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 very hard on him. Vasily was 20 when the war came to Russia. Like Yakov, he fought. But he was a pilot, like the Mussolini boys. The pilots were the elite of the military. And Vasily received promotion after promotion.
In no time, he was a major general. Then he was a lieutenant general. For these positions, Vasily was not in the least qualified. He performed appallingly. He was drunken, bullying, physically abusive, incompetent, and reckless. His recklessness endangered lives, and sometimes cost them. “No privilege was denied him,” as Svetlana writes. Vasily feared and answered to no one—except to Stalin, of course, before whom he quaked in his boots.
Once, in the war, Stalin actually fired him. The order reads, in part, “Colonel Stalin is being removed from his post as regimental commander for drunkenness and debauchery and because he is ruining and perverting the regiment.” He was reinstated after several months and, once more, promoted.
Vasily and Svetlana with their father
Vasily was a satyr, in addition to a drunkard, and the seat of his activities was the family dacha at Zubalovo, 20 miles from Moscow. Drunken orgies were regular. Imagine Vasily and his sidekicks commandeering women and firing pistols at chandeliers. He was not only a little Stalin, he was a little Caligula too. Stalin himself complained that his son had turned the dacha into a “den of iniquity.” (When you have been rebuked by Stalin, morally, you have been rebuked.)
Vasily was married either four times or three—accounts vary (as I have said in this narrative before). He was definitely married to a daughter of Marshal Timoshenko; he may have been married to a daughter of Molotov, the foreign minister, too. Though he was the dictator’s son, it was no prize to be married to him. “He beat his wives as drunken peasants do in a village,” writes Svetlana. He beat whomever he wanted, “even policemen in the street,” as Svetlana says, for “in those days everything was forgiven him.”
After the war, he formed and directed air-force sports teams. The sports included hockey, basketball, swimming, and gymnastics. When the athletes performed well, he would reward them, lavishly; when they did not, he would punish them, including by having them jailed. In 1950, the hockey team went down in a plane crash. Vasily covered it up, fearing his father’s wrath.
Everyone wanted to please or appease Vasily, because he was the czarevitch, so to speak: the crown prince. But it would not last beyond his father’s lifetime. In this sense, he was not the crown prince, not a successor, just the dictator’s spoiled brat. He knew all this, too. He was highly anxious about his future, as well he should have been. According to Montefiore, he told Artyom Sergeyev, “I’ve only got two ways out. The pistol or drink! If I use the pistol, I’ll cause Father a lot of trouble. But when he dies, Khrushchev, Beria, and Bulganin’ll tear me apart. Do you realize what it’s like living under the axe?” (These men were deputies under Stalin, who would vie for power in the post-Stalin era.)
Stalin died on March 5, 1953. By the end of April, Vasily was arrested. He was charged with embezzlement, the utterance of “anti-Soviet statements” (i.e., criticisms of Stalin’s heirs), and myriad other offenses. As Svetlana says, there were “enough charges to put ten men in jail.” Nobody came to Vasily’s defense now. All the sidekicks
