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For Lieut. General Vasily Stalin, son of the Great Comrade Joseph Stalin,* the Aviation Day he had staged was a sparkling success. Barely 30, he is the youngest general in Russia's armed forces, a fighter pilot, and head of a topflight command: the Moscow district of the elite PVO (AntiAir Defense Command), the legendary, jet-riding "Golden Falcons," watchmen of the Soviet skies.
A few times each year, during the air parades, Stalin's son stands as the shining symbol of Soviet air might and flies the lead plane in the big review. But the rest of the year, Vasily Stalin is a mysterious figure. Sometimes Red newspapers interview him, but never identify him as his father's son. A few have seen his wine-red Mercedes-Benz convertible racing through Moscow's streets, siren wailing, and seen the police clearing a way through traffic. Others have seen him carousing in Moscow's clubs. Only two photographs of him have ever come out of Russia.
The official histories tell little: Pilot V. Stalin commanded a fighter division (50 planes) in Poland in 1944, was commended for bravery, promoted in 1946 to major general (equivalent to a U.S. brigadier general), and to lieutenant general (equals U.S. major general)† three years later.
Inside the Kremlin. Much more can be pieced together from Westerners who have met him, and from escaped Soviet airmen who served in Poland and Germany with or under him. Their picture of Vasily is not quite so heroic. Vasily Iosifovich Dzhugashvili Stalin was bora in 1921 or 1922, probably in Moscow (no one is quite sure). Lenin was still alive. Joseph Stalin, in his middle 40s, was then Commissar of Nationalities and engaged in a bitter and bloody civil war. His first wife, Katerina Svanidze, had died four years before, and Stalin had taken as his second wife his secretary, Nadezhda Allilueva, the young daughter of an old-line Bolshevik who had once sheltered him from Czarist police. A year or so after their marriage, Nadezhda Allilueva presented her husband with a son, red-haired like his mother.
It was a strange, sealed-off world that young Stalin saw within the Kremlin's cold walls. As his father ruthlessly hacked his way upwards, Vasily found himself more & more isolated from other children. His companions were the stern-faced NKVD sentries lining the Kremlin corridors ; his teachers, special party instructors.
For amusement, he watched the clanking military parades on Red Square or booted a soccer ball through the courtyards. Whenever he left the palace, he saw evidences of the imposed tributes of dictatorship: the three-story murals of his father throughout Moscow, the monuments, parks and buildings erected to Stalin. He saw how ordinary mortals fawned whenever his father spoke. Before long, young Vasily Stalin learned that the boss's son could also dictate and be obeyed.