The woman who softened Stalin’s heart died at 22. Then he executed her entire family during the Great Purges.

Ketevan ‘Kato’ Svanidze married Joseph Stalin in 1906 when he was still a young revolutionary organizing in Georgia. Her family had welcomed him with open arms, offering the future dictator a rare taste of stability and warmth. When she died of typhus just a year later at only 22 years old, Stalin was genuinely devastated. Witnesses at her funeral recalled him saying that she had softened his heart of stone, and that with her death, his last warm feelings for humanity had died as well.

The Svanidze family remained loyal to Stalin for decades as he rose to absolute power. Kato’s brother Alexander Svanidze was an Old Bolshevik who continued supporting Stalin through the tumultuous early years of the Soviet Union. But loyalty meant nothing during the paranoid frenzy of the Great Purges in the 1930s. In 1937, Alexander was arrested on completely fabricated charges of espionage, subjected to torture, and executed. His wife Maria was imprisoned, and their son spent years suffering in the brutal conditions of the Gulag system.

Stalin didn’t stop there. He systematically pursued extended members of the Svanidze family, nearly wiping out the entire branch of relatives who had once welcomed him as one of their own. The family of the woman he claimed had humanized him became victims of the very totalitarian system he had built. Historians point to the Svanidze purge as one of the most chilling examples of Stalin’s complete transformation from a man capable of love and grief into a dictator ruled entirely by suspicion, fear, and the ruthless pursuit of power. Not even the memory of his dead wife could save her family from his paranoia.