Joseph Stalin as a child in Georgia in the late 1800s
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin in childhood
College/University
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1902
Joseph Stalin in youth
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
Tbilisi, Georgia
From August 1894 to 1899, Stalin attended Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary.
Career
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1919
Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin. All three of them were "Old Bolsheviks" - members of the Bolshevik Party before the October Revolution.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1921
Stalin, wearing an Order of the Red Banner.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1922
Stalin confers with an ailing Lenin in September 1922.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1925
From left to right: Stalin, Alexei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigori Zinoviev.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1925
Tbilisi, Georgia
Stalin and his close associates Anastas Mikoyan and Sergo Ordzhonikidze.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1927
Stalin at work in his office.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1936
Stalin applauds a speaker, discussing Stalin's report on the draft of the new constitution of the USSR during the eighth Soviet congress.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1937
Moscow, Russia
Joseph Stalin addresses voters of the Stalin election district in Moscow on the eve of the election in which Russians voted for the first time under the new constitution.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1939
Moscow, Russia
Stalin, greeting German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the Kremlin.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1939
Josef Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop shake hands after signing the Soviet-German Treaty of Friendship and agreeing on how Poland should be partitioned. Behind them can be seen the Russian Chief of Staff, Stapostnikov, and the Secretary of the German Embassy, Perlow.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1939
Moscow, Russia
Vyacheslav Molotov (right), foreign minister for the USSR at the time, and Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), then foreign minister for Germany, at the signing of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact with Joseph Stalin (center) on August 23, 1939.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1943
Tehran, Iran
The Big Three: Stalin, then-President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, in November 1943.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1943
Tehran, Iran
American statesman Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States of America, then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a conference in Tehran. Stalin greets Sarah Churchill.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1945
Potsdam, Germany
Then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Clement Attlee, then-President of the United States Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, in July 1945.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1945
Stalin and Winston Churchill meet in the conference room during the Yalta Conference.
Gallery of Joseph Stalin
1949
Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov
Achievements
Membership
Awards
Order of the Red Banner
Hero of the Soviet Union Medal
Order of Lenin
Order of Victory
Jubilee Medal "XX Years of the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army"
Order of Sukhbaatar
Order of Suvorov
Medal "For the Victory over Germany in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
Medal "For the Defence of Moscow"
Medal "For the Victory over Japan"
Medal "In Commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of Moscow"
Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin. All three of them were "Old Bolsheviks" - members of the Bolshevik Party before the October Revolution.
Joseph Stalin autographs photographs for 11-year-old Mamlakat Nakhangova (left from Stalin) and Ene Geldiyeva (right), members of a farming collective from Tajikistan who went to Moscow to confer with Stalin. M. A. Chernov, then-people's commissar for agriculture, is on the far left.
Joseph Stalin addresses voters of the Stalin election district in Moscow on the eve of the election in which Russians voted for the first time under the new constitution.
Josef Stalin and Joachim von Ribbentrop shake hands after signing the Soviet-German Treaty of Friendship and agreeing on how Poland should be partitioned. Behind them can be seen the Russian Chief of Staff, Stapostnikov, and the Secretary of the German Embassy, Perlow.
Vyacheslav Molotov (right), foreign minister for the USSR at the time, and Joachim von Ribbentrop (left), then foreign minister for Germany, at the signing of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact with Joseph Stalin (center) on August 23, 1939.
The Big Three: Stalin, then-President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference, in November 1943.
American statesman Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States of America, then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin during a conference in Tehran. Stalin greets Sarah Churchill.
Then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Clement Attlee, then-President of the United States Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, in July 1945.
Joseph Stalin, attending the Potsdam Conference at Cecilienhof Palace near Berlin, where the Big Three meetings were held to determine action against Japan and make arrangements for post-war Europe, on August 2, 1945.
(Stalin's work, explaining what Leninism is, with chapters...)
