MOSCOW: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s theatre director grandson Alexander Burdonsky has died at 75, the Moscow theatre where he worked for 45 years said on Wednesday.

Burdonsky kept a low profile and used his mother’s surname. He said he had never visited Stalin’s grave by the Kremlin wall.

Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky marked Burdonsky’s death with a telegram praising his “many-faceted talent” and “artistic taste”. Burdonsky was the son of Stalin’s youngest son Vasily, an air force pilot who spent years in prison after the dictator’s death and suffered from alcoholism.

Burdonsky’s mother Galina Burdonskaya came from a humble background. The couple separated in 1945 and their two children were taken away from their mother for eight years.

Vasily Stalin was sentenced to eight years in jail in 1955 for “anti-Soviet propaganda and agitation” after criticising the Soviet leadership following his father’s death in 1953.

“I’m sorry for my father because he was a very talented person,” Burdonsky said in a 2014 interview with First Educational Channel.

But he said he also witnessed his father beating his mother and his other partners. “Mum loved him and felt sorry for him. I had a conflict with her about this,” he said.

Burdonsky used the surname Stalin as a child but changed it as a teenager. “I immediately switched to Mum’s surname because I planned to work in the theatre, and what does that surname have to do with the arts?” he said.

He worked from 1972 at the Russian Army Theatre and in 1996 was decorated as a People’s Artist of Russia, a prestigious award. He was married to another theatre director Dalia Tamuleviciute, who predeceased him and they had no children.

“I’ve never been at Stalin’s grave,” he said in a 2014 interview.

Asked what he inherited from Stalin, he said “brains, I think... and maybe some willpower.” “As time passes and you get older, you understand that he was of course a person with great abilities, today I don’t doubt that for a second. I don’t want to justify Stalin or whitewash him,” he said. “There was cruelty too but in Russia unfortunately there is always cruelty.”

One of Stalin’s other grandsons, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, died last year. He was born out of wedlock to the dictator’s elder son Yakov Dzhugashvili.

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2017