This is an IHeart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories, and we love telling stories about history.

Our next story comes to us for a man who's simply known as the History Guy.

His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages over on YouTube.

The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories.

Here's the History Guy with a real beauty, the story of Stalin's daughter.

On November 22nd, 2011, an 85-year-old woman named Lana Peters passed away in Wisconsin from complications

due to colon cancer. Eventually, her death made it into some newspapers, but it seemed to go

largely unnoticed by an American public that seemed to have largely forgotten who she was

and all the attention that she had gained during one of the seminal events of the Cold War that happened on March 9th, 1967.

Lana Peters, otherwise known as Svetlana Aleuava, represented the contradictions of the era of the Cold War and was witness to some of the greatest crimes of that era.

She's most known because of her famous father, but is perhaps most notable because of how very different she was from him.

The defection of a woman whose birth name was Svetlana Stalina, the youngest child and only daughter

of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, deserves to be remembered.

Born Joseph Yugoshevili in the imperial state of Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire in

1878, Joseph Stalin already had a reputation for brutality

when he was arrested in exile by the Zyrus government in 1908.

He had purportedly been responsible for a bank robbery in 1907 that had killed some 40 people

and had, as one historian put it, established himself as Georgia's leading Bolshevik.

It was sometime during this period

that he started using the name Stalin, meaning roughly man of steel. After the

October Revolution, Stalin became a trusted supporter of Vladimir Lenin and a vocal

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