Wives Of The World’s Top 8 Biggest Dictators

Ekaterina Svanidze and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, the 1st and 2nd wifes of Josef Stalin

Joseph Stalin is another dark character in human history. Many people think he was an even bigger evil than Hitler. Nevertheles, this fact didn’t interfere with his loving women.

Stalin was married twice. His first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, nicknamed Kato, was a sister of Alexander Svanidze, an old school friend of Stalin. Ekaterina was so devoted to Joseph, that he put aside his atheism and let the marriage be held in an Orthodox church in Tbilisi. Together they had a son, Yakov, but Kato saw her wandering revolutionary husband once in a blue moon. Eventually she was struck by typhus and died.

Her demise greatly affected the Soviet leader. At her funeral, Stalin reportedly said: ‘This creature softened my heart of stone. She’s died and with her has died my last warm feelings for humanity’. Was it the reason for the subsequent Stalin’s reign of terror? We’ll never know!

What we can tell, that 12 years after the Ekaterina’s death, Joseph found new love of his life, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. They met after Stalin had returned to Petrograd from exile to join the unrest following the February Revolution. She was 16 back then and fell in love with the bold revolutionary. Soon after the revolution Nadezhda became Stalin’s personal assistant. Two years later the couple married and had two children, Vasily and Svetlana. The suffocating life in the Kremlin with a suppressing and inattentive husband, who often abused alcohol and flirted with his collegue’s wives predetermined the fate of Stalin’s second wife, and made her commit suicide by shooting herself. Before her death she left a note where she put the blame on Stalin. Needless to say, the public was told that Nadezhda Alliluyeva had died from appendicitis, since it was bad for Stalin’s image to have a wife who committed a suicide.