Lana Peters, Daughter of Josef Stalin, Has Died (ContributorNetwork)

COMMENTARY | Lana Peters, aka Svetlana Alliluyeva, has died in Wisconsin of colon cancer at the age of 85. Peters has two main claims to fame. She was the only daughter of Josef Stalin and she defected to the West in 1967 in the midst of the Cold War.

The Washington Post has a nice obituary of a complex woman who once briefly returned to the Soviet Union in the 1980s before returning to the U.S. Her relationship with her homeland, as well as her adopted country, might be called "complex" as well. Clearly she found living under Soviet tyranny an abomination. But she also found being estranged from her children who remained behind a strain as well.

Peters could not escape the shadow of her father, one of history's greatest monsters, along with Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse Tung. In the 30 years of his absolute rule of the Soviet Union, Stalin killed millions, established the slave labor camp system in Siberia dubbed the Gulag Archipelago by Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and made the USSR into an industrial and military super power. Stalin created an empire that stretched from the Elbe River in Central Europe to the Pacific.

It is a truism that the children of the great bear a special burden. However, the children of monsters must also have their crosses to bear. Since Hitler gave his offspring the great gift of not having any, Peters had the most awful burden in the world. How does one reconcile oneself with the fact that one has sprung from the loins of such as Stalin?

The struggle to come to terms with the fact of her parentage may have been part of the reason Peters first defected to the West. Her arrival in the United States was heralded as a great public relations coup for freedom and a slap in the face for communism. It was also an act of rejection of Peters' father, a man still admired in Russia for his strength while reviled for his bestiality. Going to America was likely her greatest act of independence, leaving behind not only the Old World and all of its ills, but the shadow of Stalin. It is hoped that she found some measure of happiness in her later years and now rests in peace.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/cancer/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ac/20111129/us_ac/10554219_lana_peters_daughter_of_josef_stalin_has_died

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