Yevgeny Dzhugashvili
Grandson of Josef Stalin who dedicated himself to defending his notorious forebear’s reputation
YEVGENY DZHUGASHVILI, who has died aged 80, was a grandson of Josef Stalin and very much a chip off the old block; Dzhugashvili was the Georgian family name of Stalin, who adopted the more revolutionary-sounding “man of steel” in about 1913.
With his moustache, piercing dark eyes and squat 5ft 4in frame, Dzhugashvili, a former Soviet Air Force colonel, bore such a chilling physical resemblance to his notorious forebear that a Soviet director once begged him to play his grandfather in a film. The resemblance did not stop there. His home on the edge of Gorky Park in central Moscow was a shrine to Stalin in which interviewers found him ready, according to one, to spit “with little prompting, fury against Jews, revisionists and the West”.
As glasnost began to expose the horrors of Stalin’s rule, Dzhugashvili’s adoration of his grandfather (whom he likened to Jesus Christ) brought him to the attention of millions of Russians through his diatribes in the Soviet press. He dedicated himself to keeping what he saw as his grandfather’s achievements alive, brushing aside evidence of Stalin’s massacres of millions of people as “a legend invented by dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn”, assorted “cosmopolites” and Zionists. “A hundred million people were murdered by propaganda,” he claimed.
As for the so-called “reign of terror” under his grandfather’s rule, he blamed Leon Trotsky (who was exiled in 1929 and later killed by one of Stalin’s agents). It was Trotsky who had created the labour camps; Stalin, he admitted, had made use of this “heritage” but his aim to been “to release the innocent people and to punish those who were guilty”. The 1930s, a period during which millions had been exterminated, he regarded as “the most glorious epoch in the history of Russia”.
Dzhugashvili’s regard for his grandfather was all the more surprising in that his father Yakov, Stalin’s eldest son by his first marriage to Yekaterina Svanidze, had been rejected by the Soviet dictator as a “mere cobbler”. Famously, when Yakov botched a suicide attempt after a failed romance, Stalin remarked: “He can’t even shoot straight.”
After Yakov was captured by the Germans while serving in the Red Army during the war, Stalin (who considered all Pows traitors to the motherland) sent Yakov’s wife Yulia to the gulag (Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, claimed that her father believed his son deliberately surrendered to the Germans after being encouraged to do so by his wife). When offered his son back in a swap for a German field marshal who had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, he refused, saying: “I will not trade a Marshal for a Lieutenant.”
Yakov is believed to have died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp aged 36 in 1943, but Stalin took little interest in his family, and his grandson, born on January 10 1936, never met him face to face. “I saw my grandfather only once in my life when I took part in a parade on Red Square when I was a cadet at the Suvorov military academy,” he recalled. “The second time, I saw him in his coffin when I was 17.”
His status as Stalin’s grandson meant that Dzhugashvili had been admitted to the academy and subsequently to the Zhukovsky air force academy of military engineers without having to pass an entrance exam. There he worked with Sergei Korolev, the rocket builder, and wrote a thesis on “US aviation in the war of aggression in Vietnam”.
He went on to become a teacher of military history at Moscow’s Academy of the General Military Board and remained there until 1986 when he was suddenly dismissed because, he claimed, of who his grandfather was, though he found a job as a teacher in the Frunze Military Academy.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Dzhugashvili moved to the republic of Georgia. He lost all his savings in the 1998 economic collapse, which left him eking out an impoverished existence in a crumbling block in Tbilisi where he shared a bare four-room apartment with his wife, his two sons, Yakov, a painter who studied in Britain, and Vissarion, a daughterin-law and grandson Josef, named after his great grandfather and nicknamed “Sosso”, just like Stalin.
In 1999 Yevgeny emerged as one of the leaders of a new “Stalinist Bloc for Socialism”, an assortment of extreme communist groups whose principal goal, he explained, was to “get rid of the government through constitutional means … for the moment”. In the run-up to the elections for the Russian State Duma, he spoke at angry rallies of nationalists and communists, many brandishing portraits of his grandfather. The bloc performed dismally in the elections, however.
Dzhugashvili then turned his attention to Georgian politics, setting up a new Stalinist Communist party in Georgia and vigorously attacking the Georgian president Edvard Shevardnadze who “together with Yeltsin, Gorbachev and other Zionists [had] destroyed a great country”. Initially he had great hopes for Vladimir Putin who, he predicted, would “tighten the screws like Stalin”, though Putin, too, would disappoint. In 2015, in a wide-ranging diatribe against the Russian leader, he attacked his topless photo stunts as showing that Putin was “leading the country without brains” and accused him of heading a government of “thieves and tricksters”.
In his later years Dzhugashvili took on a new role as a serial litigant. In 2001, in a case which harked back to the venerable Tsarist tradition of the “false Dmitri” pretenders to the imperial throne, a court in Tbilisi ordered a fellow member of the Tbilisi-based International Stalin Society to apologise for suggesting that Dzhugashvili was not the grandson of Stalin, but an impostor.
In 2009 Dzhugashvili launched a libel suit against Russia’s leading liberal newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, accusing it of lying in an article which stated that Stalin had killed Soviet citizens, claimed Stalin had “evaded moral responsibility” for the Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war in 1940, and labelled the Soviet dictator a “bloodthirsty cannibal”.
Dzhugashvili demanded $326,000 in compensation for damage to his honour, but a Russian court ruled against him. Undaunted he took the issue to the European Court of Human Rights, claiming the Novaya Gazeta article had violated his right to privacy. The court rejected his complaint in 2015.
In October last year a Moscow court rejected another application by Dzhugashvili to institute criminal proceedings against the authors of a new history textbook blaming the Katyn massacre on Stalin. “Nowadays it is hard to find common sense in anything being said about Stalin, because a general prescription has been given to our society,” he complained. “It is that Stalin must be blamed for everything. This is the time we are living in, the b------s have won.”
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, born January 10 1936, died December 22 2016