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Stalin's granddaughter dies

Other News Materials 28 August 2007 12:53 (UTC +04:00)

( AP ) - Galina Dzhugashvili, a granddaughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin whose father met a mysterious death at a Nazi camp, has died in Moscow, a hospital official said Tuesday. She was 69.

Dzhugashvili died Monday evening at Burdenko military hospital after a prolonged illness, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to give her name to the media.

The official would not give the cause of death.

Dzhugashvili's father, Yakov, was a Soviet senior lieutenant who died at the Nazis' Sachsenhausen camp in 1943 after Stalin declined to swap him for a captured German general. The circumstances of his death were unclear, with conflicting contentions that he committed suicide or was murdered.

In 2003 in Moscow, a U.S. Defense Department official presented Dzhugashvili with documents that a U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said indicated her father was shot trying to escape.

At that time, Dzhugashvili said that her recollections of her grandfather were "a child's memories - the best and most tender." She said Stalin had been "very tender" with her because she was a girl.

Stalin, whose original surname was Dzhugashvili, ruled the Soviet Union with an iron fist until his death in 1953. Tens of millions of people were executed or deported to prison camps under his rule.

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