[4][5] As her mother was interested in pursuing a professional career, Alexandra Bychokova was hired as a nanny to look after Alliluyeva and her older brother Vasily (born 1921).

[10] On 15 August 1942, Winston Churchill saw Alliluyeva in Stalin's private apartments at the Kremlin, describing her as "a handsome red-haired girl, who kissed her father dutifully".

"[11] At the age of sixteen, Alliluyeva fell in love with Aleksei Kapler, a Jewish Soviet filmmaker who was 38 years old.

[12] Alliluyeva was first married in 1944 to Grigory Morozov [ru], a student at Moscow University's Institute of International Affairs.

Alliluyeva lived with Zhdanov's family at this time, though felt herself dominated by his mother, Zinaida, which was something Stalin had warned her of.

Her training was in History and Political Thought, a subject she was forced to study by her father, although her true passion was literature and writing.

"[21] When asked at a New York conference about whether she agreed with her father's rule, she said that she was disapproving of a lot of his decisions but also noted that the responsibility for them also lay with the Communist regime in general.

[22] In 1963, while in hospital for a tonsillectomy, Alliluyeva met Kunwar Brajesh Singh, an Indian Communist visiting Moscow.

For her first trip outside the Soviet Union, she was allowed to travel to India to take his ashes to his family to pour into the Ganges river.

At about nine o’clock p.m. in India, eleven in the morning Washington time, I said, "I have a person here who states she's Stalin's daughter, and we believe she's genuine; unless you instruct me to the contrary, I’m putting her on the one a.m. plane for Rome where we can stop and think the thing through.

This is one advantage that non-career Ambassadors have; they can go ahead and do unorthodox things without anybody objecting, where a Foreign Service officer might not dare do it.

You could go back to the Russian embassy right now (she was staying there in their dormitory) and simply go to sleep and forget it, and get up Wednesday morning and on to Moscow, as your schedule calls for."

[27] When the Qantas flight arrived in Rome,[26] Alliluyeva immediately traveled farther to Geneva, Switzerland, where the government arranged her a tourist visa and accommodation for six weeks.

Upon her arrival in New York City in April 1967, she gave a press conference denouncing her father's legacy and the Soviet government.

[32][33] Alliluyeva herself stated that she gave away much of her book proceeds to charity and by around 1986 had become impoverished, facing debt and failed investments.

[1][36][37] The British journalist Miriam Gross with whom Alliluyeva conducted her final interview before moving back from England to the Soviet Union in 1984, described Svetlana's increasingly fragile state of mind in a series of letters she wrote to Gross following the interview: In all of them she is very anxious to explain how, having arrived in the West “blind with admiration for the FREE WORLD”, she had come to believe that the US and the USSR were morally equivalent.

She had been convinced that “in the FREE WORLD people are superhuman, wise, enlightened…What a terrible blow it is to find out that…there are just the same idiots, incompetent fools, frightened bureaucrats, confused bosses, paranoid fears of deception and surveillance…this loss of idealism is what happens to defectors only too often.

[1][36][37] Alliluyeva, for the most part, lived the last two years of her life in southern Wisconsin, either in Richland Center or in Spring Green, the location of Wright's summer studio "Taliesin.

"[35] She died on 22 November 2011 from complications arising from colon cancer in Richland Center,[1][5] where she had spent time while visiting from Cambridge.

She received a letter from Father Garbolino, an Italian Catholic priest from Pennsylvania, inviting her to make a pilgrimage to Fátima, Portugal, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the famous apparitions there.

While living in Cambridge, on 13 December 1982, the feast of Saint Lucy of Syracuse, Alliluyeva converted to Catholicism.

[43] Raymond Pearson, in Russia and Eastern Europe, described Alliluyeva's book as a naïve attempt to shift the blame for Stalinist crimes onto Lavrentiy Beria, and whitewash her own father.