I didn’t think I’d get back—defector’s daughter

Press, 18 April 1986, Page 6

I didn’t think I’d get back —defector’s daughter

NZPA-AP Saffron Walden

Olga Peters went back' to her English school yesterday after an 18-month stay in the Soviet Union, and wept with joy as old classmates and teachers hugged and kissed her.

“It’s a very emotional moment I didn’t think I’d get back,” said Olga Peters, daughter of Svetlana Alliluyeva, whose father, Josef Stalin, ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years.

She arrived at the Friends’ School, run by Quakers, in the town of Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, accompanied by two Soviet diplomats, the day after she flew to London.

Her mother, who defected to the West in 1967 and abruptly returned with her daughter to the Soviet Union in October, 1984, has said she, too, was free to return to the West.

At the time of their move in 1984, there were reports that Olga resented suddenly being pulled out of her surroundings and transplanted to what to her, as an American, was an alien culture.

She said her mother “deeply regretted taking me away from school so suddenly without saying goodbye to anyone,” and that she was “really thrilled I was coming back.”

Olga said she and her mother had gone to the Soviet Union “for the sake

of the family. She wanted to save the family and ... I didn’t want to hurt her.” She did not regret the time she lived in Soviet Georgia, her grandfather’s birthplace, but said she had problems with the Georgian and Russian languages and missed her mother tongue, English. Also, she said, her half-

brother and half-sister “were not supportive to me ... we didn’t know what to say to each other.” But in general, “it was a great experience and I don’t regret any of it ... It’s not every kid that gets to see three different countries — three of the most interesting countries

in the world.” Olga was brought up in the United States, home of her father, William Peters, an architect who is divorced from Miss Alliluyeva, and then lived in England for two years before going to the Soviet Union. While in Georgia she corresponded with her

English former classmates, who sent her a birthday present last year. She will board at the 284-year-old co-educational high school. Miss Alliluyeva told a news conference after she returned that she had never been happy in the West was tired of publicity about herself and her

father, and wanted to see the two older children she left behind when she defected. In Moscow Swiss sources said she had left on a regular Swissair flight to Zurich and would go on from there to Chicago. They said she had bought her ticket for Switzerland on Monday.