with Stalin at his dacha, Marshal Zhukov asked the General Secretary if anything had been heard of his son Yakov. Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son from his first marriage, had been captured by the Germans while serving as a lieutenant in charge of an anti-tank battery in 1941. Stalin remained silent. Zhukov must have regretted asking. Three years previously, when given command of the defence of Leningrad, he had ordered that ‘all the families of those who surrender to the enemy will be shot’. Although echoing a similar order by Stalin, he would not have known that this could, technically at least, imply that Stalin be shot. However, Stalin eventually replied, saying ‘Yakov is never going to get out of prison alive. The murderers will shoot him.’1
Sonderlager ‘A’, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, 14 April 1943
Almost two years prior to this conversation, Yakov Dzhugashvili stood alone outside his prison hut in despair, hurting physically and mentally. A short time earlier he had been in a brawl with some Irish prisoners who were billeted with him. He asked to see the Camp Commander, probably to request a transfer, but the request was denied. His mental anguish may have hurt more than any blows he received. He had earlier been taunted by the allegation that his father was responsible for the murder of thousands of Polish officers and intellectuals, whose remains had been discovered in a mass grave in Katyn Forrest. The news had been broadcast on German radio the previous day. He may not have believed it, but it was another reminder of his awful predicament. His relationship with his father was never good. Despite his best efforts to win his approval, Stalin seemed to dislike him.2 Now he had irredeemably shamed him by allowing himself to be captured by the Germans.
It was dusk and past curfew and he was being ordered to go into his hut. He remained standing. A rifle was trained on him from the watchtower. With increasing urgency he was being warned that he would be shot if he didn’t obey. Some of his fellow prisoners, including Thomas Cushing, watched from a hut window. He still wouldn’t move. Perhaps he reasoned that this was a way out of his dilemma. A sacrificial death might reconcile him with his father, a last act of tortured fidelity. It would at least end his torment.
Dzhugashvili suffered bouts of depression,3 which is not surprising given his background. He was the only child of Stalin’s first marriage to Kato Svanidze. She died when he was an infant and he was left in the care of his maternal grandmother and aunt in Georgia while Stalin pursued his revolutionary career. His father had little or no contact with him until he was taken to Moscow by his mother’s relatives at fourteen years of age in 1921. Stalin was at that time a close ally of Lenin within the Communist Party and he was in a position to provide his son with a good education. To the disappointment of his father, Yakov didn’t do well in school; which must have been, at least partly, attributable to the fact that he spoke only Georgian when he arrived. Although installed into the Stalin household, which now included two uncles and an aunt who had travelled with him from Georgia, he seems to have been despised by his father, who considered him soft and worthless.4 Stalin regularly humiliated Yakov in front of others, referring to him as ‘my fool’.5 He was, however, protected somewhat by his stepmother, Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyev, known in the household as Nadya.6 When he was only sixteen years old, Yakov announced that he wanted to marry a fellow high school student, but Stalin objected – not so much because of their youth, but because he didn’t approve of the girl’s ‘social behaviour’ and the fact that she was the daughter of a priest.7 Yakov married his sweetheart notwithstanding, but the union didn’t prosper; a child died in infancy before the couple separated, in part at least due to Stalin’s interference. The separation didn’t improve the father-and-son relationship. In his early twenties, following another disagreement, an upset Yakov attempted suicide. He put a gun to his chest, but the bullet narrowly missed his heart and he was only wounded. This further alienated him from Stalin who told Nadya that Yakov was ‘a hooligan and a blackmailer, with whom I have nothing in common and with whom I can have nothing further to do. Let him live wherever he wants with whomever he wants.’8 Stalin, rather than seeing Yakov’s action as a cry of despair at his father’s relentless disapproval, viewed it as an attempt to exert pressure on him.9 For eight years they were completely estranged.
He remarried – again Stalin didn’t approve – and his new wife Yulia bore him a daughter, Gulia, in 1938. By then he was a Red Army officer cadet and this contributed to a reconciliation of sorts that allowed him return to the Stalin household. Relations, though, were still not easy. Nadya, was no longer there to protect him – she committed suicide in 1932 – and Yakov had a tempestuous relationship with his half-brother, Vasily. More tragedy followed. His maternal aunt and uncle along with his uncle’s wife, all of whom had accompanied him from Georgia, were arrested in 1937 during the ‘Terror’.10
When the Germans invaded on 22 June 1941, Dzhugashvili was ordered to the front in charge of an artillery unit. Before leaving, he telephoned his father who urged him to ‘Go and fight!’11 His unit entered combat on 27 June, but they were soon encircled by the Germans and he was captured when attempting to make his way back to Red Army lines. Although not wounded, he claimed to have been stunned by heavy bombing ‘otherwise I would have shot myself’, he told his German interrogators.12
Although he had fought bravely before being captured, he was suspected by his Soviet commander of willingly surrendering to the Germans.13 Irrespective of the circumstances of his capture, Yakov knew Stalin would have been angered by it and he would have feared for his wife and 3-year-old daughter. Yulia was arrested, although her husband probably didn’t know of this during his captivity. Stalin would have been particularly angered when the Germans used his son’s capture for propaganda purposes. A leaflet containing a photograph of him looking somewhat dazed and dishevelled in the presence of two German officers was dropped over the Russian front. The accompanying text read:
Stalin’s son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, full Lieutenant, battery commander, has surrendered. That such an important Soviet officer has surrendered proves beyond doubt that all resistance to the German army is pointless. So stop fighting and come over to us.14
This was the only propaganda the Germans extracted from him. He steadfastly refused to collaborate with the Nazis who wanted him to make propaganda broadcasts. His treatment in captivity alternated from being cosseted in a fashionable hotel to being ill-treated and half-starved in prison camps. The Nazis continued to pressurise him to work for them. They wanted him to act as nominal head of Vlassov’s renegade Russian army, but he steadfastly refused to be linked to the turncoat general. He even refused to address SS guards by their military title, using only their surname; an unnecessary act of defiance that led to retaliatory punishments.
After Stalingrad, it is believed that Hitler offered to exchange Dzhugashvili for Field Marshal von Paulus. Stalin is said to have responded, ‘I will not exchange a soldier for a marshal’,15 a comparison that owes as little to Communist egalitarianism as it does to notions of parental care. Before being sent to Sachsenhausen, he was interned in a special oflag near the Baltic port of Lϋbeck where he was billeted with Polish officers16 who might have been expected to be hostile to Russians and Communists. However, contrary to expectations, Dzhugashvili became friendly with some of the Polish officers and joined them in a futile attempt to escape.17 Robert Blum, the son of Léon Blum, the French statesman, whom we will encounter later, shared a cell with Dzhugashvili in Lϋbeck.18
Stalin’s son was, potentially at least, the most valuable prisoner held by the Nazis. His friend and cell mate, Vassily Kokorin, was another prize captive, being a nephew of the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov. Molotov was second only to Stalin within the Soviet leadership and would have been assumed to have influence over the Soviet leader. In fact, Molotov, described by Lenin as ‘the best filing clerk in Russia’,19 was, like others in the Kremlin hierarchy, in abject fear of Stalin. Kokorin, Molotov’s sister’s son, was a Soviet Air Force officer who had been wounded before being captured, by which time his feet had been severely frostbitten with the result that most of his toes had to be amputated.20
The Irishmen with whom Dzhugashvili had brawled was none other than the
