Stalin

Stalin

Stalin, whose original name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was born on Dec. 21, 1879, in the Caucasian town of Gori, Georgia. He was the only one of four children to survive infancy. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili, an unsuccessful cobbler, entered a factory in Tiflis, took to drink, and died in 1890 from wounds received in a brawl. However, his mother, Yekaterina, kept the family together by taking in washing and sewing, hiring out for housework, and nursing young Joseph through various sicknesses including smallpox and septicemia, which left his left arm slightly crippled for life. An illiterate peasant girl herself, Yekaterina was deeply religious, puritanical, ambitious, and intent on securing for her son training for the priesthood, one of the few careers in which the non-Russian Georgian poor might easily rise to higher station. He was enrolled in the local Orthodox parochial school in Gori in 1888.

Obviously able, he won a free scholarship in 1894 to the Orthodox theological seminary in Tiflis. There he succumbed to the radicalism traditional among the students of the school and in his fourth year joined Mesame Dasi, a secret group espousing Georgian nationalism and socialism. Expelled from the seminary in May 1899, when he was about to graduate, he first tried tutoring and then clerical work at the Tiflis Observatory. But he abandoned his clerical job in May 1901, when he was about to be arrested. Although he came to reject his church training, it left a mark on his style, which tended toward the liturgical and was characterized by dry, categorical assertion.

Revolutionary Apprenticeship

The young Dzhugashvili joined the Social Democratic party of Georgia in 1901 and plunged full-time into rev...

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... in turmoil, and rebellions broke out in Poland and Hungary, largely because of the uncertainty whether destalinization meant the abrogation of key aspects of the Stalin regime or merely reforms designed to dress the familiar features of Stalinism in more attractive garb. It now seems clear that his heirs meant to leave intact many of the basic elements of the system. Stalin's method of personal rule was replaced by group rule and more orderly processes of government, the terror apparatus was largely dismantled, the economy was notably modernized, and foreign policy was conducted with much greater diplomatic initiative and flexibility. But the Soviet leadership continued to cling tenaciously to the authoritarian system of party supremacy that shapes every aspect of life in the Soviet Union and to Soviet dominance over the Communist countries on its western borders.