a glimpse of Stalin. Like Konstantin, he was made to sign a secrecy oath by the NKVD. He later ran a canteen in the mining town of Novokuznetsk—known from the 1930s until the 1960s as Stalinsk. He died in 1987.
Stalin had an adopted son, in addition to his two illegitimate sons and the two sons he had with his wives. This was Artyom Sergeyev, son of Fyodor Sergeyev, a top Bolshevik and ally of Stalin’s. The senior Sergeyev died in a notorious accident in 1921: An experimental high-speed train, the Aerowagon, derailed. Lenin himself assigned Stalin to look after Sergeyev’s widow and infant son. Artyom would call his adoptive father “Uncle Stalin.” He rose to be a major general in the Soviet army. He died in 2008—still devoted to the USSR, and to Stalin in particular. He regarded Gorbachev, the reformer who lost the Soviet Union, as a traitor.
An obituary in the Guardian, the British newspaper, told of his final moments: “As he lay on his deathbed, a group of war veterans brought him a medal in commemoration of Stalin.” The old general sat up slowly, and as the veterans pinned the medal on his pajamas, he said, proudly, “I serve the Soviet Union.” Those were his last words.
Stalin’s son Yakov served the Soviet Union, too. He was born of the dictator’s first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, in 1907. His mother died later in the year. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, was to write in one of her books that Yakov must have taken after his mother—“for there was nothing rough or abrasive or fanatical about him.” He was gentle, unassuming, and honest. After Yekaterina, or “Kato,” died, Stalin promptly forgot about Yakov. The boy was raised by his grandmother and other relatives. A biographer of Svetlana’s, Martin Ebon, writes that Yakov “was a relic of Stalin’s past. But he remained on the periphery of his father’s life, a goading reminder of Stalin’s early personal history, for more than three decades.”
One of the things that Stalin denied him was his name: Stalin, that is. The dictator’s two children with his second wife enjoyed the glory of the name. But Yakov was always a Dzhugashvili—that being his father’s original, Georgian name. Stalin discarded it for himself in about 1910. As Ebon notes, Yakov was “marked for emotional defeat early in life.”
He moved from Georgia to Moscow in 1921, when he was 13 or 14. He lived with Stalin and his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva (“Nadya”). He had a hard time of it. To begin with, he had to learn Russian, which was difficult for him. Unfortunately, many things were difficult for him. He was a bit slow, or clumsy, or earnest. Stalin thought him a despicable country bumpkin. He scorned and bullied him. “In his eyes,” Svetlana writes, “Yakov could do nothing right.” Stalin “had no use for him and everybody knew it.”
Yakov married a priest’s daughter, Zoya. His father disapproved. In despair, Yakov went into the Stalins’ kitchen and shot himself, although failing in suicide. The bullet either grazed his chest or pierced a lung (accounts vary). His father snorted, “He can’t even shoot straight.” According to Svetlana, her father treated her brother even worse thereafter.
Stalin’s first son, Yakov Dzhugashvili
The young man worked at menial, or at least humble, jobs. He and Zoya had a baby, who died at less than a year. They soon divorced. In the mid-1930s, Yakov got married again, to Yulia, who was Jewish. Stalin once more disapproved. Svetlana writes, “He never liked Jews, though he wasn’t as blatant about expressing his hatred for them in those days as he was after the war.” Yakov and Yulia had a daughter, Galina, called “Gulia.”
It seems that Yakov had another child too, in between his marriages. A Stalin biographer, Miklós Kun, says that Yakov had a son named Yevgeny with Olga Golisheva, an accountant. Today, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili is proud to be Yakov’s son—or, more to the point, proud to be Stalin’s grandson. Gulia always refused to accept that he was related. (She died in 2007.) Yevgeny once told the press, “She suggested we do a DNA analysis. I accepted her offer on the condition that she pay for it. Then she disappeared.”
Yevgeny became a colonel in the Red Army. He has long lived in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. In 2006, a journalist, Steven Knipp, visited him at his apartment and found “several huge photos of Stalin staring down from the walls.” Yevgeny is a super-dedicated Stalinist. He helped form a political coalition, the Stalinist Bloc. He has sued individuals and institutions for defaming Stalin—i.e., for telling the truth about his crimes. He even sued the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, for acknowledging that Stalin ordered the Katyn massacre (the wholesale execution of Polish officers).
Gulia, incidentally, was no less faithful a Stalinist, even if a less litigious one.
Svetlana Stalina loved her brother Yakov. In a memoir, she says she saw him angry just twice. In both instances, their brother, Vasily, had spoken crudely in front of Svetlana and other girls and women. “Yakov couldn’t stand it,” she writes. “He turned on Vasily like a lion.” But mainly he was gentle, which irritated his ungentle father. They were “too unlike each other ever to be compatible,” writes Svetlana, in an understatement. Yakov once said to her, “Father speaks to me in ready-made formulas.”
Hitler and the Nazis had a pact with Stalin, which they broke in June 1941. They invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin barked at Yakov, “Go and fight!” He did. In less than a month, he was captured. The Germans discovered they had a plum. Stalin denied to them and everyone else that he had a son named Yakov. He further denied that there was really such a thing as a Russian POW: “In Hitler’s camps, there are no Russian prisoners of war, only Russian traitors, and we will do away with them when the war is over.” Stalin had his daughter-in-law, Yulia, arrested as the wife of a traitor. She was imprisoned for a year and a half, and was never the same again.
In February 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, leading the German army at Stalingrad, surrendered. The Germans proposed a swap: Paulus for Yakov Dzhugashvili. Acting as mediator was Count Bernadotte, the famed Swedish diplomat. Hitler and Stalin were of the same mind (as so often): One was furious at his commander for choosing surrender over suicide; the other was furious at his son for the same reason. But they differed on a swap—which Stalin refused. He is reported to have said, “I will not exchange a soldier for a field marshal.” He is also reported to have said, “They are all my sons,” meaning that all the boys of the Red Army were dear to him.
The details of Yakov’s captivity are murky—like the details of his life in general—but we know two things: He was brutally treated, and he refused to crack. He did not go over to the other side, which would have given the Germans a propaganda victory. The details of his death are, of course, murky. But he seems to have committed suicide by throwing himself on an electric fence, in April 1943.
Svetlana says that her father “abandoned Yakov to his fate.” And “it was very like my father to wash his hands of the members of his own family, to wipe them out of his mind and act as if they didn’t exist.” That is no doubt true. But there are reports that Stalin ordered secret rescue attempts. And the biographer Montefiore adds a wrinkle or two. Those wrinkles are as follows: Stalin was somewhat haunted by Yakov in later years. He was also somewhat proud of him, for his behavior at the end. “A real man,” he called him.
With his wife Nadya, Stalin had Vasily and Svetlana. The second son was very, very different from Yakov. Vasily was a classic type of dictator’s son: the little tyrant of a tyrant, the little monster of a monster. We will meet more such sons as this book proceeds. Vasily used his privileged position to get everything he wanted: sex, power, riches, thrills. And, as frequently happens, it all ended very badly for him.
He was born in 1921, Svetlana in 1926. You might have thought it problematic enough to be Stalin’s son or daughter—but when Vasily was eleven, and Svetlana six, their mother committed suicide. Svetlana was raised by a nanny and other generally civilized women; Vasily was given over to brutish bodyguards, especially to the chief of Stalin’s personal security team, General Nikolai Vlasik. They were happy to foster a monstrousness in Vasily.
Stalin essentially ignored Vasily, as he did Yakov. He doted on Svetlana (until he decided to ignore her too). When he did pay attention to Vasily, he was