Stalin’s grandson

[Islaw Khan]

Stalin’s grandson

By Luke Harding


SITTING in his front room at home in Moscow, surrounded by shelves of books on 20th-century history, Leonid Zhura recounts how life was better under Stalin. “It was a heroic epoch. It was the first time in human history that a society was founded on fair principles,” he says, adding that Stalin did not commit any crimes.

Zhura’s views are not greatly unusual in today’s Russia. What distinguishes the amateur historian from other Stalin fans is that he is going to court to prove his assertion that Stalin never killed anybody. And he claims to have an impeccable witness — Stalin’s 73-year-old grandson.

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili — the offspring of Stalin’s ill-fated son Yakov, from the dictator’s first marriage — is due to appear at Moscow’s Basmanny court. Dzhugashvili lives in Tbilisi, Georgia. But at Zhura’s invitation, he is flying to Moscow to take part in a libel action against Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s leading liberal newspaper.

“He’s retired and lives with his family in Georgia. But he’s decided he wants to take a stand on this,” said Zhura, 63, a former trade official.

Dzhugashvili is demanding $300,000 in damages from the paper after it said that his grandfather personally signed politburo orders to execute civilians.

Author Anatoly Yablokov — who wrote the piece — says such a legal case would have been unthinkable until recently, but is now depressingly possible.

“There is a change in society’s view of Stalin,” Yablokov said at a preliminary court hearing. “We hear much more now about how much of an effective manager Stalin was, much more than in the 1990s, and much less about the repression.”

Zhura also insists that the notorious Molotov-Ribbentrop pact — under which Hitler and Stalin secretly carved up eastern Europe in August 1939 — was not the cause of the Second World War. Instead, he blames the Anglo-Polish agreement between Britain and Warsaw.

Furthermore, he also claims the Nazis carried out the notorious massacre in Katyn in 1940 of Polish officers — a crime hushed up by Moscow for 50 years, but now acknowledged as the work of the Soviet NKVD. According to Zhura, Stalin’s associates were behind the murderous purges of 1937-1938, during which tens of thousands of people were summarily shot. He admits that Stalin created the gulag system, but says those imprisoned in it — including Alexander Solzhenitsyn — deserved their lot.

“I accept there were some judicial mistakes. But every country has to defend itself from fifth columnists,” he said. “Look at Britain. You arrested Oswald Mosley, Mrs Mosley and 20,000 British fascists. There was no investigation or due process. You then interned them in your own British concentration camps. You’ve simply forgotten that bit.”

It would be easy, but wrong, to dismiss Zhura as an unrepresentative crackpot whose defence of Stalin says little about contemporary Russian opinion. But many Russians appear to share his views.—The Guardian, London