Svetlana ‘Deeply Regretted’ Taking Her Away : Olga Weeps Tears of Joy at School

The 14-year-old American-born granddaughter of Josef Stalin returned to her English school today after an 18-month stay in the Soviet Union, and wept with joy as old classmates and teachers hugged and kissed her.

“It’s a very emotional moment. I didn’t think I’d get back,” said Olga Peters, whose grandfather ruled the Soviet Union for 29 years.

She arrived at the Friends’ School run by Quakers in the town of Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, the day after she flew to London. She was accompanied by two Soviet diplomats.

Her mother, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who defected to the West in 1967 and abruptly took her daughter to the Soviet Union in October, 1984, has said she also is free to return to the West and will leave shortly, first to visit Wisconsin and then to settle in Switzerland.

At the time the mother and daughter went to the Soviet Union, there were reports that Olga resented being transplanted to what to her, as an American, was an alien culture.

She told reporters that her mother “deeply regretted taking me away from school so suddenly without saying goodby to anyone” and that “she was really thrilled I was coming back.”

Olga said she and her mother went to the Soviet Union “for the sake of the family. She wanted to save the family and . . . I didn’t want to hurt her.”

The teen-ager said she did not regret the time she lived in Soviet Georgia, her grandfather’s birthplace, but said she had problems with the Georgian and Russian languages and missed her mother tongue, English.

Also, she said, her stepbrother and stepsister “were not supportive to me . . . we didn’t know what to say to each other.” But in general, she added: “It was a great experience and I don’t regret any of it. . . . It’s not every kid that gets to see three different countries--three of the most important countries in the world.”

Olga was brought up in the United States, home of her father, architect William Wesley Peters, who is divorced from Alliluyeva, and then lived in England for two years before going to the Soviet Union.

Alliluyeva told a news conference after she returned to the Soviet Union that she had never been happy in the West, was tired of publicity about herself and her father and wanted to see the two grown children she left behind.