Felix Dadaev: Stalin's double

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The elderly "leader of the peoples" was replaced by a 24-year-old Dagestani, strikingly similar to Stalin. He's still alive!

By the time Felix Dadaev, a young guy from a Dagestan village, became an official double, Stalin already had three of them. The idea to pick up "understudies" came to General Nikolai Vlasik back in the 1920s, when he headed the Kremlin's special protection. The secret police believed that it was unsafe for Stalin to go out to rallies to the workers, the politician had too many enemies.

The approach paid off. The very first double, Caucasian Rashidov, was blown up by a planted mine when his motorcade drove through Red Square. But the fate of Dadaev turned out to be much more remarkable. Firstly, he remained silent for 55 years, hiding this fact of his biography even from his family. Secondly, he is still alive - he is a hundred years old!

Pronounced dead

Dadaev was born in 1920 in the mountainous village of Dagestan Kazi-Kumukh, and as a boy he worked as a shepherd and began to master jewelry. But his real passion was dancing - after moving to the city of Grozny, he took lessons from a choreographer, and when the family moved to Ukraine, he was invited to the state ensemble.

The twenty-year-old Dagestani impressed many then: he danced, juggled, showed tricks, had an acting talent and, the funniest thing, was surprisingly similar to the main person in the country.

“When I was young, I was terribly similar to the leader of all times and peoples, so that even some highlanders teased me and called me Soso [Joseph in Georgian]. I pretended to be dissatisfied, but in my heart I was proud of my resemblance to the great father of nations! " - says Dadaev.

When the war broke out, the fate of Dadaev was predetermined - the guy was sent to the front-line concert brigade, to raise the morale of the soldiers. The fame of him quickly reached the generals of the army, but it is not known whether the NKVD would have become interested in him, if not for one circumstance.

Having come under fire, Dadaev was seriously wounded and was pronounced dead: “Seven corpses were thrown into the hospital, but it turned out: two people are alive! I was one of them. However, they realized the mistake late: a funeral had already been sent from the hospital to Dadaev's relatives, and all the war years they considered him dead at the front.

This "disappearance" was in the hands of the Chekists. In 1943, after another speech, people in civilian clothes approached Dadaev and sent him on a secret special flight to Moscow. They put Dadaev in one of the country dachas, fed him tasty food and explained what they wanted from him. To begin with, appear instead of Stalin in the right place and attract attention to yourself. For example, get out of the Kremlin and get into a car.

Disguise

“In general, Soso and I had one hundred percent similarity in everything! I have coincidences with him in height, voice, and nose. Only the ears were made, like those of the leader. The process, by the way, is not complicated. The ear was pasted over with a special adhesive flesh-colored gutta-percha patch. Due to her, the auricle became deeper. Then they added various ear patches, the gluing points were powdered, and the ears of Comrade Stalin's uniform were ready,”recalls Felix Dadaev.

To become an indistinguishable copy, he had to gain 11 kilograms, artificially yellow his teeth (Stalin smoked a lot, but Dadaev did not) and for several months, under the supervision of the NKVD and acting teachers, to work out facial expressions, intonation, and Stalin's movements in the smallest detail. To do this, he spent hours playing newsreels with the first person. But there was one important mismatch - age. The difference between the "original" and the "understudy" was almost forty years.

“There was no such plastic makeup as it is now in those years. A make-up artist worked on me. But he could not be around me every day. Therefore, I learned how to make myself "smallpox" [Stalin's face was covered with smallpox spots since childhood]: first I applied a tone of brown, like a tan, color, then I took an ordinary female brush with iron teeth, pressed hard into my face, and deep "smallpox" was obtained. When the makeup dried up, I powdered my face. You walk around like this all day, and wash it off in the evening,”says Dadaev.

Only a very narrow circle of people knew about the existence of the "understudy". Dadaev himself signed a nondisclosure agreement, and he was prohibited from communicating with his family.

Target for assassination attempts

Having easily coped with the first stage, Dadaev was given a new task - to appear in public in a circle of fellow party members.

In his autobiographical book, Variety Country, he wrote: “The main thing was to try to hold the first test meeting (with members of the government. - author's note) silently, the leader, as it were, is not in the mood for conversations, but if something happens then to say, to do it laconically, of course, in the voice of Joseph Vissarionovich. It was, perhaps, the easiest, quietest task."

After that, Dadaev began to trust Stalin's official visits, meetings of foreign delegations, filming newsreels, reading reports on the radio, marching during the parade on Red Square with comrades and standing on the Mausoleum. None of the witnesses understood anything. As a result, it turned out that in many books and media there was a ceremonial portrait of the leader, on which Dadaev was actually filmed.

The most important task, perhaps, was to play the "flight" of the head of the USSR to Tehran to meet the three leaders in 1943.

“We figured out that there will be two flights. One is distracting. I also participated in it. In the image of Stalin, at the appointed time, I got into the car, and they took me to the airport with a security guard. This was done so that Stalin (or rather, his copy, that is, me) came to the attention of [foreign intelligence],”he recalls.

Dadaev was not in Tehran, he was taken only to the airport. But it was there that there was an assassination attempt.

Dadaev himself met with Stalin only once. It lasted no more than five minutes in the leader’s reception room, but being in a state of shock, the “understudy” could remember almost nothing: “Apart from the smile of Joseph Vissarionovich, as it seemed to me then, and the heavy nod of agreement, I didn’t remember anything. That's the whole conversation.”

After Stalin's death, the need for an understudy disappeared by itself, and Dadaev continued to engage in acting and … humor, performing with concert programs.

Until 1996, all information about the double was classified, this fact was listed only in his personal file, stored in a secret KGB file cabinet. When the veto was lifted, this fact became public, but even after so many years, Dadaev continues to say that he cannot tell everything. In his book, he devoted only one chapter to this fact of his biography.