JOSEPH STALIN ,THE DICTATOR OF RUSSIA KILLED THEIR POPULATION DIED MARCH 5,1953

JOSEPH STALIN ,THE DICTATOR OF RUSSIA KILLED THEIR POPULATION DIED MARCH 5,1953

Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) was the dictator of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from 1929 to 1953. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was transformed from a peasant society into an industrial and military superpower. However, he ruled by terror, and millions of his own citizens died during his brutal reign. Born into poverty, Stalin became involved in revolutionary politics, as well as criminal activities, as a young man. After Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) died, Stalin outmaneuvered his rivals for control of the party. Once in power, he collectivized farming and had potential enemies executed or sent to forced labor camps. Stalin aligned with the United States and Britain in World War II (1939-1945) but afterward engaged in an increasingly tense relationship with the West known as the Cold War (1946-1991). After his death, the Soviets initiated a de-Stalinization process.

JOSEPH STALIN’S EARLY YEARS AND FAMILY
Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili on December 18, 1878, or December 6, 1878, according to the Old Style Julian calendar (although he later invented a new birth date for himself: December 21, 1879), in the small town of Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. When he was in his 30s, he took the name Stalin, from the Russian for “man of steel.”

Did You Know?
In 1925, the Russian city of Tsaritsyn was renamed Stalingrad. In 1961, as part of the de-Stalinization process, the city, located along Europe's longest river, the Volga, became known as Volgograd. Today, it is one of Russia's largest cities and a key industrial center.

Stalin grew up poor and an only child. His father was a shoemaker and alcoholic who beat his son, and his mother was a laundress. As a boy, Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him with lifelong facial scars. As a teen, he earned a scholarship to attend a seminary in the nearby city of Tblisi and study for the priesthood in the Georgian Orthodox Church. While there he began secretly reading the work of German social philosopher and “Communist Manifesto” author Karl Marx, becoming interested in the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. In 1899, Stalin was expelled from the seminary for missing exams, although he claimed it was for Marxist propaganda.

After leaving school, Stalin became an underground political agitator, taking part in labor demonstrations and strikes. He adopted the name Koba, after a fictional Georgian outlaw-hero, and joined the more militant wing of the Marxist Social Democratic movement, the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin. Stalin also became involved in various criminal activities, including bank heists, the proceeds from which were used to help fund the Bolshevik Party. He was arrested multiple times between 1902 and 1913, and subjected to imprisonment and exile in Siberia.

In 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina “Kato” Svanidze (1885-1907), a seamstress. The couple had one son, Yakov (1907-1943), who died as a prisoner in Germany during World War II. Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant. In 1918 (some sources cite 1919), Stalin married his second wife, Nadezhda “Nadya” Alliluyeva (1901-1932), the daughter of a Russian revolutionary. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s. Stalin also fathered several children out of wedlock.

JOSEPH STALIN’S RISE TO POWER

In 1912, Lenin, then in exile in Switzerland, appointed Joseph Stalin to serve on the first Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. Three years later, in November 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. The Soviet Union was founded in 1922, with Lenin as its first leader. During these years, Stalin had continued to move up the party ladder, and in 1922 he became secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, a role that enabled him to appoint his allies to government jobs and grow a base of political support.

After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin eventually outmaneuvered his rivals and won the power struggle for control of the Communist Party. By the late 1920s, he had become dictator of the Soviet Union.

THE SOVIET UNION UNDER JOSEPH STALIN
Starting in the late 1920s, Joseph Stalin launched a series of five-year plans intended to transform the Soviet Union from a peasant society into an industrial superpower. His development plan was centered on government control of the economy and included the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture, in which the government took control of farms. Millions of farmers refused to cooperate with Stalin’s orders and were shot or exiled as punishment. The forced collectivization also led to widespread famine across the Soviet Union that killed millions.

Stalin ruled by terror and with a totalitarian grip in order to eliminate anyone who might oppose him. He expanded the powers of the secret police, encouraged citizens to spy on one another and had millions of people killed or sent to the Gulag system of forced labor camps. During the second half of the 1930s, Stalin instituted the Great Purge, a series of campaigns designed to rid the Communist Party, the military and other parts of Soviet society from those he considered a threat.