Stalin's work, explaining what Leninism is, with chapters on Theory, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the Peasant Question, the National Question, Strategy and Tactics, the Party and others.
(Written shortly before his death, this work is regarded a...)
Written shortly before his death, this work is regarded as Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's political testament. Far more than just a dry theoretical economic discussion, this book provides a fascinating and unique insight into the economic, social and political thinking of the man who led the Communist juggernaut from 1924 to 1953.
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian-born Soviet revolutionary and political leader. He governed the Soviet Union as its de facto dictator from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Stalin held the positions of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union.
Background
Joseph Stalin was born on December 18, 1878, in Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire (now Gori, Georgia), the son of Besarion Jughashvili, a shoemaker and workshop owner, and Ekaterina "Keke" Geladze, a domestic servant.
During the early years of their marriage, Joseph's parents prospered. However, over the course of time, Besarion, being a shoemaker, did not adapt to changing footwear trends, and his business began to fail. The family soon found itself living in poverty. Having lost his business, Besarion Jughashvili started to drink heavily and beat his wife and son. By 1883, Ekaterina and Joseph had left home and started a wandering life, moving through nine different rented rooms over the next decade. In 1886, they found a place in the house of a family friend, Father Christopher Charkviani.
Education
Joseph grew up speaking Georgian and only learned Russian at the age of eight or nine. In September 1888, he began attending the Gori Church School. He did well in his classes, especially in religious studies, painting, drama classes, geography, and Georgian. He also studied Greek and Russian. During those years, he got into many fights, and a childhood friend later noted that Stalin "was the best but also the naughtiest pupil" in the class. When he left the school in 1894, he was near the top of his class.
Later, Stalin won a scholarship to study at Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary, Georgia's leading educational institution. He began to study at the educational establishment in August 1894. During his first year there, he received high marks; the next year, however, he began to rebel against the institution's stern religious rules. He smuggled banned books into school and joined secret study groups opposed to the Russian czarist government. At one point he was sent to a punishment cell for five hours for not bowing to a school official. In 1899, the seminary directors expelled him for spreading subversive views. Stalin's mother wanted him to become a priest and was disappointed when he pursued another course in life. Years later, even after he had become the leader of the Soviet Union, she considered him a failure for not having completed his religious studies.
In December 1899, Stalin was hired as an accountant at the Tbilisi observatory. Russia's Social Democrats, members of a Communist Party opposed by the czar, had been using the observatory as a hideout, and Stalin ultimately joined them. A police raid exposed this association, and Stalin was fired from his accounting job. From this point on, Stalin was a professional revolutionary.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Stalin became active in the militant wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party. He was arrested in 1902 and deported to Siberia, a frozen wasteland in eastern Russia, but he escaped and was back in Georgia two years later. He first met Lenin, the leader of the radical Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party, in 1905, and became a devoted follower. It's known, that Lenin secretly approved of bank robberies, which he called "expropriations," to finance the Bolsheviks. In 1907, Stalin was involved in several bank heists in Georgia. To avoid connection with any illegal activities, the local Party expelled him, and he disappeared. He spent the next few years, organizing Bolshevik factions and spending time in exile.
In 1912, Lenin broke from the Social Democratic Party and formed a new Party. That year, Stalin spent some time with Lenin and his wife in Krakow, in present-day Poland, and then went to Vienna, Austria, to study Marxist literature. Lenin saw in Stalin a dependable - and ruthless - enforcer of the Bolsheviks' will and nominated him to the Party's Central Committee. However, Stalin was arrested shortly thereafter and exiled once again to Siberia, where he remained until the czar was overthrown in 1917.
After the fall of czarism, Stalin made his way at once to Petrograd (present-day St. Petersburg). The October Revolution of 1917 placed the Bolsheviks in power and Lenin became the new ruler of Russia. Lenin had come to admire Stalin for his loyalty and his organizational talents, particularly the way he could get things done, and he named Stalin to his cabinet as Commissar of Nationalities.
