Svetlana Alliluyeva - Political Asylum and Later Life

Political Asylum and Later Life

On March 6, 1967, Alliluyeva approached the United States embassy in New Delhi. After she stated her desire to defect in writing, the United States Ambassador Chester Bowles offered her political asylum and a new life in the United States. Alliluyeva accepted. Because the Indian government feared condemnation by the Soviet Union, she was immediately sent from India to Rome in Italy. When the Alitalia flight arrived in Rome, Alliluyeva immediately traveled onward to Geneva, Switzerland, where the government arranged a tourist visa and accommodation for six weeks. She travelled to the United States, leaving her adult children back in the USSR. Upon her arrival in April 1967 in New York City, she gave a press conference denouncing her father's regime and the Soviet government. Her intention to publish her autobiographical book Twenty Letters to a Friend on the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution caused an uproar in the Soviet Union and the government threatened to release an unauthorized version. Publication in the West was therefore moved to an earlier date.

Alliluyeva moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where she lectured and wrote.

During her years in exile, it is claimed that Svetlana was never happy. Her children who were left behind in the Soviet Union disowned her. She had money problems and flirted with various religions. In 1970, Alliluyeva answered an invitation from Frank Lloyd Wright's widow, Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, to visit Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. Alliluyeva described the experience in her autobiographical book Far Away Music. Olgivanna believed in mysticism and had become convinced that Alliluyeva was a spiritual replacement for her own daughter, also named Svetlana. Years previously, Svetlana Wright (Olgivanna's daughter) had married Wright's chief apprentice William Wesley Peters and had died in a car crash. She came to Arizona and, within a matter of months, was engaged to Peters. They married and had a daughter, Olga (born 20 May 1971). William Peters was a member of the Taliesin Fellowship, a group of architects and designers who had been Wright's apprentices and acolytes and had remained dedicated to his work. Alliluyeva took the name Lana Peters, became part of the Fellowship community and migrated back and forth and with them between the Scottsdale and Taliesin studios.

By her own account, Alliluyeva retained respect and affection for Wes Peters, but their marriage dissolved both under the pressure of Mrs. Wright's influence and because of Svetlana's inability to adjust to the Taliesin cult-like lifestyle, which she compared to life in the Soviet Union under her father. In 1982, Alliluyeva moved with her daughter to Cambridge, England. In 1984, she returned to the Soviet Union, where she and her daughter were granted citizenship, albeit apparently retaining her acquired United States citizenship.

Alliluyeva settled in Tbilisi, Georgian SSR. In 1986, she returned to the United States, after "feuding with relatives".

Alliluyeva died on November 22, 2011 from complications arising from colon cancer in Richland Center, Wisconsin, where she resided. Alliluyeva's daughter Olga now goes by the name Chrese Evans and lives in Portland, Oregon.