Free Sex Lives of the Great Dictators by Nigel Cawthorne

Stalin died, Svetlana defected to the West. She lived in Britain, America and Switzerland, and after four broken marriages, at the age of 70, she became a nun "to atone for the sins of my father", she said.
    While, at the beginning, there were kisses for his daughter, his sons were handled brutally from the outset. Yakov, his son from his first marriage, was treated with contempt, perhaps because he reminded Stalin of his own Georgian origins. He only came to live with his father in the Kremlin at Nadya's insistence. He probably wished he hadn't.
    "The boy Yakov was subjected to frequent and severe punishments by his father,"
    Trotsky related.
    When Yakov tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide in 1928 or 1929, Stalin said
    callously: "Ha, he couldn't even shoot straight." When he was captured during World War II, Stalin denounced hire w a traitor a s "no true Russian would ever surrender". He refused a German offer to exchange hint oral had Yakov's wife imprisoned.
    His younger son, Vasily, was also beaten.
    "At home, he would knock the boy down and let him have it with his boots," Svetlana said.
    After a disastrous career in the Red Air Force, Vasily died an alcoholic wreck at the age of forty-one. One of his sons died of a heroin overdose. One daughter was an alcoholic; another was confined to a mental asylum.
    Stalin loved to be photographed with young children and the party machine trumpeted his love for them. A story frequently told at the time is of a three-year-old child coming home from his first day at school and telling his father: "You are not my father any more."
    "What do you mean I am not your father?" the man would exclaim, horrified.
    "You are not my father," the child would say. "Stalin is my father. He gives me everything I have."
    In fact, Stalin turned his brutality towards his own sons into public policy. In 1935, Stalin changed the law so that children could be hanged. Children as young as ten were arrested and tortured into informing on their parents or confessing that they were "counterrevolutionary, Fascist terrorists". The children of adults who had been arrested were also vulnerable to arrest. When asked why, Stalin replied: "For being freethinkers, that's what."
    During the famine of 1932, Stalin personally issued orders to shoot the hungry children who were stealing food from railway trucks and who, for some reason, Stalin thought had contracted venereal diseases. In all, it is estimated, that "Uncle Joe" was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children plus two or three million children who starved to death during the famines of the 1930s.
    There was a joke in the old Soviet Union that ran this way:
    A schoolteacher asked one of her pupils: "Who is your father?"
    The child answered: "Comrade Stalin."
    And who's your mother?"
    The child said: "The Soviet motherland."
    And what do you want to become?" the teacher asked.
    The child said: An orphan."
    Stalin had a thing about boots. Not only were they useful for kicking his son, his own father was a cobbler. When drunk, he had kicked the young Stalin with his boots. He also beat Stalin's mother, leaving Stalin with a deep misogyny.
    The Soviets even had some jokes about his boots:
    Question: Why did Lenin wear botinki [ankle-high boots], while Stalin wore sapogi [high boots]?
    Answer. Because during Lenin's time, in Russia, the shit was only up to the ankles.
    Official photographs always show Stalin in high boots, usually with his trousers tucked in them, peasant style. He rarely took his own boots off, and he always slept with his socks on, but this may have been to hide his deformed left foot. According to Tsarist police records, the second and third toes of his left foot were joined together.
    Stalin even had one of his bodyguards sent to the gulag for abandoning his boots. The man wore slippers instead so as not to wake Stalin when he was sleeping. Stalin accused the man of planning to sneak up and assassinate