(Image Source: Wikimedia)

BY EMOKE BEBIAK

ANCHOR CHRISTINA HARTMAN

Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Lana Peters, died of colon cancer last week at her Wisconsin home. Now, the media is taking a look back at her complex relationship with her infamous father. Peters was Stalin’s last living child. Euronews reports...

“The daughter of Joseph Stalin, who denounced communism after defecting to the US, has died at the age of 85. Svetlana Peters described her father as “a moral and spiritual monster” after escaping the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”

But The Telegraph reports that, growing up, Peters was close to her father...

“At the height of the terror, he would come home every evening after a hard day signing death warrants ... He would sit down and help her with her homework and dine with her and her friends.”

But the BBC explains the father-daughter relationship deteriorated.

“... they grew distant in his final years. He sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia.”

Peters divorced twice, then married an Indian communist leader. When he died, she went to India to bury him. According to TIME, it was during this trip that she decided to leave the Soviet Union...

“Peters famously defected from the Soviet Union to the U.S. in 1967 via the American embassy in India, embarrassing the ruling communists and causing an international furor …”

But a commentator for the Russian RIA Novosti writes that Peters’ main reasons for defecting weren’t ideological...

“Her rebellion above all represented a struggle for her personal freedom and her right to choose: friends, lovers, faith, weaknesses, whims.”

In 1970, Peters married an American architect, and kept his name despite their eventual divorce. The New York Times reports that she never forgave her father. Peters once said...

“You can’t regret your fate... although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”

Peters made a living writing memoirs about growing up with Stalin. Her book, “Twenty Letters to a Friend” became an international best-seller.