But what his people would never learn during the lifetime of Josef Stalin – who died 60 years ago next month – was the fate of his fi rstborn child during that confl ict. His eldest son Yakov was captured by enemy forces in the early years of the war yet, although the Germans offered to exchange him for their own soldiers taken captive by the Red Army, Stalin flatly refused and left him ultimately to die in a prisoner of war camp.



Stalin’s unswerving rule was that Soviet soldiers who had allowed themselves to be captured were traitors – and that included Yakov. After the war ended hundreds of thousands of soldiers who fell into Nazi hands returned to Russia in 1945 to be sent to Siberian gulags for 25 years or were often executed.

Yet new documents revealed last week appear to support the theory that far from being taken prisoner the hapless Yakov might actually have surrendered during Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. It was an act that would have horrifi ed the hardline father who already held him in low esteem. Stalin had previously ordered that the Red Army oath all its soldiers took include the words: “Surrendering to the enemy is treason.” A fi le discovered at the Russian defence ministry suggests that the story of Stalin’s son being captured was a fiction to save face.



Nazi propaganda had a fi eld day with Yakov’s capture. Leafl ets airdropped on Soviet soldiers declared: “Do not shed your blood for Stalin! His own son has surrendered! If Stalin’s son has saved himself then you are not obliged to sacrifi ce yourself either!” Yakov was not the only son to whom Stalin failed to show a shred of tenderness. His half-brother Vasili, who served in the Soviet air force, was also called inept by his father and died of alcoholism at 41.

But it was at least consistent with the Russian leader’s generally callous attitude towards his closest family. Vasili’s mother Nadezhda is believed to have shot herself dead following a dinner with Stalin at which he tauntingly fl icked cigarettes across the table at her. Yakov’s mother, a Georgian seamstress and Stalin’s first wife, appears to have escaped the worst of his excesses but only because she had the misfortune to die of typhus when her son was eight months old. When Yakov was 18 and fell in love with a 16-year-old classmate he grabbed a pistol and tried to commit suicide after incurring his father’s wrath but succeeded only in wounding himself.