How did the life of the descendants of Stalin develop?

The ruler had two wives, three children of his own and one adopted. The attitude of the descendants to the "leader" was different: some were proud of their kinship, others were hiding.

Joseph Dzhugashvili (Stalin's real surname, read the story of the pseudonym here) had a very close relationship with his mother: she surrounded him with love, with hard work earned money to provide for her son, and wanted him to become a priest. The father drank heavily, beat his son and wife. Biographers associate these beatings with the future incredible cruelty that Stalin showed both to loved ones and to his people.

Unloved firstborn and Stalinist grandson

The first wife of Joseph was a washerwoman and dressmaker Ekaterina Svanidze. The future "leader of the peoples" loved her dearly, but at the age of 22 she died of typhus. Biographers believe that her departure really broke Stalin. Relatives of Catherine said that during the funeral he "lost consciousness and he jumped into the grave behind the coffin of his beloved Kato."

After her death, Stalin completely devoted himself to revolutionary work, and the upbringing of an eight-month-old son Yakova Dzhugashvilitook over Catherine's aunt. For the first time at a conscious age, Yakov saw his father only at the age of 14, when he came to him from Georgia to Moscow. But their relationship did not work out. Stalin already had another family - he married Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Historians believe that Yakov reminded Stalin of his beloved Kato, and this annoyed him. As well as the fact that Yakov could hardly speak Russian, he was shy and taciturn.

Yakov early married the daughter of a priest - Stalin was against this union. After Jacob's unsuccessful suicide attempt, his father began to despise him at all and did not want to have anything more in common. Stalin insisted that Yakov go to fight during the Second World War, and already in August 1941 his son was taken prisoner by Germany and spent two years in concentration camps.

According to one of the legends, the German leadership offered Stalin to release Yakov in exchange for the captured Field Marshal Paulus, and then Stalin allegedly uttered the legendary phrase: "I am not changing a soldier for a field marshal." Yakov died in the camp under unclear circumstances.

Jacob left three children from different women. The daughter of her first wife died in infancy, two survived to adulthood. In 1936, a son was born from a civil marriage with Olga Golysheva (a friend of Stalin's wife Alliluyeva) Evgeny Dzhugashvili… He became a military historian, participated in many documentaries about Stalin, was an ardent Stalinist. Lived in Moscow and died in 2013.

He had two children - Vissarion (born 1965) and Jacob (born 1972). Little is known about them. They are alive, Vissarion works as a director and according to some sources lives in the USA, where he asked for political asylum after he was beaten in Georgia.

Jacob is an artist, lives in Georgia. In 2006, Yakov asked Vladimir Putin to investigate the circumstances of the death of his great-grandfather Joseph Stalin, he believed that political opponents had killed him.

In 1938, from a new wife, ballerina Judith Meltzer, Jacob had a daughter Galina Dzhugashvili… She was a philologist, studied literature in Algeria, married an Algerian and UN employee Hussein bin Saad.

Galina wrote a book of memoirs about her family "The Granddaughter of the Leader", and died in 2007. In 1971, her son Selim Bensaad was born. He still lives in Moscow in the apartment of his grandfather Yakov.

Vasily and his numerous offspring

In 1918, 40-year-old Stalin married the daughter of his revolutionary comrade-in-arms, 17-year-old Nadezhda Alliluyeva. They had a son in 1921 Vasily Stalin… He became a pilot and aviation general, an influential man.

Unlike Yakov and his descendants, Vasily officially bore the surname Stalin. However, after the death of his father, his situation worsened - he was fired from the army, imprisoned, and later exiled to Kazan and banned from living in Moscow.He was even forced to change his name to Dzhugashvili. Vasily abused alcohol and, according to the official version, died from alcohol poisoning (his last wife doubted the veracity of the cause of death).

Vasily had four children of his own, almost all of them bore the surname Stalin. Little is known about them - his granddaughter Anastasia from her daughter Nadezhda is still alive. In addition, Vasily adopted a daughter of a third wife and two daughters of a fourth wife - they all bore the name Dzhugashvili.

The most famous of Vasily's children was his son Alexander Burdonsky (1941-2017), director and actor. He is the only one who changed his last name on purpose to pursue art and for many years served in Moscow theaters and taught. According to some sources, in his youth, he had a negative attitude towards his grandfather, but later "realized the scale of his personality."

However, he criticized the "fanatical" attitude towards the grandfather of his cousin Yevgeny Dzhugashvili (Yakov's son), who denies the crimes he had committed. He had no children.

Beloved daughter Svetlana, who fled to the West

The second child from Nadezhda Alliluyeva was Svetlanawho took the mother's surname. She was born in 1926 and was only 6 years old when her mother committed suicide (read more here). In 1967, Svetlana actually fled the USSR and settled in the United States. Already in emigration, she wrote a book about her family "Twenty Letters to a Friend", which she dedicated to her mother, tried to recreate her personality and relationship with her husband from the recollections of friends. The book became a bestseller and brought her a lot of money, with which she was able to live in the United States until the end of her days.

Svetlana had several husbands. From her first early marriage, she had a son, Joseph Alliluyev (1945-2008), who became a cardiac surgeon. His son Ilya Voznesensky (b. 1970) is an architect.

From a marriage with Yuri Zhdanov, she had a daughter, Ekaterina (b. 1950). When her mother emigrated, she abandoned family ties and stopped communicating with her. Now she works as a volcanologist, lives in a village in Kamchatka, refuses to communicate with journalists and denies her involvement in Alliluyeva.

In the United States, Alliluyeva married William Peters and gave birth to a daughter, Olga Peters (b. 1971), who later changed her name to Chris Evans.