The BBC reports:
The paper published a piece referring to declassified death warrants which it says bore Stalin’s personal signature.
Mr Dzhugashvili — who was not at the court as the case was brought on Thursday — says that is a lie, and that Stalin never directly ordered the deaths of anyone.
It is the latest bizarre twist in what many see as a Kremlin-backed campaign to rehabilitate Stalin’s reputation, says the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Moscow.