After Lenin started setting up a number of agencies to manage government affairs in 1919, Stalin volunteered to be a member of various Party committees and newly formed agencies. The most important of these new agencies was the Secretariat, which grew from thirty members in 1919 to more than six hundred in 1922. That year, Lenin made Stalin general secretary of the Party Central Committee. Under Stalin, the Secretariat became the Communist Party's real center of power. As general secretary, he had the power to appoint local secretaries who would, in turn, select delegates to Party congresses. In this manner, Stalin gradually packed the Party's legislative bodies and staff with his own supporters.
One year later after Lenin started to suffer the first of a series of debilitating strokes in May 1922, he expressed second thoughts about having given Stalin so much power. After Lenin died, the Party, now called the All-Union Communist Party, was headed by a collective leadership that included Stalin; Leon Trotsky, who had organized the Red Army (the official name of the Soviet Army) and still headed it; Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinovyev, the Party bosses in Moscow and Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg), respectively; and Nikolay Bukharin, the Party's leading theorist. Each of these men was ambitious and hoped to serve as the Party's next leader.
A shrewd and ruthless politician, Stalin was able to maneuver his opponents out of power by skillfully manipulating their jealousies and personal rivalries. First, he aligned himself with Kamenev and Zinovyev against Trotsky, who was soon ousted as head of the army. (He was later driven into exile and killed by one of Stalin's agents in Mexico City, Mexico.) Next, Stalin teamed up with Bukharin in order to move against Kamenev and Zinovyev. Meanwhile, Stalin's agents within the Party undermined popular support for Kamenev and Zinoviev. Delegates at the Fourteenth Party Congress in 1925 voted to expel them both. Stalin then turned against Bukharin, who met secretly with Kamenev and Zinovyev, warning that Stalin would eventually strangle them if not stopped. However, it was much too late: Stalin had gained absolute control of the Party. He later had Kamenev, Zinoviev, and Bukharin shot.
Once in control of the Soviet Union, Stalin began to push a plan for rapid, forced industrialization: the development of industries through systemized manufacturing or refinement of products by many people in one place, usually a factory or plant. Stalin's Five-Year Plan for industrialization officially began in 1928. Factories, dams, and other enterprises were constructed all across the Soviet Union. By late 1932, Soviet factories were producing basic industrial products such as steel, machine tools, and tractors.
Meanwhile, in late 1929, Stalin instigated the collectivization of agriculture, in which farmers would be forced to abandon their individual farms and move onto state-owned collective farms. By 1939, most of the Soviet agriculture had been collectivized. In all, twenty-six million farmers were placed on 250,000 collective farms, but it had cost more than ten million lives.
Between 1934 and 1939, Stalin and his secret police carried out mass arrests, executions, and deportations. Countless millions of innocent people perished or spent long years in forced labor camps. Victims included top Party and government elites, army officers, artists, writers, scientists, and even children. From the Party's Central Committee elected in 1934, 98 out of 139 members were shot.
During World War II, Stalin emerged, after an unpromising start, as the most successful of the supreme leaders thrown up by the belligerent nations. In August 1939, after first attempting to form an anti-Hitler alliance with the Western powers, he concluded a pact with Hitler, which encouraged the German dictator to attack Poland and begin World War II. Anxious to strengthen his western frontiers while his new but palpably treacherous German ally was still engaged in the West, Stalin annexed eastern Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and parts of Romania; he also attacked Finland and extorted territorial concessions. In May 1941, Stalin recognized the growing danger of the German attack on the Soviet Union by appointing himself chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of the government); it was his first governmental office since 1923.
The initial Soviet losses were devastating, for Stalin had ignored warnings that an attack was coming. For nearly two weeks after the attack, Stalin secluded himself, apparently suffering a nervous breakdown. He reemerged to take personal command of the war effort, and in October 1941, with German troops at the gates of Moscow, he refused to leave the city and helped to organize a great counter-offensive. The Battle of Stalingrad (in the following winter) and the Battle of Kursk (in the summer of 1943) were won by the Soviet Army under Stalin's supreme direction, turning the tide of invasion against the retreating Germans, who capitulated in May 1945.
