Her name was not as remarkable as that of her father, the architect of the Soviet empire and the man who brutally snuffed out countless lives to build it, but her life was in every way as remarkable. Svetlana Stalina’s two brothers both died before her: the first in a Nazi concentration camp, and the second from alcoholism at the age of 40. She was married four times: her first to a fellow student, her second to a high-ranking Soviet military officer, both ending in divorce. Her third was to an Indian communist who fell ill and died. It was on a trip to India with his Ashes that Svetlana Alliluyeva, now with her mother’s last name, decided to defect to the U.S.

On this day, April 21, in 1967 Svetlana Alliluyeva walked in to the American embassy in New Delhi and asked for asylum. “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia” she said.

Settled in the U.S., Svetlana married for the final time, to William Wesley Peters, who had been chief apprentice to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. That marriage lasted two years before the couple separated. Lana Peters, as she was now known, began reaching out to her children in Russia. With her 13-year old daughter from the marriage to William Peters, she abruptly moved to Moscow denouncing the west asking to be taken back. Yet even then she could not find happiness. She moved back to the United States two years later, in 1986. Her daughter Olga returned to boarding school in England.