R.L. Swihart's Blog

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.

Deathedit

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

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Not until 1980 were we able to read in the Sunday Times how Stalin’s son, Yakov, died. Captured by the Germans during the Second World War, he was placed in a camp together with a group of British officers. They shared a latrine. Stalin’s son habitually left a foul mess. The British officers resented having their latrine smeared with shit, even if it was the shit of the son of the most powerful man in the world. They brought the matter to his attention. He took offense. They brought it to his attention again and again, and tried to make him clean the latrine. He raged, argued, and fought. Finally, he demanded a hearing with the camp commander. He wanted the commander to act as arbiter. But the arrogant German refused to talk about shit. Stalin’s son could not stand the humiliation. Crying out to heaven in the most terrifying of Russian curses, he took a running jump into the electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp. He hit the target. His body, which would never again make a mess of the Britishers’ latrine, was pinned to the wire.

The Amazing Cooper's Hawk

Cooper's Hawk (with all the moves) @ West San Gabriel River Parkway Nature Trail

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being

That was Tomas’s version of eternal return. Of course we here on earth (planet number one, the planet of inexperience) can only fabricate vague fantasies of what will happen to man on those other planets. Will he be wiser? Is maturity within man’s power? Can he attain it through repetition? Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Anyone who thinks that the Communist regimes of Central Europe are exclusively the work of criminals is overlooking a basic truth: the criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise. They defended that road so valiantly that they were forced to execute many people. Later it became clear that there was no paradise, that the enthusiasts were therefore murderers.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The women thus armed with umbrellas were both young and old, but the younger among them proved the more steeled warriors. Tereza recalled the days of the invasion and the girls in miniskirts carrying flags on long staffs. Theirs was a sexual vengeance: the Russian soldiers had been kept in enforced celibacy for several long years and must have felt they had landed on a planet invented by a science fiction writer, a planet of stunning women who paraded their scorn on beautiful long legs the likes of which had not been seen in Russia for the past five or six centuries. She had taken many pictures of those young women against a backdrop of tanks. How she had admired them! And now these same women were bumping into her, meanly and spitefully. Instead of flags, they held umbrellas, but they held them with the same pride. They were ready to fight as obstinately against a foreign army as against an umbrella that refused to move out of their way.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

CEMETERY 

Cemeteries in Bohemia are like gardens. The graves are covered with grass and colorful flowers. Modest tombstones are lost in the greenery. When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children’s ball. Yes, a children’s ball, because the dead are as innocent as children. No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery. Even in wartime, in Hitler’s time, in Stalin’s time, through all occupations. When she felt low, she would get into the car, leave Prague far behind, and walk through one or another of the country cemeteries she loved so well. Against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby. 

For Franz a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Don’t you like music?” Franz asked. “No,” said Sabina, and then added, “though in a different era . . .” She was thinking of the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, when music was like a rose blooming on a boundless snow-covered plain of silence. Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood. During her years at the Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at a youth camp. They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks construction site. Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning to nine at night. She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her. At the time, she had thought that only in the Communist world could such musical barbarism reign supreme. Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of total ugliness. The total ugliness to come had made itself felt first as omnipresent acoustical ugliness: cars, motorcycles, electric guitars, drills, loudspeakers, sirens. The omnipresence of visual ugliness would soon follow.

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Something else raised him above the others as well: he had an open book on his table. No one had ever opened a book in that restaurant before. In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.

Shyness & Dignity

And it was her he was thinking of now, standing at the Bislett traffic circle, his hand bloody (ridiculous) from the ribs of the umbrella and himself at his wits’ end, not knowing which way to turn as he stood in the light rain that made little splashes of mud for the passing cars. The disaster had occurred. He knew that the principal would attempt to trivialize the whole affair and have the support of the faculty, who would attempt to persuade him to continue by saying that this was something that could have happened to anyone. But it had not happened to just anyone. It had happened to him, and for him it meant that he had fallen out. Fallen out of society, quite simply. He knew he would never again set foot in Fagerborg High School. Not in any other school either, in his capacity as a teacher. How, then, would she who was his wife be able to cope? She who had just started a three-year education at the College of Social Affairs and depended on his income? For this means it’s all over, he thought. It is dreadful, but there is no going back.