Alexander Semyonovich "Alyosha" Svanidze (Georgian: ალექსანდრე სვანიძე; Russian: Александр Семёнович Сванидзе) (1886 – 20 August 1941) was a GeorgianOld Bolshevik, politician and historian. He was a personal friend of Joseph Stalin and a brother of Stalin's first wife Kato. Nevertheless, he was arrested during the Great Purge in 1937 and he was shot in prison in 1941.
Life and career
Born of a petty noble family in a small village of Baji in western Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Svanidze was educated at Tiflis and later at Jena where he learned German and English and engaged in historical research of ancient civilizations.
At the height of the Great Purge, he was arrested by the NKVD. Svanidze refused to confess to being a German spy in return, as the NKVD offered him, for his life.[3] "Such aristocratic pride," Stalin is quoted to have said. Svanidze and his sister Mariko were executed in 1941, as the Germans advanced.[4] His wife Maria (née Korona; 1889–1941), a singer for the Tbilisi Opera House, was sentenced to ten years in Dolinskoye, a women's prison camp in Kazakhstan. She died of a heart attack upon being informed of the execution.[5] His son, Ivan (born Dzhonrid in honour of John Reed) was married to Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva from 1957 to 1959.[6]
Fitzpatrick, Sheila (2015), On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, ISBN978-0-691-14533-4