Additionally, Stalin built a cult of personality around himself in the Soviet Union. Cities were renamed in his honor. Soviet history books were rewritten to give him a more prominent role in the revolution and mythologize other aspects of his life. He was the subject of flattering artwork, literature and music, and his name became part of the Soviet national anthem. His government also controlled the Soviet media.

JOSEPH STALIN AND WORLD WAR II
In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Joseph Stalin and German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) signed a nonaggression pact. Stalin then proceeded to annex parts of Poland and Romania, as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. He also launched an invasion of Finland. Then, in June 1941, Germany broke the Nazi-Soviet pact and invaded the USSR, making significant early inroads. (Stalin had ignored warnings from the Americans and the British, as well as his own intelligence agents, about a potential invasion, and the Soviets were not prepared for war.) As German troops approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Stalin remained there and directed a scorched earth defensive policy, destroying any supplies or infrastructure that might benefit the enemy. The tide turned for the Soviets with the Battle of Stalingrad, from August 1942 to February 1943, during which the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them from Russia.

As the war progressed, Stalin participated in the major Allied conferences, including those in Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945). His iron will and deft political skills enabled him to play the loyal ally while never abandoning his vision of an expanded postwar Soviet empire.

JOSEPH STALIN’S LATER YEARS
Joseph Stalin did not mellow with age: He prosecuted a reign of terror, purges, executions, exiles to labor camps and persecution in the postwar USSR, suppressing all dissent and anything that smacked of foreign–especially Western–influence. He established communist governments throughout Eastern Europe, and in 1949 led the Soviets into the nuclear age by exploding an atomic bomb. In 1950, he gave North Korea’s communist leader Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) permission to invade United States-supported South Korea, an event that triggered the Korean War.

Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years, died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, after suffering a stroke. His body was embalmed and preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square until 1961, when it was removed and buried near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization process initiated by Stalin’s successor Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971).

By some estimates, he was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people during his brutal rule.

Reds in the bed - Stalin's sex drive exposed

HE has been worshipped, feared, and even denounced. But now the sexy side of Joseph Stalin is being exposed in a controversial Russian film. The Soviet tyrant's relationship with a woman 22 years his junior is to be turned into a steamy TV and film drama this autumn. The production team admits it will provoke a storm of anger in Russia and reignite the debate over the portrayal of one of history's most infamous dictators who sent millions to their deaths.

It comes a year after German filmmakers sparked a major row by depicting Hitler as warm and caring in the film Downfall. Yevo Zhena, or 'His Wife', is being made as a 1.5m four-part blockbuster to be shown on the Rossiya TV Channel this autumn. 

There are also plans for a feature-film version to be sold internationally. The drama focuses on Stalin's relationship with his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, and depicts the feared ruler as a passionate lover who missed the climax of the Russian Revolution because he was in bed with Alliluyeva, then a teenager. 

The two first met in 1908. He was 30 and she was eight when her father, Sergei Alliluyeva, offered Stalin shelter after he had escaped from prison. Stalin's first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, had died a year earlier after four years of marriage. Stalin and Alliluyeva married in 1919 and had an often stormy relationship until she mysteriously died in 1932. 

The film shows them striking up a romantic attachment in early 1917, after he returned from exile in Siberia. One scene sees Stalin helping the nervous teenager undress, and in another he pulls her into a bath with him. Even more controversially, the film claims that he missed the storming of the Winter Palace during the October Revolution because he was in bed with Alliluyeva.

As they listen to the shooting outside, Stalin casually remarks that the Bolsheviks may or may not have taken power. Yevo Zhena is based on a book published in 2001, called The Only Women, which was based on new material from archives but which dramatised the gaps between what could be proved from research. The film takes the scholars' view of Alliluyeva's death, saying that she committed suicide after a public row, and dismisses popular conspiracy theories suggesting Stalin murdered her or had her killed. 

After Stalin insults her at a banquet, she is shown walking through the Kremlin alone, and then a shot is heard. Mira Todorovskaya, the co-director, said: "Stalin was a devil and monster, but in our film you can't see that. "People will say that we have beautified Stalin and made him not as he was in real life. But I think my film will have opponents from both sides." Todorovskaya said she believed that Alliluyeva helped keep Stalin's behaviour under control, calling her "his second conscience". 

Historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, who wrote a best-selling book on the Soviet tyrant, Stalin: Court Of The Red Tsar, and who is now researching a volume on Stalin's early life to be published next April, said: "It's not correct to say that he missed out on the Revolution. He didn't help storm the buildings, but that's because he didn't have a military role. He was the editor of Pravda, which was a very important job because the paper was crucial in the days before radio and television. "The producers are right to dismiss the conspiracy theories about Stalin killing her or having her killed. All the evidence points to her having committed suicide.

 "Alliluyeva's death did affect Stalin, although I disagree with the suggestion that she kept him in check or acted as a 'conscience'. He was extremely brutal before she died. But losing her helped make him more paranoid and affected his views of families and spouses, such as imprisoning or torturing wives of suspects.

" Dr Andrei Rogatchevski, a lecturer in Russian culture at Glasgow University, said: "It will be very interesting and will spark a lot of debate. There are still some who are nostalgic for the kind of strong leadership which Stalin gave. They don't want the gulags or terror back, but they believe that such a vast country can only be ruled by a strong man like Stalin. They won't like Stalin being portrayed as missing the Revolution to be with his lover. "Many others in Russia will not like to see a man who caused the death of millions being seen as loving and tender. 

As well as the terror, many still blame Stalin for the blunders at the beginning of the Second World War which cost millions of lives and allowed the Germans to advance into Russia." Leave The Baby Alone With Dad For 5 Minutes... Read More Give It Love Three years after Stalin's death, the 'excesses' of his rule were denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who announced a policy of "De-Stalinisation." 

In the film, Stalin is played by award-winning Georgian actor Duta Skhirtladze, with Olga Budina starring as his young lover. Budina recently played the part of Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Russian tsar, Nicholas II. Anastasia's fate has been the subject of even more debate than Alliluyeva, with many believing Anastasia survived the murder of the Imperial family in 1918 and managed to escape to the West.




There is a chapter in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography is appropriately called – ‘1914: Artic Sex Comedy’.When Stalin was exiled to Kureika, a hamlet of  69 peasants living in huts he became involved with a thirteen year old girl Lidia. She became pregnant and had a child but not until after Stalin had abandoned her. This did not please her brothers but was not illegal in the sense that we would think of it today.Fourteen was the technical under Tsarist law, but this was Siberia. Furthermore, there was no precise legal concept of statutory rape in Tsarist law: for the police, it was as much a crime ‘against female honour’ as a violation of her father’s chattels. Stalin’s agreement to marry Lidia rectified the situation.

Stalin’s relationships with women were never the best. Both his father and his mother beat him and this definitely left its mark. When an emotional Stalin asked his mother why she had beaten him so much she said the beatings were the reason that he had turned into the great man he was. He may have been a superbly intelligent political leader who could deal with the political intrigues of the Kremlin sign but he could not emotionally deal with his wife. He hid in the toilet from his wife, Nadya, to avoid her hysterics and depressive moods. He was oppressed by her extreme jealousy of other women and her suicide destroyed him. In later life he settled for a maid-come-wife who didn’t talk very much perhaps to avoid the intensity of other relationships with women that he had had before in his life.


Stalin who was born (in 1879) to poor Georgian parents became one of the most dreaded dictators of all times. Stalin has been usually portrayed as a megalomaniac who was uninterested in sex.  But contrary to the common belief, Stalin in his 30s seduced a 13-year-old and was also indicted for under-aged seduction. The girl, Lydia, was from a Siberian village Kureika.  In those days Stalin was extremely attractive and charming and Lydia was a school girl. Their affair started sometimes around 1914. Simone Sebga Montefiore while researching on his new book came across Lydia’s memoir in the presidential archive in Moscow along with other evidence. His investigation pointed towards a completely different Stalin, a wanton and unfaithful seducer. The sex between Lydia and Stalin was consensual and she became pregnant twice. Although he promised to marry her, he forgot her in the pursuit of his political career. The investigation also indicated that St

Told for the first time, the astonishing story of the brutal dictator's affair with an under-age schoolgirl...and how he made her pregnant.
The story was too shocking to believe. But now that Stalin was dead, his successor Nikita Khrushchev decided he had to investigate the astonishing rumour about the monster's sexual depravity.

