In 1963, a young Russian woman was admitted to the Moscow Central Clinical Hospital in Kuntsevo for a tonsillectomy. She was a lecturer and translator based in Moscow, and although she had studied history and politics at her father's insistence, her true passion was for literature and the arts. Besides Russian, she was fluent in German, French, and English. Her name was Svetlana Alliluyeva. She was Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's youngest child and only daughter.
During her brief stay at the hospital, she met another patient — an older Indian man — who was receiving treatment for bronchiectasis and emphysema. His name was Kunwar Brijesh Singh. He was the scion of the royal family of Kalakankar in present-day Uttar Pradesh, and a member of the Group of Oppositional Indian Communists, affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany Opposition and the Indian National Congress. At the time, Svetlana was reading a book by Rabindranath Tagore from the hospital library, and the two often spoke about him at length. Soon, they fell in love and moved to Sochi, a resort town near the Black Sea, to recuperate after Singh was discharged from the hospital. There, they lived together as common-law husband and wife for a month. She was 37 at the time, and he was in his late-50s.
It was a tumultuous Cold War-era love affair. As per the term of Singh's medical visa, he was supposed to return to India after his discharge from the Kuntsevo Hospital, and he did so in December 1963. But the couple soon came up with a plan for him to work as a translator of Russian texts into Hindi, and he returned to Moscow in March 1965. They planned to legally marry the same year and applied to register their marriage in Moscow on May 3, 1965. Unfortunately, this is when things took a turn for the worse for them.
Svetlana was summoned to Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin's office in Kremlin the next day — the same office which once belonged to her father — where Kosygin told her that the Soviet government did not and would not approve of their marriage. At the time, she was working for the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, and she came under increasing scrutiny and surveillance because of the Institute's publication of anti-Soviet materials and organisation of unapproved political rallies.
Singh, too, was increasingly isolated after coming under government scrutiny for his translation work with Moscow-based Progress Publishers. The stress took a toll on him. He became critically ill and had to be hospitalised again. During this time, Svetlana spent entire days at the hospital with him and the two talked about India and Vedic literature, according to her biographer Rosemary Sullivan.
At 7 am on the morning of October 31, 1966, Singh passed away peacefully at the couple's home in Moscow. He was cremated the day after, and in December 1966, Svetlana flew to India to personally immerse his ashes in the Ganges as per his wishes. She also built a hospital in his honour at Kalakankar, and funded it for twenty years until she could no longer pay for it. Today, the building houses a private school.
But the story was far from over. India had had a tremendous impact on Svetlana, and in early 1967, she asked for official permission to settle permanently in the country. This was at the height of the Cold War, and the Soviet-leaning Indian government of Indira Gandhi denied her request. The Soviet government asked her to return to the USSR but she'd never set foot on Soviet soil again. In March 1967, two days before she was scheduled to depart for Moscow, she defected to the USA instead. She spent the rest of her life in the USA and died on November 22, 2011.
To learn more about Svetlana Alliluyeva, read her memoir Only One Year and Rosemary Sullivan's biography Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva.
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