GALINA Djougachvili's first memories of her grandfather are as a child. "He took me in his arms and gave me a hug. But his moustache annoyed me and I started to cry so he had to put me down again. He was a tender man with children. I was always his little girl."
In her flat in the centre of Moscow, around the corner from the old KGB headquarters, a black and white photograph of Joseph Stalin takes pride of place on the bookshelf, alongside a picture of her son.
"I loved him and admired him," she says unapologetically of the man who is widely regarded as second only to Hitler as the most evil figure of the 20th century. "Have you ever heard of anyone who didn't love their grandfather?"
Pictures of her father, Iakov, are kept discreetly in a box of family snapshots. Galina was only three when Stalin's eldest son went to war. He was captured within a month and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Germany. When Hitler offered to exchange him for the head of the German forces imprisoned after the Battle of Stalingrad, Stalin refused, saying he would never swap a soldier for a marshall.
Galina is still not sure of the circumstances in which her father died. But she insists that Stalin made the right decision in refusing Hitler's offer.
"How could he have exchanged his son? It was a war. He was a soldier like anyone else. Stalin had to set an example. All the Germans wanted to do was to discredit him."
Stalin, she says, never spoke about her father after his death, except to say that she looked a lot like him. Going on 60, Galina a thin, dark haired woman, still bears a resemblance to both.
She knows her father was alive until 1943. She was told he was killed while trying to escape. Others believe he walked to the perimeter fence, intent on being shot. After two years of torture for refusing to collaborate with the Germans, he no longer wanted to live.
It was Stalin's sister in law who had introduced her parents at a performance at the Bolshoi theatre. Her mother, Julia, had been married to a KGB man. Her father had already been married and divorced. They fell in love, she says, and married a year later in a simple registry office ceremony. Julia was not introduced to her father in law until after the wedding.
After the war, Galina and her mother moved to the flat where she still lives today. "My mother had a pension which Stalin paid her directly although sometimes he forgot. We weren't well off but we were Stalin's family and it had some perks. We could shop in shops that were always stocked. If we were ill we were treated at the clinic in the Kremlin."
She saw her grandfather regularly. During the summer months she stayed with her aunt Svetlana in a dacha in the country close to his. When Stalin died, Galina was devastated, like many of her country people. No one knows how many people were crushed to death outside the House of Unions where his body lay in state. Inside, the 15 year old listened to Tchaikovsky's last symphony as the crowds passed by.
"The music was like a heart beating, slower and slower, until it finally stopped," she recalls. "It was tragic."
Growing up, she knew only one side of Stalin. "I knew that he was one of the founders of a very powerful state, a state that had won the war." When she heard the other side, of the man who sent millions to their deaths in work camps, of the purges and show trials, she didn't really believe it.
To this day she questions the figures relating to the number of people who died in the Gulags, the Siberian labour camps. "History is what the men who write it say it is. It is only Stalin's enemies who have given the statistics. That state had a lot of enemies.
"If Stalin had not been there the Soviet Union would not have existed, the war would not have been won, the state would not have been as powerful as it was. I don't believe Stalin was extreme. I don't believe he was some sort of psychopath. I don't suffer from paranoia and they say it is hereditary, so if he was paranoid I would have been too."
However, she believes her aunt, Svetlana, the daughter who disowned Stalin once he had died, is not as psychologically sound. It came from her mother's side, she says. Stalin's second wife committed suicide in 1932.
"The last I heard was Svetlana had become a Catholic and is now in a convent somewhere. Madness, she laughs. "This is a woman who was married and divorced four times. Now she is a nun.
"After Stalin's death she wrote books about how difficult it was to live with him. How she had suffered. Stalin was stern with his sons, but she could do as she wanted. He adored her. I was there. I saw it."
After Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th party congress when Stalin's name was for the first time linked with the death of his comrades and the suffering of millions, life became "very painful" for the family, she says.
"Some would flee in fear at the mention of our name. Many of those who had been our friends shunned us. I was young and could ignore it. But my mother suffered a lot. When she had cancer, she was not allowed into the clinic in the Kremlin. She was never treated in the end."
It was during the desalinisation years that Galina met her husband. Hocine, an Algerian mathematician was studying in Moscow at the same time as she was completing a doctorate in Algerian literature. They have one son who is studying art at a college in the Russian capital.
The fear and hatred towards Stalin's family have eased over the years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic crisis which has gripped the country, his popularity has even grown slightly. She still votes for the Communist Party.
"It's a family tradition," she smiles, although she believes it no longer holds the same principles as her grandfather.
The recession has also affected her family, she says. "Life has become very difficult over the last five years. If it wasn't for what my husband earned it would be hell." The couple lives modestly. Their home, decked out in 1960s furniture, bears no obvious sign of wealth. When asked if Stalin left her anything, she replies: "The only things my grandfather owned when he died were the clothes on his back."
HOCINE works as a French teacher, Galina as a writer contributing short stories to literary reviews. A heavily marked page sits in the carriage of an old typewriter in the corner of her sitting room. She is writing a novella. It is about Russian life today, she says but won't discuss the book further until it is finished.
She never visits her grandfathers grave, behind's Lenin's mausoleum as she would need a pass to get past security - "the whole thing is such a spectacle".
Galina Djougachvili describes herself as an ordinary Russian woman who has lived a normal Russian life. Her family suffered, like millions of others, when her, father died in the war. She went to university, married and had a child. The only thing that makes her different, is that she was and always will be Stalin's little girl.