The enigma called Joseph Stalin.

 

Vasily, Svetlana, and their father Joseph Stalin

If members of Stalin's inner circle shed tears on the death of Joseph Stalin, it was tears of relief. Khrushchev said they all knew they were temporary men. They didn't like getting invites to Stalin's dacha at Kuntsevo.

I have read a number of books on Joseph Stalin and he was a very cynical but interesting and ruthless man. He seems to have been devastated when he lost his first wife, Kato Svanidze, but he didn't care much for their son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, who tried to kill himself. Stalin joked that Yakov was that useless that he couldn't even kill himself properly. When the Germans notified him that they had his son in captivity, Stalin his reputed to have told them that he didn't have a son. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, gave him two children (Vasily and Svetlana), before she committed suicide. She was one of very few who would stand up to him in public and she was often seen arguing with him.

Stalin had many of his in-laws imprisoned, possibly because they knew too much, but he was close to Svetlana, as a child, who he called "My little sparrow." Nevertheless, when Svetlana inquired about the whereabouts of a favourite aunt who had disappeared, Stalin told her not to play the Attorney with him. He told his youngest son Vasily - who used his father's position to advance his own interests - that he wasn't Stalin and neither was his father, because Stalin represented Soviet power. It's known that Stalin would often send sums of money to old friends or pose for photographs with holiday makers in Sochi, where he had a holiday home. There were also occasions when he would tell his driver to stop the car in order to offer people a lift, if he saw them stood in the rain at a bus stop, on his way home to Kuntsevo. Artem Mikoyan, the brother of Anastas Mikoyan, one of Stalin's ministers, recalled having an angina attack when he was staying with Stalin at his holiday home in Sochi. He said he went to bed and late in the night, he felt somebody tucking him in. When he looked up it was Stalin.

Joseph Stalin turned a young peasant lad, called Pavlik Morozov, into a Soviet hero and martyr, after he'd been killed for denouncing his father as a Kulak who had hoarded grain. But Stalin was reportedly heard saying, "What a little swine, denouncing his own father." Stalin liquidated many of the old Bolsheviks and returned many German communists back to Germany, after he entered into a pact with Nazi Germany. Some say that Stalin killed more communists than Adolf Hitler.