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Story donated to us by Partha Sarthi Sen Sharma as :   Kalakankar today is a small village on the banks of Ganga river, some 200 kms east from Lucknow, in the Pratapgarh district of Uttar Pradesh. But it was once the seat of a big zamindari called Kalakankar estate. Raja Dinesh singh, once Foreign minister of India, belonged to this family and the Rajbhawan still stands tall, right on the banks of Ganga like a floating ship. The illustrious Hindi poet Sumitra Nandan Pant lived in this building and edited a newspaper that used to be published from here in the heydays of the estate and must have composed many of his shringar ras poems from the terrace of Raj bhawan overlooking the river. Gandhiji himself had also come here as a guest of the family, at the height of freedom movement and the cement platform on which bonfire of foreign clothes were made still stands today. But all these remarkable facts still pale in comparison to the remarkable story of Joseph Stalin’s only daughter living here for months in 1967. You see Svetlana Alliluyeva, the only daughter of the Russian dictator, had fallen in love and married a Scion of the zamindari family, Brijesh Singh, uncle of Dinesh singh in a Moscow hospital where they both were recuperating. Brijesh singh was a communist leader and had been living in Moscow, the headquarters of USSR communist state then. But the remarkable love story had a tragic end as Brijesh singh died soon after. However, Svetlana, who had never ventured out of Russia till then, decided to come to India, to Kalakankar with the ashes of her late husband to immerse them in Ganga. This she did, lived in the village at a place called Prakash Grih, Brijesh’s house, and was naturally an object of curiosity for villagers all around. Stalin had died long ago and Svetlana was never enamoured with the communist totalitarian state. Soon after she caused an international diplomatic sensation by defecting from USSR to USA in New Delhi and lived the rest of life in USA. She wrote a remarkable memoir of her sojourn in India, in which Kalakankar finds naturally a very prominent place and of her thrilling defection later and is considered a classic in Russian. It’s English translation is called ‘only one year’ and gives vivid descriptions of the places, times and events of India of that time. So if you happen to visit Kalakankar sometime and ask the old people of the village somebody would still recall that ‘ Roosi tanashah ki beti’ and her golden hair. The reference book for this story is Svetlana's autobiography ' Only One Year'  Narration by Mohit Gupta  --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/cblstorybank/message