Des Derrien
Stalin was
born on 18 December 1878. His name was
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. He
later claimed a date of birth of 21 December 1879, possibly to confuse the
tsar’s secret police. He was born in a
small and unsophisticated town (pop. 7500) called Gori in Georgia, which was
then part of the Russian empire.
His father
was an alcoholic boot maker who worked mainly in Tbilisi, fifty miles
away. Two older brothers had died in
infancy. The family were very poor. As a child, Stalin had a bout of smallpox
which left his face permanently pockmarked and a childhood accident caused his
left arm to be four inches shorter than his right. And he was not a big man:
five foot three inches, and the built-up shoes didn’t help a lot. He was aged nine before learning to speak
Russian and he never lost a strong Georgian accent.
He attended
a Georgian Orthodox church school, did well academically and gained a
scholarship to a seminary in Tbilisi aged 15.
There, instead of discovering God, he discovered Marx. He was expelled in 1899 and became a
revolutionary activist, fomenting labour unrest and committing minor crimes to
help fund the Marxist groups. Between
1902 and 1913 he was arrested six times, but always soon escaping. Was he able
to escape so easily because he was a double agent? Then arrested in February 1913, he spent the
next four years in Siberia.
Stalin
married in 1906, had a son Yakov, but his wife died of typhus in 1907.
