Stalin's Son Yakov

Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili^[a] (31 March [O.S. 18 March] 1907 – 14 April 1943) was the eldest son of Joseph Stalin, and the only child of Stalin's first wife, Kato Svanidze, who died nine months after his birth.

Death

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On 14 April 1943, Dzhugashvili died at the Sachsenhausen camp. Initially, the details of his death were disputed: one account had him running into the electric fence surrounding the camp.^[39] However, it had also been suggested that he was shot by the Germans; Kun speculated that it is "conceivable that he committed suicide: he had suicidal tendencies in his youth".^[29]

Upon hearing of his son's death, Stalin reportedly stared at his photograph; he would later soften his stance towards Dzhugashvili, saying he was "a real man" and that "fate treated him unjustly."^[39] Meltzer would be released in 1946 and re-united with Galina, though the years apart had made Galina distant from her mother.^[40] In 1977, Dzhugashvili was awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, first class, although this was done secretly and the family was not allowed to collect the medal.^[33]

After the war, British officers in charge of captured German archives came upon the papers depicting Dzhugashvili's death at Sachsenhausen. The German records indicated that he was shot after he ran into an electric fence attempting to flee after an argument with the British prisoners; a postmortem showed he died from electrocution before he was shot. The British Foreign Office briefly considered presenting these papers to Stalin at the Potsdam Conference as a gesture of condolence. They scrapped the idea because neither the British nor the Americans had informed the Soviets that they had captured key German archives, and sharing those papers with Stalin would have prompted the Soviets to inquire about the source of these records.^[41]

Stalin's Son Yakov