March 6 — Svetlana Alliluyeva, Stalin’s daughter, applies to the American Embassy in Delhi for political asylum. On December 20 she arrived in India, accompanying the ashes of her common-law husband Brajesh Singh. On March 6 she asked the Soviet ambassador Benediktov to allow her to remain in India, but he insisted that she return to Moscow on March 8 and stated that she would no longer be permitted to leave the USSR. That same day she came to the U.S. Embassy in Delhi with her passport and luggage and requested political asylum.
Her move to the West and the subsequent publication of Twenty Letters to a Friend, in which Alliluyeva recalled her father and life in the Kremlin, became a sensation. For a time Svetlana stayed in Switzerland, then lived in the United States.
In 1970 she married the American architect William Peters (1912–1991), gave birth to a daughter (Olga Peters, later renamed Chrese Evans), divorced in 1972, but kept the name Lana Peters.
In 1982 Alliluyeva moved from the United States to the United Kingdom, to Cambridge, where she placed her daughter Olga, born in the United States, in a Quaker boarding school. She herself began traveling and visited almost the entire world.
Finding herself completely alone, in late November 1984 Svetlana unexpectedly appeared in Moscow with her daughter. She was met with enthusiasm by the Soviet authorities, and her Soviet citizenship was promptly restored.
But Svetlana’s relations with the Soviet government deteriorated. Alliluyeva was unable to find common ground with either her son or her daughter, whom she had left in 1967. She went to the Georgian SSR. In Georgia, Alliluyeva marked her 60th birthday.
After living in the USSR for not quite two years, Alliluyeva sent a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU requesting permission to travel abroad. After the personal intervention of CPSU General Secretary M. S. Gorbachev, in November 1986 she was allowed to return to the United States.
In the United States, Alliluyeva settled in the state of Wisconsin. In September 1992 reporters found her in a nursing home in the United Kingdom. She then lived for a time at the Monastery of St. John in Switzerland.
In her later years, Svetlana Alliluyeva lived in a nursing home near the city of Madison (Wisconsin) under the name Lana Peters.
Svetlana Iosifovna died on November 22, 2011, in a nursing home in the city of Richland (Wisconsin, USA) from colon cancer.
September 27 — Felix Felixovich Yusupov, a count and a participant in the killing of Rasputin, died.