Stalin's granddaughter Galina Dzhugashvili dies

MOSCOW: Galina Dzhugashvili, the granddaughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, has died in a Moscow military hospital aged 69 after a long battle with cancer, a hospital spokesman said on Tuesday.

Dzhugashvili, daughter of Stalin's eldest son Yakov Dzhugashvili, died Monday at the Burdenko military hospital where she had undergone several operations in recent years, hospital officials and Russian media said.

She was the last prominent, direct descendant of the infamous dictator.

Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's son from a first marriage, was taken prisoner in 1941 by Nazi forces and, according to official accounts, died in captivity after the Soviet leader refused to exchange him for a senior German officer.

That version of the fate of Stalin's eldest son however has been contested by some Russian historians -- and by Galina herself -- who say that it was concocted by the Nazis to portray Stalin as a cruel warmonger.

In an interview published last June in the popular Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda, Galina Dzhugashvili described the reports of her father's death in a German prison camp as a "vulgar fake."

Galina, who said she saw her father for the last time in 1941 when she was three years old, lived most of her life in Moscow where she defended her doctoral thesis in philology at Moscow State University.

She was also a fluent French speaker who worked afterwards for many years at Moscow's Institute of World Literature, according to a report carried by the RIA Novosti news agency.

Her mother, Yulia Meltser, was a ballet dancer who died in 1967 while her husband was described by RIA Novosti as a mathematics professor from Algeria who worked as a United Nations expert for "emergency situations."

Stalin had two other children, Vassily and Svetlana, by his second wife, Nadezhda, who committed suicide in 1932.

Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, a resident of Tblisi, the capital of Stalin's native Georgia, also claims to be the grandson of the late Soviet dictator. But he admits his claim was not recognized even by Galina Dzhugashvili, who he says is his sister.

"She suggested we do a DNA analysis," Yevgeny Dzhugashvili told AFP in Tbilisi.

"I accepted her offer, on condition that she pay for it. Then she disappeared and we lost contact for three years," Yevgeny Dzhugashvili said.

When he met Galina again several years later at the funeral of another distant Stalin relative "she showed no sign of any desire to have any relationship with me," he added.