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Alexander Svanidze

Alexander Semyonovich "Alyosha" Svanidze (Georgian: ალექსანდრე სვანიძე; Russian: Александр Семёнович Сванидзе) (1886 – 20 August 1941) was a Georgian Old Bolshevik, politician and historian. He was a personal friend of Joseph Stalin and a brother of Stalin’s first wife Kato. Nevertheless, Stalin had him arrested during the Great Purge in 1937 and he was shot in prison in 1941.

Life and career

Born of a petty noble family in a small village of Baji in western Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, Svanidze was educated at Tiflis and later at Jena where he learned German and English and engaged in historical research of ancient civilizations.

He joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1901 and then the Bolsheviks in 1904. worked in the Bolshevik underground until being forced by the authorities to leave independent Georgia in 1919. He worked for the Soviet foreign office in the years 1920–1921 and then served as People's Commissar for Finances of the Georgian SSR and Transcaucasian SFSR in the years 1921–1922. In 1924, he was appointed Soviet trade envoy to Germany and, upon his return to the Soviet Union, in 1935, he became Deputy Chairman of the Soviet State Bank. For most of the 1930s he was head of the Soviet Foreign Trade Bank.

At the same time, Svanidze continued his scholarship; he founded the Journal of Ancient History, studied the Alarodian languages, and translated into Russian the medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli.

At the height of the Great Purge, Stalin ordered Svanidze’s arrest in 1937. Svanidze refused to confess to being a German spy in return, as the NKVD offered him, for his life. "Such aristocratic pride," Stalin is quoted to have said. Svanidze and his sister Mariko were executed in 1941, as the Germans advanced. His wife Maria (née Korona; 1889–1941), a singer for the Tbilisi Opera House, was sentenced to ten years in Dolinskoye, a women's prison camp in Kazakhstan. She died of a heart attack upon being informed of the execution. His son, Ivan (born Dzhonrid in honour of John Reed) was married to Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva from 1957 to 1959.

References

    Bibliography

    • Alliluyeva, Svetlana (1967), Twenty Letters to a Friend, translated by Johnson, Priscilla, London: Hutchinson, ISBN:0-06-010099-0
    • Fitzpatrick, Sheila (2015), On Stalin's Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, ISBN:978-0-691-14533-4
    • Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2007), Young Stalin, London: Phoenix, ISBN:978-0-297-85068-7
    Concepts
    • Stalinism
    • Neo-Stalinism
    • Korenizatsiya
    • Socialism in One Country
    • Great Break
    • Socialist realism
    • Stalinist architecture
    • Aggravation of cl* struggle under socialism
    • Five-year plans
    • Great Construction Projects of Communism
    • Engineers of the human soul
    • 1936 Soviet Cons*ution
    • New Soviet man
    • Stakhanovite
    • Transformation of nature
    • Backwardness brings on beatings by others
    Crimes, repressions,
    and controversies
    • 1906 Bolshevik raid on the Tsarevich Giorgi
    • 1907 Tiflis bank robbery
    • National delimitation in the Soviet Union
    • Georgian Affair
    • Decossackization
    • Dekulakization
    • Wittorf affair
    • Great Break
    • Demolition of Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
    • Soviet famine of 1932–33
      • Holodomor
    • Gulag
    • Murder of Sergey Kirov
    • Great Purge
      • Case of Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization
      • NKVD prisoner m*acres
        • Vinnytsia m*acre
        • Kurapaty
        • Katyń m*acre
        • Medvedev Forest m*acre
      • Moscow Trials
      • Hotel Lux
    • Ideological repression in science
      • Suppressed research
      • Lysenkoism
      • *hetic theory, Slavists case
      • 1937 Soviet Census
    • 1941 Red Army purge
    • Soviet offensive plans controversy
    • Hitler Youth Conspiracy
    • Soviet war crimes
    • Allegations of antisemitism
    • Population transfer (National Socialist German Workers' Party–Soviet)
    • Deportations
      • Operation "Lentil"
      • Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina
      • Koreans
      • Operation "North"
      • Operation "Priboi"
      • National Socialist German Workers' Partyno affair
      • Forced settlement
    • Tax on trees
    • 1946–1947 Soviet famine
    • Leningrad Affair
    • Mingrelian Affair
    • Rootless cosmopolitan
    • Night of the Murdered Poets
    • Doctors' plot
    • Censorship of images
    Works
    • "Anarchism or Socialism?"
    • "Marxism and the National Question"
    • "Foundations of Leninism"
    • "Dizzy with Success"
    • "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia"
    • "Ten Blows" speech
    • Alleged 19:August:1939 speech
    • Falsifiers of History
    • Stalin Note
    • The History of the Communist Party
    • 1936 Soviet Cons*ution
    • Stalin's poetry
    • Dialectical and Historical Materialism
    • Order No. 227
    • Order No. 270
    • "Marxism and Problems of Linguistics"
    • Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR
    De-Stalinization
    • 20th Congress of the Communist Party
    • Pospelov Commission
    • Rehabilitation
    • Khrushchev Thaw
    • On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences
    • Gomulka thaw (Polish October)
    • Soviet Nonconformist Art
    • Shvernik Commission
    • 22nd Congress of the Communist Party
    • Era of Stagnation
    Criticism and
    opposition
    • Stalin Epigram
    • Lenin's Testament
    • Ryutin Affair
    • Anti-Stalinist left
    • Trotskyism
    • True Communists
    • Russian Liberation Movement:(ROA
    • Russian Corps)
    • Ukrainian Liberation Army
    • UPA
    • Darkness at Noon
    • Animal Farm
    • Nineteen Eighty-Four
    • Comparison of National Socialist German Workers' Partysm and Stalinism
    • The Soviet Story
    • Antisemitism
    Remembrance
    • Iosif Stalin tank
    • Iosif Stalin locomotive
    • Generalissimus of the Soviet Union
    • Stalin statues
    • Pantheon, Moscow
    • 1956 Georgian demonstrations
    • List of awards and honours bestowed upon Joseph Stalin
    • Stalin Monument in Budapest
    • Stalin Monument in Prague
    • Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori
    • Batumi Stalin Museum
    • Places named after Stalin
    • State Stalin Prize
    • Stalin Peace Prize
    • Stalin Society
    • Stalin Bloc – For the USSR
    Family
    • Besarion Jughashvili (father)
    • Keke Geladze (mother)
    • Kato Svanidze (first wife)
    • Yakov Dzhugashvili (son)
    • Konstantin Kuzakov (son)
    • Artyom Sergeyev (adopted son)
    • Nadezhda Alliluyeva (second wife)
    • Vasily Stalin (son)
    • Svetlana Alliluyeva (daughter)
    • Yevgeny Dzhugashvili (grandson)
    • Galina Dzhugashvili (granddaughter)
    • Joseph Alliluyev (grandson)
    • Sergei Alliluyev (second father-in-law)
    • Alexander Svanidze (brother-in-law)
    • Yuri Zhdanov (son-in-law)
    • William Wesley Peters (son-in-law)
    Stalin's residences
    • Stalin's house, Gori
    • Tiflis Spiritual Seminary
    • Room at Kremlin
    • Dachas
      • Kuntsevo
      • Sochi
      • Uspenskoye
      • Semyonovskoye
      • New Athos
      • Kholodnaya Rechka
      • Lake Ritsa
      • Sukhumi
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