Vasily was born on 21 March 1921, the son of Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva.[2] He had an older half-brother, Yakov Dzhugashvili (born 1907), from his father's first marriage to Kato Svanidze, and a younger sister, Svetlana, was born in 1926.[3][4] The family also took in Artyom Sergeyev, the son of Fyodor Sergeyev, a close friend of Joseph. Fyodor died in an accident four months after the birth of Artyom, so the boy was raised in the Stalin household.[5]