As discussed in an August TranslatingHistory post, Yakov Dzhugashvili, the oldest child of Josef Stalin, was captured by Germans in 1941 near Vitebsk and used as a propaganda piece by Hitler and Goebbels. According to a generally accepted legend, he was dangled as bait in a proposed exchange with the Germans for Field Marshall Paulus, to which Stalin turned down, supposedly stating “I don’t exchange a soldier for a field marshal.” Dzhugashvili later perished in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
An 11 January 2026 article from Russian news website Dzen points to the recently declassified interrogation of Dzhugashvili (material translated by TranslatingHistory in the link provided above) as offering critical insight into Stalin’s decision not to go through with the exchange, which would obviously have saved his son’s life. The author of the article, an historian writing under the pseudonym Filial Karamzina [Karamzin‘s Subsidiary], offers his thoughts on Stalin’s motivations. We’ve translated the material and are pleased to provide it below. We fell it makes an excellent companion piece to our original translation, and is a unique (and tragic) take on this slice of Soviet history.
Why Stalin Refused to Save His Son: The Newly Declassified Documents
We all remember from school the legendary phrase attributed to Stalin: “I don’t exchange a soldier for a field marshal.” This was supposedly said in response to the Germans’ offer to exchange his captured son Yakov for Field Marshal Paulus. It sounds powerful, doesn’t it? It immediately conjures up the image of a stern but just leader for whom everyone is equal in the face of war. But what if I told you that this phrase most likely was never uttered? And that the reality was far more prosaic and terrifying? Let’s examine the facts, relying not on beautiful legends, but on documents that until recently were classified.
The Difficult Son of the “Father of the Nations”
To understand why Stalin made his decision in 1943, one needs to look back a number of years. Joseph Dzhugashvili’s relationship with his eldest son, Yakov, is a classic “fathers and sons” drama, multiplied by the father’s immense power and the tragic fate of the family.
Yakov was born in 1907 to Stalin’s first and dearly beloved wife, Yekaterina Svanidze. Yekaterina died of typhus when the boy was less than one year old. Until the age of 14, Yakov grew up in Georgia, among relatives, and scarcely knew his famous father. When he was brought to Moscow in 1921, to the cold and alien Kremlin, he met not a loving parent, but a stern, perpetually busy statesman. Stalin, already absorbed in party struggles, saw in his son only a reminder of the past and, it seems, did not feel any particular warmth towards him. He contemptuously called him a “wolf cub” and constantly reproached him for his softness.
One of the most horrific episodes, which says a lot about their relationship, occurred in 1928. Yakov, having fallen in love with a fellow student, Zoya Gunina, decided to get married. Stalin was categorically against it. Driven to despair, the young man tried to shoot himself in his small room in the kitchen of the Kremlin apartment. The bullet went through, but Yakov survived. The father’s reaction was abominable. He conveyed through his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva: “Tell Yasha that he acted like a hooligan and a blackmailer, with whom I can no longer have anything to do. Let him live wherever he wants and with whomever he wants.” Later, according to the memoirs of his adopted son Artem Sergeyev, Stalin uttered a phrase that became an ominous prophecy: “Ha, he missed! He can’t even shoot himself properly.”
After that, their paths diverged even further. Yakov graduated from the Institute of Transportation Engineers, then from the Artillery Academy. He didn’t get involved in politics, lived his own life, and raised his daughter. When the war began, Senior Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, commander of an artillery battery, was one of the first to go to the front. He never took shelter behind his father’s name.
The Captivity That Need Never Have Happened
July 1941. A dreadful time. The Red Army was retreating while entire divisions were being surrounded. On July 16, near Vitebsk, during a battle at the Chernogostnitsa River, Yakov Dzhugashvili went missing. It was later revealed that he had been captured.
This was considered an invaluable gift to fall into the lap of German propaganda. Goebbels was overjoyed! Millions of leaflets were immediately printed with a photograph of Yakov surrounded by German officers and his alleged appeal to Soviet soldiers to surrender. “Stalin’s son has surrendered, surrender yourselves too!” proclaimed these leaflets, which were dropped from planes over Red Army positions.
