Washington, Nov. 29: Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef Stalin’s only daughter, died unannounced in Wisconsin a week ago, taking secrets surrounding her 1967 defection to America from Indian soil to her grave.

She was suffering from colon cancer and was 85 at the time of her death.

Svetlana, who assumed the name of Lana Peters after marrying American William Wesley Peters three years after her arrival in the US, unburdened herself 11 years ago to Naresh Chandra, then Indian ambassador in Washington, about her life’s crises and dilemmas that were inevitable as the daughter of one of the most pugnacious leaders in history.

In a long and sometimes rambling letter, Svetlana told the ambassador that she had been constantly misunderstood and that the story of her defection on the footsteps of the American embassy on New Delhi’s Shanti Path had not been truly told to the world or in its entirety.

The letter, which I have seen, was handwritten closely on standard letter paper on both sides and ran into eight pages, if memory of it from 2000 serves right.

I saw the letter because Svetlana pleaded to Chandra that she wanted to tell the truth about the Indian episodes in her life, that the time had come for telling her side of the story, and asked the ambassador to recommend a journalist who would break it to the world without varnishing it, as tales about “Stalin’s daughter” had often been doctored.

Indian communist Brijesh Singh, the late external affairs minister Dinesh Singh’s uncle, was Svetlana’s third husband. It was to immerse his ashes that she was given permission by the Soviet authorities to travel to India, where she hoped to live and find spiritual solace. But when the Kremlin insisted that she should return to the USSR, she defected to the US instead.

My memory of the letter is not photographic because it was shown to me on the condition that it will not be copied in any form and that I will, under no circumstances, record her address in the US, which was “restricted” information in view of what the Americans saw as threats to Svetlana’s life, although the US perception of those threats varied from time to time.

I agreed, without a moment’s hesitation, to go and see “Stalin’s daughter”, whose defection when I was in my mid-teens is still etched in memory.

My Slavic wife, who speaks Russian, agreed to go with me, doubling as a photographer, because Svetlana was known to quote Russian poetry and discuss Soviet literature, more so as she aged, to relieve the monotony of life in an obscure corner of Wisconsin.

It would have been the story of my life.

But alas, before the ambassador’s office could firm up arrangements for my travel to Wisconsin came another letter, this time more sad than reflective. I did not see the second letter, but portions of it were read out to me in confidence.

Svetlana wrote in her second communication to Chandra that Olga, her daughter by William Peters, who was an apprentice to legendary architect and builder Frank Lloyd Wright when the two married, had objected to her decision to hit the public arena once again with another story about herself.

“Haven’t you caused enough trouble already?” Olga asked her mother, according to Svetlana. She said her daughter had rebuilt her life after many chequered years during which Svetlana, by then divorced from Peters, dragged little Olga in search of elusive tranquillity from Arizona to the US east coast, from there to California and eventually to England so that she could be enrolled in a British public school.

The mother-daughter duo then went to Moscow as the Soviet Union was getting ready for perestroika. Svetlana’s Soviet citizenship was restored and she denounced the West. But she stayed in the USSR for no more than a year, returning to the US and declaring that she would never go to Moscow again. The daughter went back to study in England.

Olga told Svetlana that a new round of stories about their famous family had the potential to destabilise their lives all over again and the daughter asked the mother to desist from meeting a journalist in order to reveal any new information, according to Svetlana’s second communication to Chandra.

The impression I had from the second letter was that Olga’s was not an entreaty, but a command. Svetlana, however, rationalised that Olga was her only real family left, the one blood relative with whom she was still communicating and she wanted to preserve that link.

Olga’s insistence that Svetlana should take her India secrets to her grave was not surprising. The daughter is so obsessed with erasing her Soviet past that she has abjured her Slavic name and is now known in Portland, Oregon, where she runs a boutique, by the name of Chrese Evans.

When news of Svetlana’s death began circulating yesterday, almost a week after it occurred, the daughter refused to take any calls from the media. One persevering reporter who got through to her was asked to leave her alone in her time of grief.

But American reporters are not easily rebuffed, especially during tragedies, and the Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, finally made her talk. What she tells the newspaper throws some light on why the daughter prevented Svetlana from going public with her Indian episodes, especially her version of the story of her defection.

It turns out that Olga was offered a job by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the US version of India’s income tax department. She eventually went into the boutique business because it was “cool”, but significantly the offer of a government job came in 2000, the same year when Svetlana wrote to Chandra.

Any publicity — or notoriety — that new stories about Olga’s connections with Stalin brought in their wake would have damaged her prospects with the IRS or any government agency here.

Olga told The Oregonian that her mother “was my only family. We were very close. It was a huge loss. I thought she was going to outlive me.”

The New York Times quoted a county official in Richland Center, the Wisconsin town where Svetlana lived, that she may have died several months ago. The announcement of her death was not made by any family member, but by the county coroner, Mary Turner. The funeral home where the body is preserved said no funeral services had yet been planned.

What is already known about Svetlana’s stay in India and her defection could fill a book, but some aspects of the episode offer lessons for Indian diplomacy even now, 44 years later.

Accounts of how she was spirited out of Delhi by the Americans recall a time when ambassadors were truly what their title suggests and many of them acted like ambassadors were expected to act.

Chester Bowles, the US ambassador in New Delhi when Svetlana approached his embassy seeking asylum, has since recounted that he was summoned from Roosevelt House, the embassy residence, by a Marine who was nonplussed when a woman turned up at the mission’s gate after office hours on March 6, 1967, and announced that she was Stalin’s daughter asking for political refuge in America.

In accounts corroborated by historical records here, Bowles did not lose his wits even for a second. The ambassador realised that hell would break loose if he kept her in the mission after she had sought asylum, given India’s close friendship with the USSR.

It was already morning in Washington and Bowles gave an ultimatum to the then secretary of state, Dean Rusk: he would use his discretion and grant a US visa to Svetlana unless he heard from Rusk before the next flight from India to Europe left in a few hours.

Conveniently for US-Soviet relations, Rusk did not respond to the telegram and Svetlana was out of India escorted by a CIA officer at the embassy, ostensibly at the ambassador’s behest.

It says a lot for the laxity at immigration counters at Delhi airport that both Svetlana and the CIA officer passed the exits using their own passports and no one smelt a rat. It is the same laxity that allows the likes of terrorist David Coleman Headley to go in and out of India with impunity even as ordinary, genuine travellers are put to hardship by zealous immigration officers.

A sordid anecdote by author David van Praagh in a 2003 book said an Indian diplomat met Svetlana in Switzerland as she waited at the airport to change planes to the US. He got a letter signed by Svetlana, allegedly written by Dinesh Singh, but addressed to himself, which exonerated Singh of any role in her defection to ensure that the Soviets did not blacklist him.

What is worse, in good faith, Svetlana gave the Indian diplomat two letters addressed to her children whom she was leaving behind in the USSR. The letters never reached the children and van Praagh surmises that they were handed over to the Soviet embassy in New Delhi by South Block.