Svetlana Stalin spent her life trying to escape from the shadow of her father, defecting to the US and becoming known as Lana Peters. So why will history mark her as a cold war plaything?

To his many detractors, Joseph Stalin was a monster on an epic scale who sent millions of "class enemies" to their graves. To the considerably smaller band of his enduring admirers, he was the man who saved the world from the far worse fate of Nazi tyranny. And then there was Svetlana. For her, his "little sparrow", Stalin was the imposing father whose long shadow haunted her throughout a lifetime spent in vain pursuit of escape.

The story of Lana Peters, nee Svetlana Stalina, is on one level quite unexceptional. Spanning as she did the period from 1926 to her death last week in the American heartlands of Wisconsin, she experienced extremes of hardship and joy, success and poverty, that were common to generations of Europeans and Americans who lived through the brutal 20th century.

On another level, though, it was unique, and uniquely poignant. It was not just the dichotomy of the love she felt towards a man who others saw as a cruel, ruthless dictator. It was also that she became the ultimate cold war plaything, the defector heralded by the US in 1967 as proof of the moral corruption of the Soviet Union, only to be lauded in equal measure by Moscow in 1984 when she made a celebrated, albeit brief, return home.

Born on 28 February 1926, her childhood reveals a quality in Stalin rarely discussed in the history books, testament perhaps to the truism that even political monsters have their softer sides. She was spoiled as the "little princess of the Kremlin", a Soviet version of Shirley Temple.

In a rare interview last year with her local paper, the Wisconsin State Journal, Peters was asked whether Stalin had loved her. "Oh yes," she said. "I looked like his mother. I had this red hair, which I still have. It's not coloured. It's my own hair. I have freckles all over, like her."

In a documentary about her life, Svetlana on Svetlana, she recalls the pride with which Stalin watched her driving a car, a skill he didn't possess. "He sat next to me, beaming with joy. My father couldn't believe I knew how to drive."

But there was a darker side to Stalin the father. She told the Journal that he "broke my life twice". The first time was when he dispatched her teenage love, a film-maker called Aleksei Kapler, to Siberia because he did not approve of him (he was Jewish, and an older man); the second time by forcing her to study history as a good Marxist and not pursue her passion of literature and the arts. "Bohemians!", Stalin scoffed. "You want to be with Bohemians?"

In later accounts, Peters said it was the frustration of having her creative urges stymied that drove her to defect. She gave her KGB minders the slip on a 1967 trip to India where she was carrying the ashes of her deceased partner, an Indian communist she met in Moscow. She sneaked into the US embassy, and was granted asylum, arriving in New York that same year.

"I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia," she announced at a packed press conference.

Her defection, aged 41, was an enormous propaganda coup for the US which made the most of her comments that America was "free, gay and full of bright colours," her denouncing of her father as a "moral monster" and her burning of her Soviet passport. But it was never quite as simple as it came across in the soundbite Technicolor culture of the US. Even as she was introduced to the American public for the first time, she defended her father: "I loved him, I respected him." She spoke of his death in 1953, saying: "When he was gone, I lost a lot of faith," and she tried to spread the blame for Soviet excesses away from him, insisting that "many other people in our Politburo were responsible for terrible things for which only he was accused".

Not that the Soviet Union was able to hear such complexities of narrative either. It denounced her following her defection, calling her a traitor, a "tool of the CIA" and stripping her of her Soviet citizenship in 1970.

The post-defection years of Peters are something of a blur, consisting of almost constant moving, a constant seeking of a place where she belonged. She became married, briefly and for a third time, to William Peters, the right-hand man of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. She changed her name to Lana Peters, bore her third child, Olga, and settled in Wisconsin where she had been drawn by Wright's experiment in communal design, Taliesin.

As the euphoria of her American adventure faded, Peters began to reflect more deeply about what she had done. In the snippets of insight gleaned from sparse interviews, there is evidence of a growing awareness on her part that she would never succeed in throwing off her father's shadow and that the great American promise of "freedom" was but an illusion.

In 1990 she told a newspaper: "I don't any longer have the pleasant illusion that I can be free of the label 'Stalin's daughter'. You can't regret your fate, though I do regret my mother didn't marry a carpenter."

Last year, she developed the thought to the Wisconsin State Journal: "Wherever I go, here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever, Australia, some island, I always will be a political prisoner of my father's name."

That was not the only awareness that grew on her through the years. From her snatched words we can see that she also came to recognise the price of "freedom" – the loss that was contained for her within the American dream. Specifically, the two children she had left behind in Moscow when she fled in 1967 – Josef and Yekaterina - the offspring of her first two marriages.

She felt the separation most keenly in 1982 when she moved to England so that Olga could be educated at a Quaker school, where she complained that she felt "cut off and lonely". When her son Josef contacted her by letter from Moscow, out of the blue, she was ecstatic and almost on a whim packed her bags and returned with Olga in tow to the land of her birth.

From the Soviet point of view, it was a triumphant homecoming every bit as exquisite in propaganda terms as America's embrace of her in 1967. Mother and daughter were put up at a luxurious hotel suite and feted around town. But, quickly this time, the euphoria began to pale. Hopes of a passionate reconciliation with her two abandoned children came to nothing, and after a fleeting sojourn in Soviet Georgia, where she could not walk the streets without being ogled at as the child of Georgia's most famous citizen, she accepted defeat and made another about-turn. She slunk back to Wisconsin where she remained in almost total seclusion until her death on 22 November.

So what is to be made of this long and drama-filled life? There is a passage in Svetlana on Svetlana where she suddenly breaks down in tears, her normal composure utterly dissolved. She is reciting in Russian a poem written in 1919 by one of her childhood teachers, Maximilian Voloshin:

"Pray, you.

Endure, you.

Accept a cross around your neck.

On shoulders – throne,

the bells of drowned Kitiaz on the soul's bottom,

The dream that's never to fulfill."

Stalin's daughter explains to the camera, wiping back her tears, why Voloshin's poem affects her so. She talks of Russia, but she might equally have been referring to America or, for that matter, to her own life.

"He thought that Russia's dream will never get fulfilled," she said. "It's probably true."