The payoff was a whirlwind romance - just a few weeks - ending in a brief marriage to Wes Peters, and a daughter.

Peters thinks now that she was invited to Taliesin because it was thought she had personal wealth through her late father.

"This is completely ridiculous," she said. "My father was a very old-fashioned man. He believed that children should have no money. He never gave, even allowance, to me or my brothers. He lived completely on state expense. He never acquired private wealth."

Stalin a tough father

Peters was asked if she thinks often of her father.

"No," she said. "He broke my life. I want to explain to you. He broke my life twice."

She said she had fallen in love with an older man, a writer and filmmaker named Aleksei Kapler. Her father did not approve.

"I was 17," she said. "He put to jail, and then to labor camp, the man who I loved. I saw for the first time that my father could do that."

Kapler had introduced her to the arts - giving her books, taking her to galleries - and Peters said the second time her father "broke" her life came when she applied at a university to study the arts.