It was claimed that when he was in his 30s and before he became leader, Stalin had raped or seduced, even fathered a child with, a girl who was just 13 years old - and had been indicted for the under-age seduction by the police.

The tale had long been dismissed as just another piece of Western anti-Stalin propaganda

It had first surfaced soon after he took over from Lenin as Soviet dictator in 1924, appearing in the "scurrilous" tabloids and emigre journals in the West that were banned in the newly-formed Soviet Union.

Of course, during his reign of terror the rumour had all but disappeared - no one dared breathe a critical word about the tyrant in those years.

But on his death in 1953 it had resurfaced. And now Khrushchev, having heard the story of the under-age girl, had commissioned his KGB boss General Ivan Serov to investigate in great secrecy.

As Stalin's biographer, I had heard the story but it seemed so outrageous as to be incredible: like most historians, I simply believed that it was mere propaganda.

It did not sound like the Stalin we knew: he was married twice but usually he was portrayed, somewhat like Hitler, as a freakish inhuman monster, so unnaturally obsessed with power that he was uninterested in sex.

Yet more than 80 years on from when the rumours first appeared, I found myself examining a most extraordinary document among Stalin's papers in the so-called Presidential archives in Moscow, while researching for my new book on the young Stalin.

Marked top secret and signed by the KGB boss Serov, it was addressed to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo.

It was dated 1956 - three years after Stalin's death - and spelt out the results of General Serov's investigation.

Serov reported back to Khrushchev that, amazingly, the entire story of Stalin's affair with a 13-year-old was true. Khrushchev showed it to the Politburo (including Stalin's long-serving henchman Molotov), who all signed it and then filed it in the deepest recesses of the archives where it has remained until now.

I was also able to find in the archives the memoirs of the girl herself, who was called Lidia. She wrote them during Stalin's reign, which is why they make no mention of any sex or the children she had by Stalin - that would have been suicidal.

Using all these and other archive documents, I constructed an astonishing picture of an unknown Stalin - one that painted him as a promiscuous and faithless serial seducer and libertine.

The picture was confirmed by the reminiscences of villagers who lived in the isolated hamlet that was the 13-year-old girl's home in Siberia.

This, then, is the true story of the under-age affair - the most shocking of many conducted during Stalin's mysterious life in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

In March 1914 Josef Stalin - a Georgian cobbler's son known to friends as Soso and comrades as Koba - was sentenced for his revolutionary activities by the Tsar to exile close to the Arctic Circle in a tiny hamlet named Kureika.

The place was a freezing hellhole, an isolated twilight world cut off from humanity in winter by the daylong darkness.

In Kureika, only the reindeer, snowfoxes and Tungus indigenous tribesmen could really function in deep midwinter. Everyone wore reindeer fur.

The hamlet contained 67 villagers - 38 men and 29 women - all packed into just eight ramshackle izbas or wooden peasant shacks.

Among them were seven orphans from the same family - the Pereprygins - of whom the youngest was 13-year-old Lidia.

She immediately noticed Stalin, not just because of his good looks but also because he was hopelessly underdressed with only a light coat.

Before long, he was sporting the full local outfit - from boots to hat - of reindeer fur, all of it provided by Lidia Pereprygina.

Stalin in those days was slim, attractive, charming, an accomplished poet and educated in the priesthood, but also a pitiless Marxist terrorist and brutal gangster boss - a Red Godfather who had funded Lenin's Bolsheviks with a series of audaciously bloody acts of bank robbery, piracy and racketeering.

Lidia was a schoolgirl orphan living on the remote frontier where girls matured early.

Some time in the early summer of 1914, the 35-year-old Stalin embarked on an affair with Lidia.

While not admitting to anything explicit in her memoirs, we catch a glimpse in them of Stalin and Lidia together staggering from drinking bout to drinking bout, because she writes of their drunken dancing and singsongs: "In his spare time, Stalin like to go to evening dances - he could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance."

These memoirs of Stalin's 13-year-old mistress - recorded 20 years later at the height of his dictatorship, while she remained a Siberian housewife - were clearly constrained.

But they contain unmistakable innuendos: "He often liked to drop in on certain people," says Lidia - by which she meant herself.

"And he also drank."