By the end of the war in 1945, Stalin stood at the height of his power and fully shared in the glory of the victory. During the war, he had insisted on conducting diplomacy himself. At the wartime conferences, he won the respect of the Allied leaders then-President of the United States Franklin D. Roosevelt and then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill.
In February 1945, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt met in Yalta, in Crimea, where they sealed the fate of Poland. Churchill and Roosevelt accepted the provisional Polish government supported by Moscow in return for the promise of free elections for the Polish people. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the three leaders divided Germany into occupation zones. Stalin wanted to cart off as much of Germany's industry as he could, both to help rebuild the Soviet economy and to prevent Germany's recovery. The other Allied powers sought to rehabilitate Germany economically, knowing that not to do so would mean costly Western aid in the future. Stalin was not interested in rehabilitating Germany.
Increasingly suspicious and paranoid in his later years, Stalin ordered the arrest, announced in January 1953, of certain - mostly Jewish - Kremlin doctors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. The dictator was evidently preparing to make this "Doctors' Plot" the pretext for yet another great terror menacing all his senior associates, but he died suddenly on March 5, 1953, according to the official report; so convenient was this death to his entourage that suspicions of foul play were voiced.
(The work sought to analyze anarchism using Marxist methods.)
1907
Religion
Stalin was raised very religious in the Greek Orthodox Church. He was named after Saint Joseph and was raised to be a priest. He even spent several years in an Orthodox seminary.
During his time in power, Stalin had a complex relationship with religion. He officially adopted the Russian Communist Party's stance on religion, claiming atheism and continuing the tradition of teaching atheism in schools and propagating the idea that religion was only damaging to a perfect communist society. Stalin even took it further than his predecessor, Lenin, and initiated a nationwide campaign to destroy churches and religious property and even persecute and kill church officials. It is said, that under Stalin, the Russian Orthodox Church went from 50,000 to 500 open and operating churches.
During World War II, Stalin eased up considerably on religion. He allowed for tens of thousands of Russian Orthodox churches to reopen, adopted an official policy of tolerance toward Muslims, and re-established the hierarchy of leadership in the Russian Orthodox Church. There were even rumors, that Stalin had reconsidered his own personal relationship to religion, when he took a "mysterious retreat" in 1941. But for all accounts and purposes, Stalin was a hardcore atheist until the day he died.
Politics
Stalin's political views began taking shape in his early years, when he was still a student at Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary. While a sophomore, he started to rebel against the institution's stern religious rules, smuggling books into the educational establishment and joining secret study groups, opposed to the Russian czarist government. In the end, he was expelled for spreading subversive views (extremist ideas, often against the government).
It was at the seminary, that Stalin began reading Marxist works, focusing especially on the writings of Russian Marxist Vladimir Lenin. Marxism - the belief that a revolution by the working class would eventually lead to a classless society - would furnish the basis of Stalin's worldview for the rest of his life.
In 1901, Stalin became a member of the militant wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Some time later, in 1905, he got acquainted with Lenin, the leader of the radical Bolshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party, and became a devoted follower. After Lenin passed away, the Party was renamed the All-Union Communist Party, of which Stalin was a staunch member. At that time, the Party was headed by a collective leadership that included Stalin himself, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinovyev and Nikolay Bukharin.
