Ekaterine "Kato" Svanidze[a] (2 April 1885 – 22 November 1907) was the first wife of Joseph Stalin and the mother of his eldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili.

Born in Racha, in western Georgia, Svanidze eventually moved to Tiflis with her two sisters and brother, and worked as a seamstress.

[1] Her parents were Svimon, a railway worker and landowner, and Sephora Dvali, both descendants of an impoverished minor Georgian nobility.

[1] Alyosha was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) in Georgia and a confidant of Ioseb Jughashvili (later known as Joseph Stalin).

[1][6] The three sisters took up working at an atelier for a French seamstress, Madame Hervieu, making uniforms and dresses for military officers and their wives.

While my fellows did illegal stuff in one room, my wife was fitting the dresses of generals' wives next door," Monaselidze later wrote.

[11] But she was also, as Montefiore notes, an educated woman in her own right and had taken an active interest in Bolshevism, organising fundraisers for the Social Democrats and helping tend to wounded revolutionaries.

[6][12] Afterwards, a small dinner party was held for the ten guests, with Mikhail Tskhakaya, a Bolshevik mentor to Jughashvili, serving as the tamada (toastmaster, an important figure at Georgian celebrations).

[14] Despite the law requiring marriages to be recorded in one's internal passport, Svanidze did not do so, ostensibly to protect Jughashvili, who was known to the Okhrana, the imperial Russian secret police.

[21] A few months after Iakob's birth, Jughashvili was involved in a high-profile Tiflis bank robbery, and the three of them fled to Baku to avoid arrest.

[16][25][g] Her death was announced in a newspaper, Tsqaro (წყარო, "Source"), and a funeral was held at 9:00am on 25 November in the same church she had married Jughashvili.

According to the Georgian Menshevik Ioseb Iremashvili, Jughashvili was very distraught at the death of his wife, and at the funeral allegedly said "This creature softened my heart of stone.

[32] Svanidze's brother Alyosha later married an opera singer, Maria Anisimovna Korona, and rose in the ranks of the Communist Party.

[35] Alyosha and Maria's son, Ivan Svanidze, was briefly married to Stalin's only daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva.