not a word was said about the possibility of the aforementioned decisions in Brezhnev's report at the XXIII Congress of the CPSU (1966). And, according to Khoja, in order to "confirm" the commitment of the post-Khrushchev authorities to condemn a certain "cult of personality", it was decided to condone the movement of Alliluyeva to the West with her manuscripts.
It is characteristic in this regard that shortly before her departure to India, KGB officers in January 1967 beat up a delegation of students and graduate students of the PRC (see photo) near Lenin's mausoleum, who tried to lay wreaths at the mausoleum and at Stalin's grave.
By doing so, Hoxha notes, Moscow signaled that there would be no revision of Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist policy.
Soon Alliluyeva ended up in India. There, the runaway daughter of the leader in March 1967 first applied to the government of the country with a request to obtain Indian citizenship. But the Soviet side insisted that Alliluyeva be denied her request. I note that Stalin's streets are still preserved in India - in the towns of Ambatur (pictured), Kochi and Puttucheri.
The press of the pro-Stalinist Communist Party of India (which broke away from the pro-Soviet Indian Communist Party in 1964) noted that Moscow probably feared that Alliluyeva, while in India, would “cross over” to the PRC, which supported and, it seems, still supports the pro-Stalinist Indian Communist Party. But Ms. Alliluyeva preferred "transit" through India to the US.
Is the version indisputable?
In favor of the version of the "organized escape" of Stalin's daughter, E. Hodge also notes that the KGB in no way interfered with her activities in the West. The same is noted in the mentioned FBI dossier.
And her anti-Stalinist escapades and libels were aimed "and at discrediting the policy of the PRC and Albania to protect Stalin from Khrushchev's and" pro-Khrushchev's "falsifications." In connection with these factors, the Albanian leader expressed a reasonable suspicion that the KGB operation to move Alliluyeva to the West "certainly was coordinated with the CIA."
Svetlana Alliluyeva, aka Lana Peters, 2010
It is characteristic that the mentioned Albanian version of the scenario of the "flight" of Stalin's daughter to the West was not refuted either in the USSR or in the West, nor was it refuted by S. Alliluyeva herself...
But in her last years she lived not in respectable apartments in the USA, Great Britain and Switzerland, as in the 70s and early 90s, but ... in the American Richland almshouse. Where did she die...
Meanwhile, the daughter of I. V. Stalin, even in her last years, expressed hatred for the USSR, Russia, and for everything Russian and Soviet. Although her deliberately notorious "anti-Stalinism", ordered to her by American sponsors-political consultants back in the 1960s, has long been, as they say, out of circulation.
"Father would shoot me for what I did"
- the daughter of the leader admitted to reporters in 1983 ...
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