After Lenin's death, Stalin promoted an extravagant, quasi-Byzantine cult of the deceased leader. Archpriest of Leninism, Stalin also promoted his own cult in the following year by having the city of Tsaritsyn renamed Stalingrad (now Volgograd). His main rival, Trotsky (once Lenin's heir apparent), was now in eclipse, having been ousted by the ruling triumvirate of Zinovyev, Lev Kamenev, and Stalin. Soon afterward Stalin joined with the rightist leaders Nikolay Bukharin and Aleksey Rykov in an alliance directed against his former co-triumvirs. Pinning his faith in the ability of the Soviet Union to establish a viable political system without waiting for the support hitherto expected from worldwide revolution, the Secretary General advocated a policy of "Socialism in one country"; this was popular with the hardheaded Party managers whom he was promoting to influential positions in the middle hierarchy. His most-powerful rivals were all dismissed, Bukharin and Rykov soon following Zinovyev and Kamenev into disgrace and political limbo pending execution. Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929 and had him assassinated in Mexico in 1940.
In 1928, Stalin abandoned Lenin's quasi-capitalist New Economic Policy in favor of headlong state-organized industrialization under a succession of five-year plans. This was, in effect, a new Russian revolution more devastating in its effects than those of 1917. The dictator's blows fell most heavily on the peasantry, some 25 million rustic households being compelled to amalgamate in collective or state farms within a few years. Resisting desperately, the reluctant muzhiks were attacked by troops and OGPU (political police) units. Uncooperative peasants, termed kulaks, were arrested en masse and shot, exiled, or absorbed into the rapidly expanding network of Stalinist concentration camps and worked to death under atrocious conditions. Collectivization caused a great famine in Ukraine, and Stalin's policies, some of which targeted Ukraine specifically, compounded the death and misery. Stalin continued to export the grain stocks that a less cruel leader would have rushed to the famine-stricken areas.
In late 1934, Stalin launched a new campaign of political terror against the very Communist Party members who had brought him to power. He used the murder of Sergey Kirov as a pretext to launch the Great Purge, in which about a million people perished. Some later historians came to believe that Stalin arranged the murder, or at least that there was sufficient evidence to reach such a conclusion. Kirov was a staunch Stalin loyalist, but Stalin may have viewed him as a potential rival because of his emerging popularity among the moderates. After Kirov's assassination, the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) charged the former oppositionists, an ever-growing group according to their determination, with Kirov's murder as well as a growing list of other offences, including treason, terrorism, sabotage, and espionage.
During the Great Purge, Stalin not only "liquidated" veteran semi-independent Bolsheviks but also many Party bosses, military leaders, industrial managers, and high government officials totally subservient to himself. Other victims included foreign Communists on Soviet territory and members of the NKVD. All other sections of the Soviet elite - the arts, the academic world, the legal and diplomatic professions - also lost a high proportion of victims, as did the population at large, to a semi-haphazard, galloping persecution that fed on extorted denunciations and confessions. These implicated even more victims until Stalin himself reduced the terror, though he never abandoned it. Stalin's political victims were numbered in tens of millions. His main motive was, presumably, to maximize his personal power.
As a war leader, Stalin maintained close personal control over the Soviet battlefronts, military reserves, and war economy. At first over-inclined to intervene with inept telephoned instructions, as Hitler did, the Soviet generalissimus gradually learned to delegate military decisions.
After World War II, Stalin imposed on eastern Europe a new kind of colonial control, based on native Communist regimes nominally independent but in fact subservient to himself. He thus increased the number of his subjects by about a hundred million. But, in 1948, the defection of Titoist Yugoslavia from the Soviet camp struck a severe blow to world Communism as a Stalin-dominated monolith. To prevent other client states from following Tito's example, Stalin instigated local show trials, manipulated like those of the Great Purge of the 1930s in Russia, in which satellite Communist leaders confessed to Titoism, many being executed.
During his last years, Stalin regarded the United States and Great Britain - and especially the United States - as the arch-enemies, that he needed after Hitler's death. At home, the primacy of Marxist ideology was harshly reasserted. Stalin's chief ideological hatchet man, Andrey Zhdanov, a secretary of the Central Committee, began a reign of terror in the Soviet artistic and intellectual world; foreign achievements were derided, and the primacy of Russians as inventors and pioneers in practically every field was asserted. Hopes for domestic relaxation, widely aroused in the Soviet Union during the war, were thus sadly disappointed. In January 1953, Stalin also ordered the arrest of certain - mostly Jewish - Kremlin doctors on charges of medically murdering various Soviet leaders, including Zhdanov. He was clearly getting ready to make the so-called "Doctors' Plot" the pretext for another great terror. However, he died suddenly on March 5, 1953.
