Yakov Dzhugashvili
first child of Josef Stalin (1907–1943)
Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili (31 March [O.S. 18 March] 1907 – 14 April 1943) was a Georgian-born Soviet engineer and Red Army officer. He was the eldest son of Joseph Stalin, and the only child of Stalin's first wife, Kato Svanidze, who died nine months after his birth.
His father, then a young revolutionary in his late 20s, left the child to be raised by his late wife's family. In 1921, when Dzhugashvili had reached the age of 14, he was brought to Moscow, where his father had become a leading figure in the Bolshevik government, eventually becoming head of the Soviet Union. Disregarded by Stalin, Dzhugashvili was a shy, quiet child who appeared unhappy and attempted suicide several times as a youth. Married twice, Dzhugashvili had three children, two of whom reached adulthood.
Dzhugashvili studied to become an engineer, then – on his father's insistence – he enrolled in training to be an artillery officer. He finished his studies weeks before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Sent to the front, he was captured and imprisoned by the Germans and died at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
Early life
Georgia
Dzhugashvili was born on 31 March [O.S. 18 March] 1907 in Baji, a village in the Kutais Governorate of the Russian Empire (now in Georgia).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Yakov Dzhugashvili” as first child of Josef Stalin (1907–1943). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q163816. VIAF identifies the subject as 90594358. The Library of Congress control number is n95095965. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1907, 1943, 1921 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yakov Dzhugashvili” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.