Her father was well known. She said, “My father would have shot me for what I have done.”
Her father was raised in the Orthodox Church, but he renounced Christianity. His name was Joseph Stalin.
As a young boy his father beat him severely.
When Stalin came to power, he tried to stamp out Christianity by closing thousand of Churches and putting Christians in prison. In a period of 2 years, 1937 & 1938, he had 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy arrested. The majority were shot.
He hated Christianity, but loved Svetlana, his daughter, who was born in 1926. She looked up to him, and they had many joyful and affectionate times together. Her mother, Nadya, was cold and distant. Eventually, she committed suicide.
At first, Svetlana knew nothing of her father’s brutal activities. Eventually, he told her that relatives who had disappeared were killed because they knew too much.
Svetlana got married, but got divorced shortly afterward. Her second marriage also ended quickly.
In March 1953, Stalin died. As he was dying, he raised his fist in anger at God.
Svetlana said, “My father would have shot me for what I have done.”
What did Svetlana do? She was baptized in 1962 into the Orthodox Church. While in India, she went to the U.S. Embassy and introduced herself, to the shock of the U.S. official, as Joseph Stalin’s daughter. She came to the U.S. in April 1967.
Her personal life was a mess. She married again, returned to Russia and came back to the U.S. She met a priest, converted to Catholicism in 1982. She attended daily Mass.
Svetlana died in a Wisconsin nursing home in 2011.
Picture is Public Domain -https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Stalin_with_daughter_Svetlana,_1935.jpg