Ouch

>Raised by his maternal grandparents, Yakov joined the Stalin household in the mid-1920s. He spoke little Russian, and did so with a thick accent (like Stalin). Nadezhda seems to have liked him and fully accepted him. But Stalin’s persecution was so systematic that toward the end of the decade Yakov attempted suicide. He succeeded only in wounding himself; and when Stalin heard about the attempt he said, ‘Ha! He couldn’t even shoot straight” (Volkogonov has him actually confronting his son with the greeting, ‘Ha! You missed!’) Soon afterward Yakov moved to Leningrad to live with Nadezhda’s family, the Alliluyevs.

>Like Vasily, Yakov joined the armed forces, as a lieutenant (rather than a field marshal), reflecting his more peripheral status. He was the better soldier, and fought energetically until his unit was captured by the Reichswehr. This placed Stalin in a doubly embarrassing position. A law of August 1941 had declared that all captured officers were ‘malicious traitors’ whose families were ‘subject to arrest.’ Thus Yakov came under the first category – and Stalin came under the second. As a kind of compromise, Stalin arrested Yakov’s wife. When the Nazis tried to negotiate an exchange, Stalin refused (‘I have no son called Yakov’). He feared all the same that the supposedly feeble Yakov might be pressured into some propagandist exhibition of disloyalty. He need not have so feared. Yakov passed through three concentration camps – Hammelburg, Lubeck, Sachsenhausen – and resisted all intimidation. It was precisely to avoid succumbing (Volkogonov believes) that Yakov made his decisive move. In a German camp, as in a Russian, the surest route to suicide was a run at the barbed wire. Yakov ran. The guard did not miss.”

I can't imagine a person more heartless in history than Stalin.

I still can't believe that he wasn't murdered

Stalin was saddened by his death more than he showed in public. There are stories that in his last years he had a picture of Yakov that he proudly showed anyone who came to his dacha.

There is another story that when the subject of trying to trade high ranking German prisoners for his son's freedom came up, Stalin shouted "They are all my sons!" (all the Soviet POWs)

>stalin was saddened by his death more than he sowed the public
would have been nice if he could have shown those same feelings to Yakov desu

Wow Stalin was a fucking cunt I had no idea thanks OP

>Surely the next time we attempt communism again it won't be stuck in a proletarian dictatorship with a sociopath in charge like before.

I like these threads, are you the user that make these threads about stalin?

>The refusal to swap Yakov has been treated as evidence of Stalin’s loveless cruelty but this is unfair. Stalin was a mass murderer but in this case, it is hard to imagine that either Churchill or Roosevelt could have swapped their sons if they had been captured—when thousands of ordinary men were being killed or captured. After the war, a Georgian confidant plucked up the courage to ask Stalin if the Paulus offer was a myth. He “hung his head,” answering “in a sad, piercing voice”: “Not a myth . . . Just think how many sons ended in camps! Who would swap them for Paulus? Were they worse than Yakov? I had to refuse . . . What would they have said of me, our millions of Party fathers, if having forgotten about them, I had agreed to swapping Yakov? No, I had no right . . .”

>Then he again showed the struggle between the nervy, angry, tormented man within and the persona he had become: “Otherwise, I’d no longer be ‘Stalin.’ ”

>He added: “I so pitied Yasha!”

Simon Sebag Montefiore, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Czar", p. 1003

Im not a Stalin defender, but you gotta show the other side. And if this is right (I see no reason to assume otherwise), then Stalin actually seems like a guy who did what he had to in a shitty position.

Feelsbadman

hard choices had to be made

Im not a communist, Im just pointing out that you have to see the human in people. People are so quick to say that Stalin (or hitler for that matter) were just monsters or emotionless psychos. But they had moments of feelings.