Lana Peters - who was known internationally by her previous name, Svetlana Alliluyeva - died on November 22 in Wisconsin, where she lived, off and on, after becoming a US citizen, the Richland County Coroner said on Monday.
Her defection to the West in 1967, during the Cold War, embarrassed the ruling communists and was a public relations coup for the US.
In 1970, she married her fourth and last husband, the architect William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. They were married until 1973 and had one daughter.
Lana Peters said her defection was partly motivated by the poor treatment of her third husband, Brijesh Singh, by the Soviet authorities.
But Peters, who left behind two children, said her identity involved more than just switching from one side to the other in the Cold War.
She even moved back to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, only to return to the US more than a year later.
When she left the Soviet Union in 1966 for India, she planned to leave the ashes of her third husband, an Indian citizen, and return. Instead, she walked unannounced into the US embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the US.
Peters carried with her a memoir she had written in 1963 about her life in Russia.
"Twenty Letters to a Friend" was published within months of her arrival in the US and became a best-seller. In the book, she recalled her father, who died in 1953 after ruling the nation for 29 years, as a distant and paranoid man. Peters wrote three more books, including "Only One Year," an autobiography published in 1969. Her father's legacy appeared to haunt her throughout her life, though she tried to live outside of the shadow of her father. She denounced his policies, which included sending (m) millions into labour camps, but often said other Communist Party leaders shared the blame.