Views
Stalin was known for his unwavering commitment to the survival of the Soviet Union and the international Marxist-Leninist cause. But also like all Soviet leaders, he had his own interpretation of the texts that formed the foundation for their belief system. His own policies are known as Stalinism. In Stalin's case, he broke from traditional Marxism in various ways. Marx believed, that Communism was a natural reaction to the failure of Capitalism. But by most accounts, Russia hadn't ever moved past feudalism (the precursor to Capitalism in Marxian social philosophy) before the revolution. Stalin seemed to think that was an unimportant detail and felt that the move from Capitalism to Communism could be forced.
The dictator publicly condemned anti-Semitism, however, he was repeatedly accused of it. Those, he knew him well enough, stated, that Soso harbored negative sentiments toward Jews, and anti-Semitic trends in his policies were also fueled by Stalin's struggle against Trotsky. However, throughout Stalin's lifetime, he "would be the friend, associate or leader of countless individual Jews." According to Beria, Stalin had affairs with several Jewish women.
Stalin viewed nations as contingent entities which were formed by Capitalism and could merge into others. Ultimately, he believed that all nations would merge into a single, global human community. In his work, he stated that "the right of secession" should be offered to the ethnic minorities of the Russian Empire, but that they should not be encouraged to take that option. He was of the view that if they became fully autonomous, then they would end up being controlled by the most reactionary elements of their community; as an example, he cited the largely illiterate Tatars, whom he claimed would end up dominated by their mullahs.
Quotations:
"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."
"Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything."
"Ideas are far more powerful than guns. We don't let our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?"
"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
"It is not heroes that make history, but history that makes heroes."
"History has shown there are no invincible armies."
"Death is the solution to all problems. No man - no problem."
"I believe in only one thing, the power of human will."
"You know, they are fooling us, there is no God... all this talk about God is sheer nonsense."
Personality
Stalin was often crude and cruel, cunning and distrustful. He was also vengeful to the point of paranoia, experiencing obsessive suspicions and delusions that others were bent on doing him harm. In political life, he tended to be cautious and slow-moving, dealing with powerful people behind closed doors rather than with the public. He was not a popular or charismatic speaker. But Stalin possessed boundless energy and a phenomenal capacity for absorbing detailed knowledge.
Soso had little private or family life, finding his main relaxation in impromptu buffet suppers, to which he would invite high party officials, generals, visiting foreign potentates, and the like. Drinking little himself on these occasions, the dictator would encourage excessive indulgence in others, thus revealing weak points that he could exploit. He would also tease his guests, jocularity and malice being nicely balanced in his manner. Stalin had a keen, ironical sense of humour, usually devoted to deflating his guests rather than to amusing them.
In private, Soso used coarse language, although avoided doing so in public. He rarely spoke before large audiences and preferred to express himself in written form.
The dictator adopted the nickname "Stalin" in 1912; it was based on the Russian word for "steel" and has often been translated as "Man of Steel."
In his youth, Soso rejected middle-class aesthetic values and cultivated a scruffy appearance.
Stalin usually awoke relatively late - at 11 am, with lunch being served between 3 and 5 pm and dinner no earlier than 9 pm. He preferred working late into the evening.
He didn't like traveling and refused to travel by plane. However, he loved spending time at his dachas.
Stalin has been often described as a man of a complex and strategic mind, great self-control, and an excellent memory. He was a hard worker and displayed a keen desire to learn. He was a voracious reader, with a library of over 20,000 books. An autodidact, he claimed to read as many as 500 pages a day.