Was this how he seduced her?

Stalin was guarded during his exile by a red-bearded, red-tempered policeman named Ivan Laletin.

Stalin had already escaped many times from previous exiles. Laletin soon became his enemy.

By summer, almost everyone must have known about the sexual affair between Lidia and Stalin - she started to slip more and more regularly into his lodgings.

The policeman probably saw his chance to nail the insolent Georgian and watched Stalin carefully, determined to catch him in bed with the 13-year-old.

"One day," recalled Feodor Taraseev, the only villager who dared record the story, "Stalin was at home, working and not leaving the house.

"The policeman decided to check up on him. Without knocking on the door, he burst into the room."

Stalin was "furious to be interrupted," said Taraseev.

Almost certainly the policeman caught Stalin and Lidia in flagrante delicto.

Stalin's immediate response was to attack the policeman, who drew his sabre. Stalin was wounded in the neck, which so inflamed him that reportedly "he kicked out the rogue!"

"We witnessed this scene," says Taraseev.

"The policeman was running away towards the Yenisei River, cravenly waving his sabre in front of him while Comrade Stalin was pursuing him in a state of high excitement and fury, with his fists clenched."

At the very time that Stalin was seducing Lidia, "the lights were going out all over Europe" as Britain and the Great Powers, including Russia, careered into World War I.

His future partners in the 'Big Three' of WWII were already established and distinguished: Franklin D. Roosevelt was on his way to becoming U.S. Secretary of the Navy while Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.

Back in Siberia, the affair was no longer a secret. The statutory age of consent was 14, but it is clear from the KGB report that the sex between Stalin and Lidia was consensual.

The KGB chairman Ivan Serov explained: "J.V. Stalin started living together with her" - and this, he implied, was almost as shocking as the seduction.

Soon the news became even more jaw-dropping: Lidia was pregnant.

Stalin moved into the pitiful Pereprygin two-room shack. The lavatory was an outhouse where he used to take a rifle to scare the circling wolves.

At night, Lidia would creep into his room, recounts Stalin's first biographer Essad Bey, who must have talked to fellow exiles.

Certainly she was not shy about recalling that "he wore white underwear and a sailorstriped vest," as she confided to her interviewer in 1952, when Stalin was almost worshipped as a demi-god.

Lidia's brothers were so furious about the pregnancy that they refused to eat with Stalin. Lidia had to cook for him on his own.

According to KGB boss Serov, policeman Laletin threatened "to instigate criminal proceedings for living together with an under-age girl. J.V. Stalin promised the policeman to marry Pereprygina when she came of age".

So Stalin became engaged and the family, whether gratefully or begrudgingly, accepted the relationship.

In return, Stalin "shared his fish with them" as one of the family.

Indeed he treated Lidia almost as his young wife, entertaining at home and asking her to cook for his guests.

Stalin enjoyed the company of the shamanistic Tunguses and Ostiak tribesmen and learned to hunt and fish just like them. He still enjoyed partying, too.

"At the Taraseevs' place, the young gathered in a circle for a party - Stalin danced in the middle beating time, then he started singing," recalled a visitor to Kureika, Daria Ponamareva.

He also studied his Marxism, eagerly awaiting letters from Lenin.

Kureika, with its solitary hunting, its time to read and its young mistress, came to suit Stalin.

But all the time he knew his teenage fiancee was a transitory amusement to be abandoned by the wayside of his revolutionary mission.

The pregnancy was presumably an irritant, although locals recall Lidia was in love with Stalin.

Somewhere around December 1914, Lidia gave birth to a baby who died soon afterwards: Stalin made no comment but was definitely in Kureika at the time.

He survived the winter of 1915/16 there, too, living in a sooty, fuggy room in the Pereprygin house, and continuing the relationship.

In 1916, the Georgian lodger impregnated Lidia for the second time, and then typically made himself scarce. He escaped for the whole summer of 1916: where had he gone?

Most likely, his disappearance was connected with the pregnancy: locals claim he was devising a way to avoid marrying his pregnant mistress.

During my research, I discovered Stalin already had form as a prolific lover and that he had often promised marriage, only to renege at the last minute.

Even in these years of penniless obscurity, he was never without at least one girlfriend - and often more.

