Dictators' Wives Who Died Awful Deaths
Joseph Stalin married his first wife long before he became the dictator feared by millions. In the early 1900s, Stalin, then going by his birth name Ioseb Jughashvili, was already involved in revolutionary politics. At one point, he used a safe house owned by the Svanidze family in present-day Tbilisi, Georgia, according to "Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928." One of the family's three daughters evidently caught Stalin's eye, and while he spent much of his time at the house working on political projects, he also got Kato Svanidze pregnant. In 1906, the pair decided to get married.
While friends remembered Stalin as being very much in love with his wife, he also immediately abandoned her for the cause. During her pregnancy, Svanidze spent six weeks in jail for the crime of marrying Stalin. When she gave birth, he was away. Finally, when facing charges of robbery in Tbilisi, Stalin moved his wife and son far from her family.
Their new home, Baku, was not a good environment for Svanidze and she only stayed about five months, then returned to her family. Once she was back home, she became deathly ill. While her exact cause of death is not certain, it was certainly not dignified or painless, since she was "hemorrhaging blood from her bowels." While Stalin was distraught at her death, he took off again, abandoning his son for over a decade.
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