The news that Josef Stalin's only daughter died in Wisconsin last week closed a haunting chapter of the Cold War that began when Svetlana Alliluyeva famously defected to the U.S. in 1967.

But to her daughter in Portland, the death of the woman who became known as Lana Peters was the loss of her best friend and confidant.

"She was my only family," said Chrese Evans, 40, who manages a boutique in Portland. "We were very close. It was a huge loss--I thought she was going to outlive me. She had a lot of friends, and a lot of people who really loved her."

Peters died of colon cancer on Nov. 22 in Richland Center, Wisconsin, where she lived off and on after becoming a U.S. citizen. She was 85.

Stalin's legacy appeared to haunt her throughout her life, though she tried to live outside his shadow. She denounced his policies, which included sending millions into labor camps, but often said other Communist Party leaders shared the blame. Stalin died in 1953 after ruling the nation for 29 years.

"He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel," Peters told the Wisconsin State Journal in a rare interview in 2010. "There was nothing in him that was complicated. He was very simple with us. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him and become an educated Marxist."

Evans, who first name is pronounced "Chris," said her mother was an talented writer and lecturer who taught at Princeton University and did not just draw on her father's past to write two books: "She had a lot of accomplishments in her own right," she said.

When Peters left the Soviet Union for India, she planned to leave the ashes of her late third husband, an Indian citizen, and return. Instead, she walked unannounced into the U.S. embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum. After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the U.S.

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"She had a house full of students and frequently got standing ovations at her lectures," Evans said. You can see in her face that's when things really turned around for her in her life."

Peters graduated from Moscow University in 1949, worked as a teacher and translator and traveled in Moscow's literary circles before leaving the Soviet Union. She was married four times -- the last time to William Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright. They were married from 1970 to 1973 and had one daughter. Evans said she and her mother moved around the U.S. often, but said she grew up "kind of a normal kid."

Peters returned to the Soviet Union with Evans (whose name then was Olga) in 1984 at age 58, saying she wanted to be reunited with the two children she had left behind when she defected. Her Soviet citizenship was restored, and she denounced her time in the U.S. and Britain, saying she never really had freedom. But more than a year later, she was given permission to leave after feuding with relatives. She returned to the U.S. and vowed never to go back to Russia.

Evans, who had worked at a fashion boutique in Portland when she was a student, said she reached a crossroads in 2000: Take an offer to work for the IRS and use her tax law and accounting degree, or stay and run the business.

"One had the prospect of excitement, the other one was cool," said Evans. She stayed in Portland.

Evans said despite some news reports, her mother was not living in a cabin without electricity at the time of her death in rural Wisconsin.

"She didn't much like TV, but she didn't live with the Amish," Evans said, a reference to the large Amish community near her mother's home. Evans wrote an

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Evans said she frequently traveled back and forth between Portland and Wisconsin and expects to return for her mother's funeral, details of which are still pending.

Peters went into seclusion in the last decades of her life. Her survivors include Evans and Yekaterina (born in 1950), who goes by Katya, a scientist who studies an active volcano in eastern Siberia. A son, Josef, died in 2008 at age 63 in Moscow, according to media reports in Russia.

The Associated Press contributed to this report