It is July 16, 1941. Three weeks ago the largest invading force in history (some three million soldiers) crossed the borders of the Soviet Union. Stalin is in shock, and it is feared that Moscow will fall in a matter of weeks.
The Red Army entrusted everything to try to regroup in Smolensk (400 km from the capital) and stop there the onslaught of Army Group Center, one of the three into which the German forces were divided, but many units did no more than back down and others surrendered without a fight.
In that chaos, near the Belarusian city of Vitebsk was the 14th Tank Division. In turn, this had a howitzer regiment, the 14th. And within that regiment there was an artillery piece whose man in command was a certain Yakov Dzhugashvili (1907-1943), ranked lieutenant.
That July 16, it happened to Dzhugashvili like most Soviet officers, who did not know how to react to the speed that the Wehrmacht printed with its “lightning war”. In combined aircraft and armored vehicle attacks, the Germans concentrated their forces on a few points on the front through which they advanced without stopping to conquer. Before they knew it, the Russian units were already surrounded and cut off.
In the midst of the rout, Lieutenant Dzhugashvili lost contact with the men who were supposedly still guarding his cannon. He was looking for them when he was stopped by some infantrymen, who said they needed an officer to lead them in an attack to try to break the siege. However, with the first shots they got scared and left him alone.
Then he decided to change his clothes for those of a peasant and asked him for refuge. The wife was sobbing, afraid that the Germans would find him there, so she left. Stunned by an explosion, and finding himself surrounded, he eventually closed in on the German lines and surrendered.
Since his name meant nothing to anyone, at first he went unnoticed; until someone recognized him and warned the guards. Dzhugashvili was Stalin’s real last name, and that was his firstborn. No wonder they ratted him out. Everyone in the Soviet Union had someone who had been a victim of Stalinist terror; there were many reasons to hate the son of the red tsar.
The Germans took him to a mansion near Berlin. The idea came from Joseph Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister, who hoped to convince him to speak to the Russians over German radio. Later he also thought of using it as an image of the Russian Liberation Army, a renegade unit created by Andrei Vlasov, a Soviet general who changed sides.
Stalin found out about his capture when they sent him a leaflet that the Luftwaffe was dropping on the front. Along with a recent photograph of his son, the following text appeared: “Stalin’s son has surrendered (…) That such a Soviet officer has turned himself in proves without a doubt that all resistance to the German army is in vain. Stop fighting and come to us!”
The ridicule could not be bigger. Shortly before, the Soviet General Staff had ordered everyone to fight to the end. Surrendering was forbidden, and whoever did so would be considered a coward and paid for by his family, who would lose all state assistance.
So… was Stalin to be punished? In those days, a feeling of hysteria invaded the Kremlin. As Miklós Kun explains in Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (2003), the general secretary was almost certain that his son had been betrayed in some way, and someone was going to pay for it.
The first was his daughter-in-law, the Ukrainian-Jewish dancer Yulia Meltzer, who found her bones in a labor camp. A month later a maternal uncle, Alexander Svanidze, was taken out of the gulag he was in and shot. Already in 1942, his wife, Maria Anisimovna, and another Yakov aunt of the same name met the same fate.
The only one of the Svanidzes who was saved was little Galina, Yakov’s daughter. In fact, it was Svetlana Alilúyeva, the daughter that Stalin had had with his second wife, who made sure that the girl was not left an orphan. Despite being only Yakov’s half-sister, she persuaded her father to get her sister-in-law out of the gulag. The one who did nothing was the other son, Vasili’s drunkard; deep down, because he had always hated his stepbrother.
While this was going on, offers for a ransom kept coming. The Germans asked to exchange the prisoner twice, first for Leo Rudolf Raubal, Hitler’s beloved nephew, and then for Marshal Friedrich Paulus, the commander of the 6th Army in the disastrous battle of Stalingrad.
Stalin rejected all the proposals; According to him, he said, because “all the prisoners of war are my children.” The truth is that he never loved Yakov, and if he did, he never showed it to him. This is the only way to explain why he sent him to the front line, commanding a simple artillery piece, when Vasili, who was completely useless, was already a twenty-year-old colonel.
The strangest thing is that the offspring he was abandoning was the son of a woman he always said he had loved madly: Kato Svanidze. They met in 1905. When they married in 1906, the groom had to use a false name, as he was already on the lists of the Okhrana (the tsar’s secret police), and she was arrested almost immediately after harboring a comrade who turned out to be be an infiltrator
As she was pregnant, they kept her in a police residence, where Iósif went to see her under another identity. She was released after a few weeks, but in June 1907 they had to leave Georgia after Iósif participated in a robbery of the imperial bank in Tiflis that left forty dead.
They settled in Baku (Azerbaijan), whose extreme climate was lethal to Kato’s health. He possibly died of typhus in November 1907, with the anguish of leaving a newborn alone.
Stalin left the baby in the care of his maternal family, of that aunt Maria whom years later he would have killed, and he barely saw him until he was fourteen. She then moved him to Moscow to live with him and the two children from his second marriage. The boy did not have it easy, since he came to a house full of strangers and at that time he did not even speak Russian, only Georgian.
Much has been written about why his father mistreated him so much. Some claim that he may have brought back the sad memory of Kato, but surely it wasn’t that. Yakov was withdrawn and prone to depression. Most likely, Stalin found his character exasperating, and did not have the sensitivity or patience to deal with it.
She wouldn’t let him take his nickname (“man of steel”) as a last name, something he did allow the other children to do, and he did everything possible to destroy his self-esteem. He ridiculed him in public, sometimes for his failed love affairs and other times for wanting to be an engineer instead of a military man (he worked for two years in a power plant).
The straw that broke the camel’s back was that he went to live with Zoya Gunina, the daughter of an Orthodox priest. His father said or did something to him then, because Yakov took a pistol and shot himself in the chest, missing his heart by very little.
It was a desperate way to get Stalin’s attention. He got the message, though he responded in his own way. He ordered to tell Yakov that he had behaved like “an extortionist”, and that he did not want to hear from him again. He even joked that he wasn’t able to successfully kill himself.
Yakov was released from the hospital and married the priest’s daughter, though she died of pneumonia eight months later. After a couple of disappointments, he finally chose Yulia Meltzer. The most tragic thing is that he ended up doing what his father wanted. In 1937 he entered an artillery academy and in 1941 he was already graduated, ready for war. As he told interrogators from the Abwehr (German military intelligence), a “go and fight!” over the phone was the only message of encouragement he received from Stalin. It would be his last conversation.
While the war lasted, almost no one dared to ask him if he was willing to do anything to save his son. The exception was Marshal Zhukov. In Himmler’s Hostages: The Untold Story of Himmler’s Special Prisoners and the End of WWII (2021), Tom Wall describes a conversation between the two in which the subject came up. Apparently, the general secretary replied: “The fascists will not release Yakov, they will shoot him first (…). As far as we know, they are pressuring him to betray his country… No! Yakov would prefer death to betrayal”.
He was not wrong, and that is precisely why his son had been dead for two years. From the reports from the Germans, and from what his comrades in the barracks said, we know quite precisely what happened to him.
In the first interrogation by the Abwehr, he said some nonsense, such as that Germany was destined to be a great empire and that what they were doing to the Jews was well done. However, he never reneged on his communism or said a bad word about his family.
He refused to go on the radio or have anything to do with the traitor Vlasov, as Goebbels wanted. He was a rebel prisoner, who did not even address the SS guards by his rank, as requested.
Given his lack of collaboration, they quickly took him out of that Berlin palace and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Since he was a valuable prisoner, they installed him in one of the barracks set aside for “special” prisoners.
The conditions were harsh, but nothing compared to the miserable existence of the rest of the prisoners – Sachsenhausen was a death camp. They had a bathroom for five, scant but sufficient rations, the obligation to work, and the occasional beating.
His companions in the barracks were Vasili Kokorin, a nephew of Viacheslav Molotov, and four independent Irishmen, forced to fight in the British Army, who as soon as they were captured – or turned themselves in – began to collaborate with the Germans. It seems they were there because the Abwehr suspected they might be double agents.
From what one of the Irish recounted some time later, Yakov’s death occurred after the umpteenth fight between them. It was April 14, 1943, at night. Thomas Cushing accused Yakov of fouling the lavatory, and William Murphy joined the accusation. There were shouts and punches, and at one point Cushing drew a knife and began to chase Yakov, who jumped out of a cabin window.
The others watched from inside, waiting for something to happen because no one should be outside at that hour. And one thing happened, but not the one they anticipated. Something happened to the Russian’s head, because he started running towards the first wall, jumped over it and then went towards the wire fence.
The spotlights illuminated him, they had seen him from the watchtower, and he yelled at the SS: “Don’t be a coward, shoot me!” The bullet went through his head and his body fell on the electrified fence.
After the war, the Americans found the SS report explaining the incident. They were about to hand it over to Stalin during the victors’ conference in Potsdam, but they didn’t want the Soviets to know that whole boxes of documents had been taken from the camps.
The Soviet leader suspected that his son had died, but never had confirmation. And the most curious thing is that he seemed to look for it. In 1951, a story was published in the British Daily Telegraph newspaper according to which the Russian authorities offered one million rubles to anyone with information about Yakov’s fate or whereabouts. Regrets?, who knows.