Indeed in exile, he became astonishingly promiscuous: in Vologda, in an earlier exile, he had met a saucy runaway schoolgirl of 16 named Polia who was living with a revolutionary comrade.

Stalin and she began an affair: watching secret police codenamed her Glamourpuss.

Polia was one of the few people who understood how strange Stalin was and could tease him about it: she always called him Oddball Osip - Osip being a diminutive of Josef.

When they parted, he sent her a postcard of a couple passionately embracing and wrote: "I owe you a kiss for your kiss passed onto me. Let me kiss you now! I'm not simply sending you a kiss but am kissssssssing you passionately (it's not worth kissing any other way! - Josef."


There was not much else to do in exile except drink, feud and fornicate, but Stalin had perfected all three pursuits.

He became engaged to at least three women, all of whom he abandoned. This shameless, caddish rogue seduced several landladies and usually their maids too, as well as a series of noblewomen and liberated revolutionary girls.

When he parted from one mistress, he managed to move in with another the next day, suggesting he was carrying on with several simultaneously.

His henchman Molotov recalled that, despite his pockmarks and freckles: "Women must have been enamoured by him because he was successful with them. He had honeycoloured eyes. They were beautiful."

Indeed, he later stole one of Molotov's girlfriends.

He was "attractive", Zhenya Alliluyeva, his future sister-in-law and probable mistress, recalled.

"He was a thin man, strong and energetic (with) an incredible shock of hair and shining eyes."

Everyone always mentions that he was that "man with the burning eyes".

He was mysterious, haughty, cold, watchful and foxily cunning as well as being eccentric and surprisingly intellectual. And then there was his nationality: the Georgians were the Italians of the Russian Empire, regarded as passionate and romantic.

But if the ladies expected a traditional Georgian Casanova, they must have been bitterly disappointed when they grew to know him better.

He seethed with complexes, and was shy about a stiff arm he had suffered since birth, along with his webbed toes and pockmarks.

The tender moments could not compensate for the glacial detachment and morose over-sensitivity.

Young Stalin seduced many women, but the Revolution always came first. The self-obsessed Marxist knight felt he could ride into the sunset, breaking engagements and abandoning children, whenever the Revolution called.

This is what happened to Lidia.

In October 1916, Stalin was conscripted into the Tsarist army but both he and officials must have known that his stiff arm would not pass medical examination.

Locals claim Stalin put his name on the conscription list with "a false certificate", to escape his marital obligations.

Stalin did not hang around in Kureika. He quickly said goodbye, giving one lady who had looked after him "a signed photograph and two overcoats".

Then, "seen off like a real hero", he set off. It is not known whether he said goodbye to Lidia.

After he was gone, in roughly April 1917, Lidia gave birth to a son, Alexander.

She did not tell Stalin, who never contacted her, but somehow he heard: he later told his sister-in-law Anna Alliluyeva of his Siberian son.

He was utterly unfettered by paternal feelings or even sentimental curiosity.

In February 1917, the Russian Revolution started in faraway St Petersburg. The Tsar abdicated and on March 12, Stalin arrived in the city.

In the summer of that year, he started his affair with another 16-year-old schoolgirl, Nadya Alliluyeva, who became his second wife.

When the Bolsheviks came to power in October 1917, Stalin became one of Lenin's top henchmen. Henceforth, his wild affairs in exile - especially his seduction and impregnation of a 13-year-old, his engagement to her and then abandonment - became secret.

Lidia later married a peasant fisherman, Yakov Davydov, who adopted Alexander as his own. She became a hairdresser and had eight more children.

"Stalin never helped her," reported KGB chief Serov.

Alexander was told he was Stalin's son by his mother Lidia years after her affair with Stalin, says his son, Yury.

They "kept quiet about it and only the few locals in Kureika knew whose son he really was".

Stalin's forgotten and illicit family still live in Siberia.

• YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.







Joseph Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid 20s to his death in 1953. Although many consider him as a tyrant, in Russia opinions are divided. His children, loved by their father, had interesting lives that led some of them far from home, and some into early death.

Stalin’s youngest son Vasily
Vasily was born on March 24 1921 and he was the child of Stalin’s marriage to his second wife – Nadezhda Alliluyeva. When he was 11, his mother Nadezhda committed suicide.

