Baku’s toxic environment, meanwhile, exacerbated his young wife Kato’s frailty and she died a frightful death in December 1907 from typhus or tuberculosis, hemorrhaging blood from her bowels.125 At her funeral, the future Stalin is said to have tried to throw himself into her grave. “My personal life is damned,” one friend recalled him exclaiming in self-pity.126 Belatedly, he is said to have reproached himself for neglecting his wife, even as he abandoned his toddler son, Yakov, to Kato’s mother and sisters for what turned out to be the next fourteen years.
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