Born Svetlana Alliluyeva, a name she changed later, Peters had denounced communism and moved to the United States in the late 1960s. She died from colon cancer on November 22 in Wisconsin.

Her defection in 1967 caused an international furore and was partly motivated by the poor treatment by Soviet authorities of Indian communist Brijesh Singh, with whom she had a relationship.

She left the Soviet Union in 1966 for India, where she planned to leave the ashes of Singh who had died in the USSR. Instead of returning to her country, she walked unannounced into the US embassy in New Delhi and asked for political asylum, shocking many.

After a brief stay in Switzerland, she flew to the US.
Upon her arrival in New York City in 1967, the then 41-year-old said, “I have come here to seek the self-expression that has been denied to me for so long in Russia.”
Peters carried with her a memoir to the US that she had written in 1963 about her life in Russia. Twenty Letters to a Friend became a best-seller.