Tyrant’s daughter returns home

Press, 5 November 1984, Page 6

Tyrant’s daughter returns home

NZPA-AP London The daughter of the Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin, had a heated half-hour argument with her teen-age American-born daughter the night before they disappeared from their Cambridge flat, a neighbour said today. Svetlana Stalin has returned to Moscow, 17 years after defecting to the West.

Peter Mansfield said that he had heard Olga, aged 13, shouting at her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you discuss it with me?”

Mr Mansfield, who lives above the flat Svetlana Alliluyeva Peters bought in the English university town and moved into just four months ago, said that he did not hear enough of the argument to be certain it was about Mrs Peters’s return to Moscow.

“But in hindsight, I think the mother had just told her she was going to go back to Russia. For a 13-year-old, I think it must be quite a shock to be told you’re going to leave everything you know,” said Mr Mansfield, a chemical company foreman. Professor Donald Denman, a Cambridge academic who was Mrs Peters’s closest friend in Britain and had described Olga as “140 per cent American,” said after hearing about the argument, “That sounds ghastly. That sounds like she (Olga) was dragged off.” . “The American authorities ought to loolojnto it. After all. she’s an American

citizen, and mother or no mother, she can’t be treated like that.”

Mr Mansfield said that the argument had taken place the night of October 22 — the same day Mrs Peters telephoned the headmaster at the Friends School in Saffron Walden, 20km south of Cambridge, which Olga attended as a boarder, to say that she was going to Moscow and would not be returning for classes.

“I don’t think anybody in the house saw them leave, but I think they left the next day — on October 23,” he said.

On Thursday, Mr Mansfield said, his wife had called the police after she heard footsteps in the Peters’s flat and saw that a note under the door was missing. “The police confirmed that somebody had been in the flat to confirm that Mrs Peters was not there and that nothing had been disturbed,” he said. The . Soviet news agency, Tass, announced on Saturday that Mrs Peters, aged 59, had returned to Moscow. It said that her citizenship, stripped in 1969, had been restored and Soviet citizenship conferred on Olga by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, the nominal parliament. Britain’s Communist “Morning Star” newspaper reported that “she returned to the Soviet Union sometime over the last week having first indicated to the (Soviet) Embassy in London that she wanted to go back in September.”

Professor Denman said that Olga’s father, William Wesley Peters, who is senior architect of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, should

press the American authorities to ascertain whether his daughter and his former wife had returned to the Soviet Union voluntarily. “The Sunday Times” reported that Mrs Peters had

written to a friend that she was disillusioned with the West and upset at the way she was treated by American agents.

Defection constitutes treason under Soviet law and the criminal code states that as such it is punishable by a prison sentence of 10 to 15 years or by death.

The official Soviet view is that only people with relatives abroad would willingly choose to abandon their native country. . In the last few years when Soviet citizens have defected, their families remaining in the country have often come under pressure to speak out against them or plead for their return.