Ekaterina Svanidze

Ketevan ( Kato or Ekaterina ) Svanidze (Georgian ქეთევან სვანიძე; born April 2, 1880 in the region of Racha, Georgia, .. † 22 Novemberjul / December 5 1907greg in Tbilisi ) was the first wife of the later Soviet government and party leader Josef Stalin.

Life

Ketevan Svanidze was born as the daughter of a teacher and a nobleman. She learned the tailoring trade. Together with her sisters Aleksandra ( Saschiko ) and Maria ( Mariko ) led them in Tbilisi a fashion store, the studio Hervieu, were manufactured in the clothes and uniforms. Her brother was the historian and Old Bolshevik Alexander Svanidze ( Alyosha ). Some sources suggest that they had more than one brother.

On July 15, 1906, she married Stalin, who at that time lived as anarcho- revolutionary under the pseudonym Galiaschwili in their home and the party raised funds with bank robberies, and took his family name Dzhugashvili. On March 18, 1907, the common Yakov Dzhugashvili son was born. In the same year she died of typhus or tuberculosis that she had contracted in summer in Baku.

Stalin later stated that she was next to his mother, the only person he really loved. In their organized by Georgian- Orthodox rite funeral he told a former comrade that died with her every human feeling in him: " This creature has been able to soften my heart of stone. . Now she is dead, and her are my last warm feelings died for all human beings, " pointing to his chest, Stalin is said to have added: " In here, it has become empty, so unspeakably empty "!