A deeper Look into the Life of Mother Russia's Great Leader: Joseph Stalin

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A Deeper Look into the Life of Mother Russia's Great Leader: Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili By Reyhan Watson

Stalin: The Steel One

Joseph Stalin was born by the name of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori, a small town in the southern reaches of the Russian Empire. He was the third child born to Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a poor shoemaker, and his wife Yek aterina, who worked as a domestic servant. However, young losif was the only one of their offspring to survive infancy. Iosifs father was very 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.

The Early Days Of Stalin

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 Iosif 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."

The Steel One's Fall: Break down

In the early 1930s, a famine developed in the Ukraine; learning of the suffering there,