How was life for Joseph Stalin as a child

Stalin was born Ioseb Jughashvili on 18 December [O.S. 6 December] 1879[1][a] in the town of Gori, in what is today the country of Georgia. He was baptised on 29 December [O.S. 17 December] 1878[2] and christened Ioseb, and known by the diminutive "Soso"[3][b][4] His parents were Ekaterine (Keke) and Besarion Jughashvili (Beso). He was their third child; the first two, Mikheil and Giorgi had died in infancy in 1876 and 1878 respectively [5]

Stalin's father, Besarion, was a shoemaker and owned a workshop that at one point employed as many as ten people,[6] but which slid into ruin as Stalin grew up.[7] Beso had specialised in producing traditional Georgian footwear and did not produce the European-style shoes that were becoming increasingly fashionable.[2] This, combined with the deaths of his previous two infant sons, precipitated his decline into alcoholism. The family found themselves living in poverty.[8] The couple had to leave their home and moved into nine different rented rooms over ten years.[9]

Besarion also became violent towards his family.[10] To escape the abusive relationship, Keke took Stalin and moved into the house of a family friend, Father Christopher Charkviani.[11] She worked as a house cleaner and launderer for several local families who were sympathetic to her plight.[12] Keke was a strict but affectionate mother to Stalin.[13] She was a devout Christian,[14] and both she and her son regularly attended church services.[15] In 1884, Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him with facial pock scars for the rest of his life.[16] Charkviani's teenaged sons taught Stalin the Russian language.[12] Keke was determined to send her son to school, something that none of the family had previously achieved.[17] In late 1888, when Stalin was ten, he enrolled at the Gori Church School.[18] This was normally reserved for the children of clergy, but Charkviani ensured that Stalin received a place by claiming that the boy was the son of a deacon.[19] This may be the reason why—in 1934—Stalin claimed to have been the son of a priest.[20] There were many local rumours that Beso was not Stalin's real father,[21] which in later life Stalin himself encouraged.[20] Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore nonetheless thought it likely that Beso was the father, in part due to the strong physical resemblance that they shared.[20] Beso eventually attacked a policeman while drunk which resulted in the authorities ejecting him from Gori.[22] He moved to Tiflis, where he worked at the Adelkhanov shoe factory.[23]

Although Keke was poor, she ensured that her son was well dressed when he went to school, likely through the financial support of family friends.[24] As a child, Stalin exhibited a number of idiosyncrasies; when happy, he would for instance jump around on one leg while clicking his fingers and yelling aloud.[25] He excelled academically,[26] and also displayed talent in painting and drama classes.[27] He began writing poetry,[28] and was a fan of the work of Georgian nationalist writer Raphael Eristavi.[29] He was also a choirboy, singing both in church and at local weddings.[30] A childhood friend of Stalin's later recalled that he "was the best but also the naughtiest pupil" in the class.[31] He and his friends formed a gang,[32] and often fought with other local children.[33] He caused mischief; in one incident, he ignited explosive cartridges in a shop,[34] and in another he tied a pan to the tail of a woman's pet cat.[32

When Stalin was twelve, he was seriously injured after having been hit by a phaeton. He was hospitalised in Tiflis for several months, and sustained a lifelong disability to his left arm.[35] His father subsequently kidnapped him and enrolled him as an apprentice cobbler in the factory; this would be Stalin's only experience as a worker.[36] According to Stalin's biographer Robert Service, this was Stalin's "first experience with capitalism", and it was "raw, harsh and dispiriting".[37] Several priests from Gori retrieved the boy, after which Beso cut all contact with his wife and son.[38] In February 1892, Stalin's school teachers took him and the other pupils to witness the public hanging of several peasant bandits; Stalin and his friends sympathised with the condemned.[39] The event left a deep and lasting impression on him.[40] Stalin had decided that he wanted to become a local administrator so that he could deal with the problems of poverty that affected the population around Gori.[29] Despite his Christian upbringing, he had become an atheist after contemplating the problem of evil and learning about evolution through Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.[29]

The man who the world would come to know as Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori, a small town in the southern reaches of the vast Russian Empire. He was the third child born to Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a poor shoemaker, and his wife Yekaterina, who augmented her husband's income by working as a domestic servant. However, the young Iosif was the only one of their offspring to survive infancy. Vissarion was an abusive, hard-drinking man, who eventually failed as an independent artisan and left his family to work in a factory in Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, when his son was five years old. For the rest of Stalin's childhood, Joseph and Yekaterina lived in the home of a priest, Father Charkviani, where the pious, hard-working woman attempted to ensure that her only son would be well-educated enough to escape the drudgery of a lower- class existence.

Georgia was a mountainous region, which at the time of Stalin's birth had been under the rule of the Tsar for only about fifty years. Like other great despots (the Austrian-born German ruler Hitler, the Corsican-born French leader Napoleon), Stalin was an outsider, a provincial in the empire he came to rule. Georgians possessed their own culture and language, which was radically different from the official Russian of the empire, and the young Stalin only began learning Russian when he was nine years old. Years later, at the height of his power, he still spoke with a pronounced Georgian accent, and while he boasted that he had forgotten the language of his birth, it is reported that in his last years his ability to speak Russian deteriorated, and he spoke only in Georgian. In other ways, too, he retained pieces of his native culture--during his early days as a revolutionary, he took the name "Koba," after a legendary Georgian bandit. But he never showed any partiality to Georgia politically: he generally treated it, in his own words, as merely a "little piece of Soviet territory called Georgia."

Culturally separate as it was, one institution that Stalin's birthplace shared with the larger Russian Empire was the Orthodox Church; indeed, Georgia actually converted to Christianity more than 500 years before Russia. The Church played a strong role in his early life: he lived with a priest, and his schooling was religious. His mother enrolled him in the Gori Church School in September 1888, when her son was nine, and he graduated six years later, despite various interruptions. (One of these interruptions lasted a whole year: Stalin's father took the young boy to Tiflis to work alongside him in a shoe factory. Vissarion seems to have intended this as a permanent career for his son, but his mother intervened, and succeeded in bringing her son home to Gori. Thereafter his father was never a strong presence in Stalin's life--he would die before World War I, although the exact date is uncertain.)

Stalin was a somewhat misshapen and diminutive boy: smallpox left his face scarred and pitted for the rest of his life, and a case of blood poisoning caused his left arm to grow shorter than his right; in a school photograph he appears considerably smaller than the boys around him. (Indeed, he would never cut a very imposing figure--he grew to just five feet four inches, and for the rest of his life his shortness rankled him, causing him to resort to platform shoes and other devices in an effort to appear taller than he actually was.) However, Stalin received excellent grades, and distinguished himself in the school choir. He seems to have loved reading, devouring the classics of Georgian literature as well as adventure novels, and he had a passion for the outdoors, spending days climbing in the wild, mountainous countryside around Gori. Thus he was ardent and energetic, and developed physical strength despite his short arm and small stature. He was swarthy, too, and contemporaries described his eyes as being yellowish--many compared them to the eyes of a tiger.

Stalin graduated from the church school in July 1894, near the top of his class. He had a reputation for being callous toward his fellow students, and had been in trouble with the school authorities a few times, but there were no other signs of the direction his career was to take. Indeed, he seems to have been a pious young man--unsurprising, given his upbringing. At his mother's urging, he applied for and won a small scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary, where he enrolled in September 1894. Yekaterina worked hard to help him afford the tuition, and she nourished a strong hope that her son would become a priest. Indeed, even years later, when Stalin ruled all of Russia, she told an interviewer that she would have preferred for him to have entered the priesthood. Russia, in retrospect, might have preferred it as well.

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