Why did the children of Soviet leaders go to live in the West?
Today, well-known members of the current Russian elite are often criticized for the fact that their children have left their native country and feel comfortable abroad. They are criticized quite reasonably, since there are serious doubts that they, and their parents, experience feelings of ardent love for the Motherland while living abroad.
Meanwhile, the children of some leaders of the USSR also preferred to live behind the hill. The most famous example is the daughter of I.V. Stalin.
Svetlana Iosifovna Allilueva
S.I. Alliluyeva
Svetlana Alliluyeva was born in 1926 in Moscow. She left the USSR in 1966. And she didn’t just leave. While in India, she went to the American embassy and asked for political asylum. Then she moved to the United States, received citizenship there, changed her name – became Lana Peters, marrying an American W. Peters. They had a daughter, Chris Evans.
In 1984, Svetlana Iosifovna came to the USSR, received Soviet citizenship, but a couple of years later returned to the United States again. It is said that her eldest children, a son and a daughter, whom she left behind in the USSR, never found a common language with their mother. She died in Wisconsin, USA, in 2011.
S.I. Alliluyeva is credited with the following words about the motives for not returning to the USSR:
“… My non-return in 1967 was based not on political but on human motives. … I hoped to return home in a month. However, in those years I paid my tribute to the blind idealization of the so-called ‘free world’, the world with which my generation was completely unfamiliar” (A.N. Kolesnik, “Chronicle of the Life of Stalin’s Family”, 1990).
Stalin’s great-grandson Vissarion Dzhugashvili (son of Yevgeny Yakovlevich Dzhugashvili) has also lived in New York since 2003.
Sergei Nikitovich Khrushchev
S.N. Khrushchev
Sergei Khrushchev was born in 1935 in Moscow. He is the second of five children of the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. In 1958 he graduated from MPEI. Until 1968 he worked in the Chelomey rocket design bureau. He became a Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor. In 1963 he was awarded the title of “Hero of Socialist Labor”. In 1991, he went to the United States, where he gave lectures, then decided to stay. He himself described his departure as follows:
“I was invited to Harvard, where I stayed at the Kennedy School for six months. At this time, he met the former president of IBM. He offered me a three-year job at his center, the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University in Providence. I agreed for a year.
I came here just after the State Emergency Committee. And then the country was gone. And now, instead of a year, I’ve been here for seven years.” Liked. He became a U.S. citizen in 1999. He lived in Providence. He died in 2020 in the United States. After cremation, he was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery (next to his father).
Ivan Adzhubei, grandson of Nikita Sergeyevich, and Nina Khrushcheva, his great-granddaughter (granddaughter of Leonid’s eldest son, who died at the front) also live in the United States. She holds anti-Russian views.
Maya Mikhailovna Sumarokova (Suslova)
M.M. Sumarokova
Maya is the daughter of Mikhail Andreevich Suslov. In Brezhnev’s time, he was the second person in the state, he was also called the “gray cardinal”. Maya was born in 1939 in Moscow. She graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and defended her doctoral dissertation on the topic: “The Democratic Forces of Yugoslavia in the Struggle Against Reaction and the Threat of War of 1929-1939”.
Mikhail Andreevich Suslov was proud of his daughter, more than once he said in the circle of close people that he brought up his children in strictness and devotion to the country. But
In 1990, when difficult times came, Maya Andreevna left with her husband (economist Leonid Nikolaevich Sumarokov) and two sons Mikhail and Nikolai to Austria, where they live to this day.
Irina Mikhailovna Virganskaya (Gorbachev)
I.M. Virganskaya
Irina Gorbacheva (Virganskaya) was born in 1957 in the city of Stavropol. She was the only child of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev. After graduating from school, Irina entered a medical institute and married her classmate Anatoly Virgansky. She defended her Ph.D. thesis on the topic “On the Study of Social Factors of Mortality”. She lives in Germany and in the United States, in the city of San Francisco, where the head office of the Gorbachev Foundation is located, where she is the vice-president…
The above list is far from complete. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of some Soviet leaders have long since become Anglo-Saxons. For example, Leonid Brezhnev’s great-grandson Dmitry lives and works in the UK after graduating from Oxford. Andropov’s granddaughter Tatyana Kharlamova (daughter of Igor’s son) emigrated with her husband to the United States and settled in Miami. Some time later, her brother Konstantin went there as well. Later, Tatiana returned to Russia, where she died. Leonid Brezhnev’s niece – Lyubov (daughter of his younger brother Yakov Ilyich) – in 1990 moved to the USA, lives in San Francisco…