Galina Dzhugashvili

Galina Yakovlevna "Galya" Dzhugashvili (19 February 1938 – 27 August 2007) was a Russian translator of French. She was the granddaughter of Joseph Stalin, the daughter of Stalin's eldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili. She consistently challenged widely-accepted accounts of her father's internment and death at a Nazi prison camp.

Biography

Galina Dzhugashvili was born in Moscow. Her mother was Yulia Meltzer, a well-known Jewish dancer from Odessa. After meeting Yulia at a reception, Yakov fought with her second husband, Nikolai Bessarab, and arranged her divorce. Bessarab was later arrested by the NKVD and executed. Yakov became her third husband.

Yakov was a senior lieutenant in the Soviet artillery in the Second World War. Historians have traditionally maintained that he was captured by the Germans in 1941 and died at the Sachsenhausen POW camp in 1943 after Stalin declined to exchange him for the captured German general Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus. Indeed, Stalin regarded Soviet PoWs as traitors, and had Yulia imprisoned in Lubyanka for two years. The United States Defense Department was in possession of documents which indicated that Yakov Dzhugashvili was shot trying to escape, which were shown to Galina Dzhugashvili in 2003, but which she rejected, claiming that her father was never taken prisoner by the Germans, but rather was killed in battle in 1941. She continuously maintained that any photographs or letters indicating her father was at the prison camp were Nazi propaganda. ["The Times" obituary refers to an interview published in "Komsomolskaya Pravda" in June 2006.]

She studied philology at Moscow State University, and received a doctorate. She was a member of the Russian Writers Union, and worked all her life as a translator of French, mainly for the Moscow Institute of World Literature. She was married to Husein ben Saad, an Algerian mathematician living in exile in Moscow and employed by the United Nations, but kept her maiden name. They had one son, Selim (b. 1970), who was born severely handicapped.

She died from cancer at the Burdenko military hospital in Moscow, aged 69.

References

* [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/29/world/europe/29dzhugashvili.html?ref=todayspaper New York Times obituary]
* [http://en.rian.ru/russia/20070828/75356675.html Biodata]
* [http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2947424.ece Obituary, "The Independent", 15 September 2007]
* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article2456236.ece Obituary, "The Times", 10 September 2007]