Svetlana Alliluyeva was born on 28 February 1926, the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife. When she was 17, Alliluyeva married a fellow student at Moscow University, Grigory Morozov, having one son, Iosif, in 1945. The couple divorced in 1947, and Alliluyeva remarried in 1949, to one of Stalin's associates, Yuri Zhdanov. The couple had one daughter, Yekaterina, in 1950, but divorced shortly afterwards. From 1963 until his death in 1966, Alliluyeva lived with the Indian Communist politician Brajesh Singh, then between 1970 and 1973, while living in the United States, she was married to the American architect William Wesley Peters, with whom she had a daughter, Olga.

After her father's death in 1953, Alliluyeva had worked as a lecturer and translator in Moscow, but following the death of Brajesh Singh, she was allowed to travel to India to return his ashes to his family. While in India, in March 1967, she approached the American Ambassador, and defected to the United States. Once there, she wrote the autobiographical books "Twenty Letters to a Friend" (1967) and "Only One Year" (1969), and later, "The Faraway Music" (1984).

Alliluyeva left the United States in 1982 and moved to Cambridge, where she befriended Lady Renfrew. She then briefly returned to live in the Soviet Union in 1984, before going back to the United States two years later. In the 1990s she settled in Britain once again for some years, before she went back to live in the United States until her death on 22 November 2011.