How did Stalin react? Publicly, he didn’t react at all. But in a private circle, according to Zhukov’s testimony, he was dejected and said: “The fool got himself into trouble. The Germans will make a martyr of him now.” Then followed the infamous Order No. 270 of August 16, 1941, which declared all those who surrendered, including commanders, as traitors and enemies of the Motherland. Their families were subject to arrest. No exceptions were made. Yakov’s wife, Yulia Meltzer, was arrested and spent almost two years in prison. Stalin applied this inhumane law to his own family, showing everyone that there would be no mercy for anyone.
Behind-the-Scenes Maneuvering: A Chance for an Exchange?
Now let’s move on to the main point – the myth about the exchange for Field Marshal Paulus. Paulus and his 6th Army surrendered at Stalingrad on January 31, 1943. By that time, Yakov had already been a prisoner of war for a year and a half, in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in a special block for particularly important individuals.
The idea of an exchange was indeed being floated. But it didn’t originate with Hitler. The Führer was furious about Paulus’s surrender and considered him a traitor. The initiative apparently came from more pragmatic individuals in the German command or intelligence services. The negotiations were conducted not directly, but through neutral channels – in particular, through the president of the Swedish Red Cross, Count Folke Bernadotte.
And this is where we come to the crucial point. None of the declassified Soviet or German documents contain a direct record of the “Paulus for Yakov” exchange and Stalin’s legendary reply. This phrase, “I don’t exchange a soldier for a field marshal,” is quoted in the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov, Stalin’s daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva, and even Churchill’s daughter Sarah. But they all recount it secondhand, as an anecdote circulating among the top ranks. As an historian, I can assert that this story is most likely apocryphal. A beautiful legend designed to ennoble a very grim decision.
So just why did Stalin refuse? Let’s think logically, based on his psychology and the political situation:
1. Political precedent. By agreeing to the exchange, Stalin would have repudiated his own Order No. 270. How could he look into the eyes of the millions of mothers and wives whose sons and husbands were considered “traitors” in German camps? By exchanging his son, he would have shown that some are “equal” and others are “more equal.” This was unacceptable for his system.
2. Personal animosity. As we have already established, Stalin did not harbor warm fatherly feelings towards Yakov. He saw him as a weak, spineless man. Saving someone he didn’t respect at the cost of undermining his own reputation as an “iron leader”? Highly unlikely.
3. Yakov’s behavior in captivity. This is the most interesting part, revealed by those declassified documents — the interrogation records of Yakov Dzhugashvili. The Germans desperately wanted to persuade him to cooperate, to make him the face of the anti-Soviet movement. But they failed. During the interrogations, Yakov behaved with dignity. Yes, he criticized some of the command’s miscalculations at the beginning of the war (which was obvious to any career officer), but he categorically refused any form of betrayal. He argued with the Germans about ideology, defended his father’s policies, and generally conducted himself like an officer of the Red Army. These records reached Stalin through intelligence channels. Did he know that his son was not a traitor? Absolutely. But this did not change his decision. Perhaps it even strengthened it: his son is behaving correctly, as befits a Soviet officer—let him continue to do so.
A Mysterious Death and History’s Verdict
On April 14, 1943, two and a half months after Paulus’s surrender, Yakov Dzhugashvili died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. According to the official German version (which is generally accepted by modern historians), he threw himself onto the high-voltage wire surrounding the camp. The guard fired a shot, but death resulted from electrocution. Whether this was a suicide caused by despair and the news of the refusal of an exchange, or an unsuccessful escape attempt, we will never know.
How do historians assess Stalin’s actions? Opinions differ. Some see it as a manifestation of monstrous, inhuman cruelty towards his own son. Others see it as an example of fanatical devotion to the ideology he himself created, where personal feelings must be ruthlessly sacrificed for the sake of the state. Still others, more cynically, consider it a cold political calculation.
Personally, I lean towards a fusion of all three versions. It was both a personal tragedy, a political maneuver, and a manifestation of an inhumane system where a person is merely a cog in the machine. Stalin didn’t refuse to exchange a soldier for a field marshal not because the soldier was as dear to him as any other, but because this particular “soldier,” his son, was an instrument for him, a bargaining chip in a great political game and personal drama. By sacrificing him, he strengthened his image as an unyielding leader who spares neither himself nor his loved ones for the sake of victory.
The story of Yakov Dzhugashvili is not a heroic ballad. It is a terrible tragedy that reminds us that behind the grand pronouncements and majestic monuments often lie broken lives and a very inconvenient, painful truth.
Translation © 2026 by Michael Estes and TranslatingHistory.org
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