Russian news reports say a grandson of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has died in Moscow at the age of 80.
The reports cite Moscow city ambulance service officials as saying Yevgeny Dzhugashvili was found unconscious near his home in Moscow on December 22. He was pronounced dead after being taken to a hospital.
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili's father was Stalin's eldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili. As a professional military engineer, he took part in the Soviet Union's space program, including the world's first flight into space by Yury Gagarin in 1961.
In the 1980s, Yevgeny Dzhugashvili taught in a number of military schools. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he held dual citizenship -- Russian and Georgian.
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili continued to defend communist ideology after the Soviet collapse and filed several lawsuits against media outlets "to protect Stalin's dignity."
He published a book in 2015 titled My Grandfather Stalin: He Is A Saint, and he played Stalin in a Russian movie.
His father, Yakov Dzhugashvili, died in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Berlin in April 1943 after Nazi troops captured him in July 1941 in the battle near Smolensk.