Physical Characteristics:
Stalin was of short stature (5 feet 4 inches (1.63 m) tall) and had black hair, black eyes, a short skull, and a large nose. His mustached face was pock-marked from smallpox during childhood; this was airbrushed from published photographs. He had a soft voice and a heavy Georgian accent and when speaking Russian did so slowly, carefully choosing his phrasing.
Stalin was born with a webbed left foot, and his left arm had been permanently injured in childhood which left it shorter than his right and lacking in flexibility, which was probably the result of being hit, at the age of 12, by a horse-drawn carriage.
Stalin was a lifelong smoker, who smoked both a pipe and cigarettes.
It was suggested that Soso had tendencies toward a paranoid and sociopathic personality disorder.
Stalin suffered from severe damage to his cerebral arteries due to atherosclerosis. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Quotes from others about the person
John Reed: "Stalin is not an intellectual… He's not even well informed, but he knows what he wants. He's got the willpower, and he's going to be at the top of the pile someday."
Vladimir Lenin: "After taking over the position of General Secretary, Comrade Stalin has accumulated in his hands immeasurable power and I am not certain whether he will always be able to use this power with the required care… Stalin is excessively rude."
George F. Kennan: "Stalin is a great man, but one great in his "incredible criminality... criminality effectively without limits."
Robert C. Tucker: "Stalin is a 20th-century Ivan the Terrible."
E. H. Carr: "Stalin is a ruthless, vigorous figure, but one lacking in originality - a comparative nonentity thrust into greatness by the inexorable march of the great revolution that he found himself leading."
Interests
Arts (particularly classical forms in the visual arts), music, theatre, classical drama, opera, ballet, reading (especially historical studies), watching films (particularly the Western genre), playing billiards, watch collecting, gardening
Philosophers & Thinkers
Karl Marx
Politicians
Vladimir Lenin
Writers
The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola; The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky; The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon; The Knight in the Panther's Skin by Shota Rustaveli; "The Prince" by Niccolò Machiavelli; Anton Chekhov; Mikhail Bulgakov
Artists
Aleksandr Gerasimov
Sport & Clubs
Football
Athletes
Sergo Hambardzumyan
Music & Bands
Classical music
Connections
Stalin seems always to have been a lonely man. His first wife, a Georgian girl, named Kato Svanidze, died of tuberculosis or typhus. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, committed suicide in 1932, presumably in despair over Stalin's dictatorial rule of the party. The only child from his first marriage, Yakov, fell into German hands during World War II and was killed. The two children from his second marriage outlived their father, but they were not always on good terms with him. The son, Vasily, an officer in the Soviet air force, drank himself to death in 1962. The daughter, Svetlana, fled to the United States in the 1960s. She died in 2011. During his marriage to Nadezhda, Stalin had affairs with many other women, most of whom were fellow revolutionaries or their wives.
Artyom Sergeyev was Stalin's adopted son. His biological father was Soso's close friend. Some sources also claimed, that Soso had at least two illegitimate children, although he never recognized them as being his.
Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar
This widely acclaimed biography provides a vivid and riveting account of Stalin and his courtiers - killers, fanatics, women, and children - during the terrifying decades of his supreme power.
2003
Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator
An engrossing biography of the notorious Russian dictator by an author whose knowledge of Soviet-era archives far surpasses all others.
Stalin
Stalin is a powerful history of Russia's evolution from backward nation to world power, as well as a dramatic portrait of a man who was called both "The Implacable" and "Beloved Father."
1979
Stalin: Breaker of Nations
In this book, Robert Conquest gives his readers Stalin as a child and student; as a revolutionary and communist theoretician; as a political animal skilled in amassing power and absolutely ruthless in maintaining it. He presents the landmarks of Stalin's rule: the class with Lenin; collectivization; the Great Terror; the Nazi-Soviet pact and the Nazi-Soviet war; the anti-Semitic campaign that preceded his death; and the legacy he left behind.