The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, has died of colon cancer in a care home in Wisconsin. She was 85. 

US officials said Lana Peters, as she was also known, died on November 22nd. Svetlana said her defection from the Soviet Union was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities' poor treatment of Brijesh Singh, an Indian communist with whom she had a relationship. She went to India in 1966 to spread Singh's ashes, but instead of returning home she walked into a US embassy to seek political asylum. She burned her passport, denouncing communism and her father, whom she called "a moral and spiritual monster".

She was six when her mother took her own life. Once close to her father  – he called her his "little sparrow"  – they grew distant in his final years. He sent her first love, a Jewish film maker, to Siberia. Her brother, Jacob, died in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II when Stalin refused to exchange him for a German general, and her other brother, Vasili, died an alcoholic, aged 40. She wrote four books, including two best-selling memoirs.  She took the name Lana Peters when she married architect William Wesley Peters in the US. The couple had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1973. She returned to the Soviet Union 

Source:www.thenewsonline.es