THERE was an expectant hush as Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili took the stage.

Everyone in the audience was familiar with the name of Georgia’s most famous son — better known as Josef Stalin — who ruled the Soviet Union until his death in 1953. But few had ever seen his 11-year-old great-great-grandson, who bears the same name and is seeking a less controversial kind of fame as a concert pianist.

They caught their first glimpse this week when Josef, in his second year at music school in Georgia, played Bach and Vivaldi to a packed house in Tbilisi in his first public performance. The home crowd of 200 people responded with a standing ovation — although not quite as long as those afforded the “Man of Steel” by Politburo members who were too terrified to sit down.

“I loved it but I want to play in a bigger concert hall so that more people can come and hear me,” young Josef told The Times by telephone from the Georgian capital.

“I played perfectly, with no mistakes,” he said of his performance with 14 other children. “I was a bit nervous at first but I soon relaxed.” Nana Dzhaparidze-Dzhugashvili, his 42-year-old mother, said that there had been standing room only for the concert in the Tbilisi Conservatory. “I hope it was because of his talent as well as his name,” she said.

Stalin may be vilified in the West as a brutal dictator responsible for the deaths of as many as 20 million people through purges, deportations and avoidable famines. But there is a growing movement to rehabilitate his name in the former Soviet Union, with a series of new statues being erected in the past two years. He is enduringly popular in Georgia, where he was born in the city of Gori, 72km (45 miles) from Tbilisi, in 1878.

Yakov Dzhugashvili, young Josef’s 34-year-old uncle, told The Times that many of Stalin’s other descendants were ashamed of their link to Stalin. “But my father was always proud of his family and his name,” he said. “Now I’m more and more aware of what we’ve lost. Stalin was the leader of a unique country in the history of mankind, which was dependent on its own intellectual and natural resources.”

Stalin’s oldest son, also called Yakov, died in a Nazi prison camp in 1943 after the Soviet leader refused to exchange him for a German general. Yakov’s illegitimate son, Yevgeni, survived the war and still lives in Tbilisi.

Yevgeni’s son, Vissarion, is the younger Josef’s father. He works as a film director in New York, however, so the boy lives with his mother and his uncle Yakov in Tbilisi.

Josef said that he knew who his great-great-grandfather was — “President of Russia!” — and had admired his portrait hanging in his grandfather’s home.

“He was very clever and everybody knew him because he ruled all the world — he was a tsar,” he said. “I want to be famous, too. But I want to be a pianist, not a tsar.”

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