It materializes on propaganda posters. We hear it in fanaticized speeches. The father-son relationship is an essential element of totalitarian rhetoric and the dictators of the 20th centurye century have often hidden their genocidal ambitions behind a paternalistic mask. Mao Zedong proclaimed himself Chinese “father of the nation”. Adolf Hitler advocated for the expansion of fatherlandthe “native land” which can be literally translated as “territory of the father”. Joseph Stalin lifted chubby children by pretending to be “Little Father of Peoples”… Even if, while he was gaining ground in the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, his eldest son languished in solitude in the depths of Georgia.
Life in red
The existence of Iakov Djougachvilithe first child of Joseph Stalin, is a sad story. It is difficult to believe that the dictator, executioner of 20 millions has more than 40 million of men, women and children (according to different estimates), could have been burdened with a family. That a heart could even beat in his chest. And yet, in the 1900s, while living in hiding in the Caucasus Mountains, the future Red Tyrant saw life in rosy colors. The one he loves is Ekaterina Svanidzé, the sister of a former classmate. Joseph Stalin married her while he was trying to raise funds to complete the “Bolshevik Revolution” and end the Russia of the Tsars. A strange idyll…
The two lovers live near Baku (present-day Azerbaijan), in a small house bordered by the mountains. The couple’s only child, Iakov, born March 18, 1907, rarely sees his father’s face: the latter goes to plead the Bolshevik cause in Finland, England and Sweden. To make matters worse, Ekaterina Svanidze ended up falling ill, contracting typhus (or tuberculosis) after drinking stale water. She died eight months after the birth of her son. During the funeral, Joseph Stalin, collapsed, would have confided to a friend: “This creature softened my heart of stone. But she died and with her died my last tender feelings towards humanity.” The Man of Steel has just been born.
Blood ties
The death of his first wife further distances Stalin, barely thirty years old, from the swaddling clothes of Yakov. Nicknamed “Yacha”, the toddler is entrusted to his maternal aunts and repatriated to Georgia. He would reunite with his father fourteen years later during engineering studies in Moscow. A gap of indifference then separates them. Joseph Stalin remarried in 1919 to a younger woman, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. To reproach him for his absences, Iakov indulges in some rebellions, refusing to even get his card in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the body that his father has ruled with an iron fist since 1922.
The relationship between the two men gradually deteriorates. One evening in 1928, when Yakov introduced his young fiancée Zoya, the daughter of an Orthodox priest, to his father, Stalin flies into a rage. Sick with despair, his son locks himself in a room and shoots himself in the chest. But he misses his heart and, while his mother-in-law urgently summons the Kremlin doctors, the despot would have sighed: “He doesn’t even know how to aim straight…”
Joseph Stalin’s wife also had to endure the dictator’s mood swings. Those around them are accustomed to the couple’s domestic scenes, generally caused by suspicions of infidelity. After a drunken dinner at the Kremlin on November 8, 1932, during which Stalin was said to have particularly mistreated his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva commits suicide by gunshot. The official cause of his death, reported by the newspapers the next day, was more trivial: appendicitis.
Portrait of Joseph Stalin (born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, 1878-1953) with his second wife Nadezhda Allilouïeva (1901-1932). Photograph dating from the late 1920s. Private collection. | © Fine Art Images / Leemage via AFP
On the front line
In the summer of 1941, the about-face of Nazi Germany against its former Soviet ally ended up uprooting the family tree of the Little Father of Peoples. Iakov (Stalin) Dzhugashvili is now lieutenant of the 14e armored division of the Red Army. Far from being protected by his father, he was sent with his artillery battery to the Belarusian front of the Second World War. Worse still, in July 1941, “Yacha” was captured by the German army, near Vitebskin the northeast of present-day Belarus.
The Wehrmacht is rubbing its hands: it has a precious bargaining chip. Perhaps she will be able to obtain several Nazi prisoners in return? And yet, attempts at negotiation are unsuccessful. Joseph Stalin cannot bring himself to exchange a German marshal against his own son. According to directive 270 in force within the Red Army, soldiers taken prisoner are considered traitors to the homelandsince they are strictly forbidden to allow themselves to be captured alive… “I am ashamed in front of my father because I remained alive”, Iakov would have confessed, sheepishly, during an interrogation.
Among previously unpublished World War II photographs taken by Nazi Field Marshal Wolfram von Richthofen during Operation Barbarossa, this one from 1941 reads: “Stalin’s son is captured.” | Wolfram von Richthofen / public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Stalin had foreseen it: his eldest son would never return home. On April 14, 1943, locked up in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp (in eastern Germany), gradually sinking into depression and refusing to eat, Yakov Djougashvili suddenly dies. Some claim that he committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified fence surrounding the camp; others, that he was shot dead by sentries during an escape attempt. Whatever his end, his fate was sealed a little over thirty-six years ago, when his father abandoned his cradle for the promise of a revolution.
Source: www.slate.fr
