MOSCOW The 14-year old ‘American granddaughter of dictator Josef Stalin was in a Moscow hotel Friday waiting to leave the nation her grandfather ruled for a quarter of a century, Soviet sources said,
The British Embassy confirmed that Olga Peters had been issued a visa to return to Britain, where she and her mother, Svetlana Alliluyeva, lived before coming to the Soviet Union.
Alliluyeva, who became one of the most celebrated defectors when she fled to the United States in 1967, slipped back into her native land in October 1984 to resume life as a Soviet citizen,
Sources in Moscow said Olga ‘was in a hotel in the capital waiting to leave.
Reports from Tbilisi, the capital of the Soviet republic of Georgia, where Olga and her mother settled, had differed about Olga’s situation for several months. Some unofficial sources said she was unhappy, but official sources said she was “happily adjusting” to her new conditions,
Georgian Party chief Dshumbar Patiashivili said at a news conference last month that Olga was ‘making many friends at school and learning classical ballet,
Olga, who had been studying at the Quaker boarding school in Essex, England before her mother brought her to the Soviet Union, spoke no Russian,
The 1984 return to Moscow by Stalin’s daughter was not noticed until Olga and her mother gave a news conference saying she had become disillusioned with the West.
Diplomat in Moscow said Olga would probably return to the school in England,
Alliluyeva, 60, who grew up within the Kremlin walls, and Olga were both given Soviet citizenship when they arrived in Moscow. Olga, however, also retained her US citizenship.
Stalin consolidated power and’ had his opponents shot or sent to ‘concentration camps following the 1924 death of Viadimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state. In 1932, Stalin’s wife, whose maiden name is still used by Svetlana Alliluyeva, committed suicide in a fit of depression over his growing despotism.
Thirteen years after Stalin died in 1953, Alliluyeva defected while on a trip to New Delhi, India, She married William Wesley Peters, and chief architect of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, and Olga was born in 1971 in San Francisco.
Svellana later divorced Peters:
Article extracted from this publication >> April 11, 1986