Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin

Dzhugashvili

Koba (this nickname is only for very close friends, of which Stalin had only a few)

December 18, 1878 (real date), December 21, 1879 (false date, the one recorded in the documents)

Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire

Political, state, military and party figure, Russian revolutionary, publicist

23 years old (real), 22 years old (fake)

Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili

Vissarion Ivanovich Dzhugashvili (c. 1850-1889)

Ekaterina Georgievna Dzhugashvili (Geladze) (born 1858)

Ekaterina Semenovna Svanidze (years of marriage: 1885-1898). Wife died of consumption. No children.

RSDLP, VKP, RCP, CPSU

Tbilisi Theological Seminary (did not graduate, expelled)

Atheism

The newspaper "Pravda"
Newspaper "Brzdola"
Tiflis Physical Observatory

Joseph Dzhugashvili was born into a Georgian family (a number of sources suggest that Stalin's ancestors were of Ossetian origin) in the city of Gori in the Tiflis province and came from a lower class background.

During Stalin's lifetime, it was believed that he was born on December 9 (21), 1879, but his real date of birth was December 6 (18), 1878, and his date of baptism was December 17 (29), 1878.

Stalin had physical defects: the second and third toes on his left foot were fused together, and his face was covered in pockmarks. In 1885, Joseph was hit by a phaeton, and the boy suffered severe injuries to his arm and leg; after that, throughout his life, his left arm could not be fully straightened at the elbow and therefore seemed shorter than his right.

Father - Vissarion (Beso), came from peasants of the village of Didi-Lilo in the Tiflis province, by profession - a shoemaker. Prone to drunkenness and fits of rage, he cruelly beat Ekaterina and little Coso (Joseph). There was an incident when the child tried to protect his mother from being beaten. He threw a knife at Vissarion and ran away. According to the recollections of the son of a policeman in Gori, another time Vissarion burst into the house where Ekaterina and little Coso were, and attacked them with beatings, inflicting a head injury on the child.

Joseph was the third son in the family; the first two died in infancy. Some time after Joseph's birth, his father's affairs went badly and he began drinking. The family often changed homes. Eventually, Vissarion left his wife, but tried to take his son, but Catherine did not give him up.

When Coco was eleven years old, Vissarion "died in a drunken brawl - someone stabbed him." By that time, Coco himself spent a lot of time in the street company of young hooligans in Gori. According to the same information, he was buried in Telavi, but the authenticity of the burial has not been established.

His mother, Ekaterina Georgievna, came from the family of a serf peasant (gardener) Geladze from the village of Gambareuli and worked as a day laborer. A woman of puritanical morals, burdened with hard work, she often beat her only surviving child, but was infinitely devoted to him. Stalin's childhood friend David Machavariani said that "Kato surrounded Joseph with excessive maternal love and, like a she-wolf, protected him from everyone and everything. She exhausted herself with work to the point of exhaustion in order to make her darling happy." Ekaterina, however, was disappointed that her son never became a priest.

In 1886, Ekaterina Georgievna wanted to send Joseph to study at the Gori Orthodox Theological School, but since he did not know Russian at all, he was unable to enroll. In 1886-1888, at the request of his mother, the children of priest Christopher Charkviani took on the task of teaching Joseph Russian. As a result, in 1888, Soso entered not the first preparatory class at the school, but immediately the second preparatory class, and in September of the following year, he entered the first class of the school, which he graduated from in June 1894.

In September 1894, Joseph passed the entrance exams and was enrolled in the Orthodox Tiflis Theological Seminary. There he first became acquainted with Marxism and by the beginning of 1895 he had come into contact with underground groups of revolutionary Marxists exiled by the government to Transcaucasia. Stalin himself later recalled: “I joined the revolutionary movement at the age of 15, when I got involved with underground groups of Russian Marxists who were then living in Transcaucasia. These groups had a great influence on me and instilled in me a taste for underground Marxist literature.”

According to the English historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore, Stalin was an extremely gifted student, receiving high marks in all subjects: mathematics, theology, Greek, Russian. Stalin liked poetry, and in his youth he himself wrote poems in Georgian, which attracted the attention of connoisseurs.

In 1898, Dzhugashvili gained experience as a propagandist at a meeting with workers at the apartment of the revolutionary Vano Sturua and soon began to lead a workers' circle of young railway workers, he began to conduct classes in several workers' circles and even drew up a Marxist program of classes for them. In August of the same year, Joseph joined the Georgian Social Democratic organization "Mesame-dasi" ("Third Group").

Together with V. Z. Ketskhoveli and A. G. Tsulukidze, Dzhugashvili formed the core of the revolutionary minority of this organization, the majority of which stood on the positions of “legal Marxism” and leaned towards nationalism.

On May 29, 1899, in his fifth year of study, he was expelled from the seminary "for failure to appear for exams for an unknown reason" (probably, the actual reason for the expulsion was Joseph Dzhugashvili's activities in promoting Marxism among seminarians and workers in railway workshops). The certificate issued to him stated that he had completed four grades and could serve as a teacher in primary public schools.

After being expelled from the seminary, Dzhugashvili made ends meet for some time as a tutor. Among his students, in particular, was his closest childhood friend Simon Ter-Petrosyan (the future revolutionary Kamo).

From the end of December 1899, Dzhugashvili was accepted to the Tiflis Physical Observatory as a calculator-observer.

On April 23, 1900, Joseph Dzhugashvili, Vano Sturua and Zakro Chodrishvili organised a workers' May Day, which was attended by 400-500 workers. Joseph himself spoke at the rally, among others. This speech was Stalin's first appearance before a large gathering of people. In August of the same year, Dzhugashvili participated in the preparation and implementation of a major demonstration by Tiflis workers - a strike at the Main Railway Workshops. The following workers' revolutionaries took part in organising the workers' protests: M. I. Kalinin (exiled from St. Petersburg to the Caucasus), S. Ya. Alliluyev, as well as M. Z. Bochoridze, A. G. Okuashvili and V. F. Sturua. From August 1 to 15, up to four thousand people took part in the strike. As a result, more than five hundred strikers were arrested.

On March 21, 1901, the police conducted a search of the physical observatory where Dzhugashvili lived and worked. He himself, however, escaped arrest and went underground, becoming an underground revolutionary.

In September 1901, the Nina printing house, organized by Lado Ketskhoveli in Baku, began printing the illegal newspaper Brdzola (Struggle). The editorial of the first issue was by twenty-two-year-old Joseph Dzhugashvili. This article is Stalin's first known political work.

In November 1901, he was introduced to the Tiflis Committee of the RSDLP, on whose instructions he was sent to Batumi that same month, where he participated in the creation of the Social Democrat organization. Party nickname: Koba.

In his youth, Stalin preferred to join the Bolsheviks rather than the Menshevism that was popular in Georgia at the time. The Bolshevik Party of that time had an ideological and leadership core that was abroad due to police persecution. Unlike such Bolshevik leaders as Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev, who spent a significant part of their adult life in exile, Stalin preferred to be in Russia doing illegal party work and was repeatedly exiled.

Even in his youth, Stalin rejected Georgian nationalism; over time, his views began to increasingly gravitate toward traditional Russian great powerdom.

Smokes a lot

Harsh, sometimes even rude in communication, a great strategist. A natural leader, possesses organizational skills. Has a difficult character. Usually calm and reasonable, at times he falls into acute irritation. Then his objectivity fails him, he changes dramatically before our eyes, becomes even paler, his gaze becomes heavy, hard. Arrogant. Persistent, strong in spirit. A realist, insightful.