Like most children of the Soviet elite members of society, Vasily became a pilot. His plane was shot down five times, and he was known as a bold and brave pilot of the Soviet Army. His father was so hard on him that he was only after 12th request granted the rank of general.

Vasily loved to pilot his plane drunk so he could show the courage to the girls, and his father banned him from flying once.

In Leningrad, he was the first one to who started the construction of sports facilities and one could say that the credit goes him for football and hockey presence in Russian sport at the time.

After his father’s death, he had a manic desire for revenge because he had claimed that his father was poisoned. What marked his military and personal life is wickedness to alcohol, according to media.

Also, he was considered a great womanizer, and this was supported by the fact he married four times. He was known for organizing “parties” where orgies were usual fun, and all of this terrified his father. He was arrested for “Soviet negative publicity” and admitted at the trial even the most basic charges. At his own request, he was set as auto-mechanic in prison.

After serving a prison sentence of eight years, he was banned from staying in Moscow and his surname Stalin was taken. He ended his life in Kazan where he died due to a severe alcohol abuse.

Firstborn son Yakov

Yakov Dzhugashvili Stalin was the eldest son of the great dictator, and he was born on 18 March in 1907. He spent his childhood in Tbilisi, and graduated in electrical engineering in Moscow.

His love life was turbulent, he married three times. He met his third wife when he fought with her husband in a pub.

When the Second World War started, Yakov served infantry of Soviet Union, and distinguished himself in the battle of Vitebsk for which he received the recognition.

The Germans captured him in 1941. year, and he spent nearly two years in the German concentration camps. Historical records show that Yakov bravely defended his country at the trials, but was disappointed in the actions of the Red Army.

When Hitler’s army lost the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army captured German Field Marshal Paulus and the Germans wanted to exchange him for Stalin’s son.

However, to the surprise of all, Stalin refused this exchange, not wanting to change the field marshal for his son, because he thought he was an ordinary soldier and the Soviet Union did not want to give him special treatment. After this military move of his father, a matter of subjective assessment, Yakov jumped out of the barracks in the camp and told the German troops, “Fire, fire” as they did.

However, there are other theories about the death of Stalin’s eldest son, saying that he was not shot, but he jumped on electric fence.

Historians claim that Stalin was most proud of his son Yakov, Vasily caused him the biggest headache for the flamboyant life, while his daughter Svetlana was his sweetheart.

Fabulous destiny of Stalin’s daughter

Photo from: www.tumblr.com
Photo from: www.tumblr.com
Stalin’s daughter Svetlana was born on 28 February in 1926. During the period from 1932 to 1943, she was taught in 25 schools in Russia. She studied at the Faculty of Philology and Literature and in addition she opted to history. Although considered as a dictator, Stalin was in her childhood a loving father and called her “Birdie.” He lavished her with gifts and brought her the American films.

Her teenage days were marked with The Second World War and estrangement from her father. Once, when she was 18 years old, while setting the table for dinner in the Kremlin, she met Winston Churchill. According to “The New York Times”, they had pretty interesting conversation.

She became the darling of the nation, similar to Shirley Temple in the United States. Thousands of babies were named after her. She worked as a translator in English and literary editor. The first marriage she entered was with schoolmate of her brother Vasily, but she soon divorced and married Yuri Zhdanov with whom she had a daughter. Later she had another marriage and with Ivan Alexandrovich, who was a prominent Soviet scientist.

In 1962, she decided to be baptized in the Orthodox church, along with her daughter. For a while she was in India where she got married for the fourth time, and when she was allowed to return to Russia, she immediately asked for political asylum in the United States. There she published “Twenty Letters to a friend,” a book in which she wrote about her father’s life and the Kremlin, and the book caused a sensation. Some say she earned about 2,5 million of dollars from the book.

Her fifth marriage was with William Peters in 1970 and she gave birth to a daughter, Olga. She took the name Lana Peters, which she maintained even after the divorce. From America, she goes to England, specifically to Cambridge where her daughter was studying.


She unexpectedly returned to Moscow in 1984, where she was welcomed with enthusiasm by the government and immediately she was returned the USSR citizenship. However, she failed to find a mutual understanding with her son and daughter from her first and second marriage and she left.