Davydov knew of his ancestry, but kept it quiet

Documents revealing the first and last name of Stalin's son were discovered in a previously closed archive.

NTV said several historians, including the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, have mentioned a son being born to Stalin in 1914 during his four-year exile in northern Siberia.

Mr Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his family connection to Stalin.

Cult of Personality

But he said the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time and his father told him to keep quiet about it.

Mr Davydov said Stalin had acknowledged his son in Siberia and even tried to have him sent to Moscow.

NTV said no record of this had been documented.

Mr Davydov, 52, works as a departmental head in a design institute and his colleagues, mainly women, still can't get over the discovery.

He is of the same height (as Stalin) and on the whole has a similar figure

Work colleague

NTV's correspondent said his colleagues never imagined Mr Davydov could be related to Stalin.

"But now they suddenly began to find similarities between them," she said.

"He is of the same height and, on the whole, has a similar figure," one man said

"Perhaps he is short-tempered on occasions - but not with us," a woman colleague added.

Mr Davydov has kept a few photographs of his father and two of his grandmother, Lida, who NTV said was the young Stalin's common-law wife.

Symbolic

Mr Davydov said he thought it was symbolic that he lives in Novokuznets because in Soviet times it was named Stalinsk for a number of years.

There is only one Stalin monument in Siberia

And recently local Communists had erected a monument to Stalin - the only one in Siberia.

Western biographies of Stalin record three children - a son Yakov by his first wife Ekaterina and a son Vasily and a daughter Svetlana by his second wife Nadezhda.

Both sons are dead. Svetlana defected from the Soviet Union in 1966 and in the 1990s settled in England.

There are known to be eight grandchildren, but Davydov said none of the direct descendants had tried to contact him.