1936-2016
Lavrentiy Gurdzhiev
Yevgeny Ya. Dzhugashvili was born on January 10, 1936, in Uryupinsk, Stalingrad region, RSFSR, and he died on December 22, 2016 in Moscow. He was a Soviet military engineer, scientist, an historian, and a Russian and Georgian public and political figure. Academically he was a candidate of the military sciences and the historical sciences. He was a professor and a colonel when he retired in 1991.
His parents separated before the war. His father was Yakov Dzhugashvili, the elder son of I.V. Stalin. He was an artillery officer. According to some reports, he died at the front in 1941, and, according to other sources, he was killed in 1943 in German captivity. He had refused to serve the Germans. His mother was Olga Golysheva who also took part in the Great Patriotic War and served at the front as a nurse. She died in 1961.
Yevgeny studied at school in his native city, then in Morskva. He was admitted to the Suvorov Military School in the city of Kalinin. (These schools were established in the USSR during the war for the maintenance and training of children and adolescents who had lost one or both parents).
He graduated from the Air Force Engineering Academy which was named after N.E. Zhukov in 1959, after which he worked in the military plants of the USSR holding the rank of engineer-lieutenant.
For more than ten years he worked in the system of military missions, and was engaged in the preparation and launching of space objects. For some times he was at the disposal of the head of the Soviet space rocket programme named after S.P. Korolyov, participating in the launches of satellites and cosmonauts from the Baikonur cosmodrome. He was an employee of the Central Administration of Space Facilities of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR.
He was trained in the adjunct of the V.I. Lenin Military and Political Academy, where he defended his thesis in the department of “Military Art” and, in 1973, he became a candidate of military sciences. In 1976, after completing a course at the Historical Section of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, USSR, named after Voroshilov, he was sent to the Air Force Academy named after Gagarin in the city of Monino near Moscow.
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili taught in a number of military schools. For 25 years he worked as a senior teacher of the history of wars and military art in the Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the USSR named after K.E. Voroshilov. He also worked in the Academy of the Armed Forces named after Malinovsky. In 1987 he moved to the Military Academy named after Frunze, from where he retired from the service in 1991 in the rank of a colonel. From that time onwards he carried out social and political activity.
In 1996, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili became Chairman of the Georgian Society of the Ideological Successors of Joseph Stalin. In 1996 he became the chairman of the People’s Patriotic Union of Georgia, and in 2001, he acted as the general secretary of the “New Communist Party of Georgia”. However, the party did not achieve special success. Its candidates failed to be elected to the parliament of the republic. In the same year he was elected as a member of the Central Coordinating Council of the All-Russian Social and Political Movement “Union”.
Yevgeny Djugashvili was widely known as the grandson of I.V Stalin, in whose defence, honour and dignity he spoke in the judicial bodies of the Russian Federation and Ukraine. In fact, of the numerous descendants of Stalin, he was and remained the only one who raised his voice in defence of the ideas and accomplishments of his grandfather. He managed to pass the baton of this to both his sons. The elder, Vissarion, graduated from the Tbilisi Agricultural Institute and the higher courses of directors and screenwriters at the Moscow Institute of Cinematography. His younger son is Yakov, a professional artist who graduated from educational institutions in Tbilisi (Georgia) and Glasgow (Great Britain).
The bourgeois courts, including the notorious European Court of Human Rights, regularly refused to satisfy his lawsuits against the slanderers who attacked not only the name of Stalin, but the entire Soviet past, the heroes of the revolution and the war. And he was not afraid to file more and more claims, or participate in meetings, conferences, rallies, casting well-reasoned accusations against his powerful enemies. He appealed to the highest Russian authorities, including the president, with the requirements ofjustice and respect for the rule of law.
It is noteworthy that in 1990, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili was asked to play the role of Stalin in a feature film that told of his father’s feats: “Jacob, the son of Stalin.” One of the motives for this proposal was the striking external resemblance between Yevgeny and the leader. The debut was successful. However, because of the anti-communist bacchanalia which was unleashed during perestroika, the film was not widely disseminated. In addition, he starred in a number of documentary films and TV shows.
In 2015, a book of memoirs by Yevgeny Dzhugashvili was published in Russian: “My Grandfather Stalin. He was a Saint!” (Yauza-Press, Moscow, 2015). In it, in particular, the author revealed some biographical details, and described the difficulties and misunderstandings that he had in his relationship with his relatives.
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili had dual citizenship – Russian and Georgian.