15 Things To Know About Joseph Stalin

15 Things To Know About Joseph Stalin

You can’t read about the Russian Civil War without mentioning Stalin, he’s the man who took over from Lenin and helped guide the Soviet Union through its early stages of industrialisation and supervised the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Stalin was close to Hitler and Mussolini so that tells you something about him, he was not the most inviting person which is what led him to start the Great Purge of 1937 where he forced the transfer of millions of people, including entire ethnic groups, and for playing a role in horrific famines. Apart from being known as the man of steel, there was a lot more to him that you should know.

Here are 15 things you should know about Joseph Stalin

1. Stalin grew up speaking exclusively Georgian

Gaeneric, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Stalin was raised in a poor family in Georgia in 1878 and was brought up speaking Georgian, Russian was foreign to him until 1886 when he enrolled at the Gori Church School 1886 and it took him two years to learn with the help of the priest’s kids.

He did so well with the Russians that by the 1930s he was unable to converse with his own mother in Georgian by the 1930s, this is when he fully embraced his Russian identity at the end of World War II and even requested a Russian actor to play him in propaganda movies.

2. He was a bright student

Learning was not a problem for Stalin, he was so smart that he managed to get a scholarship at the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary in 1984. He did well in all subjects, from Maths to Church Slavonic singing, he didn’t struggle with anything. At the same time, he wrote poetry at this time where he created a total of 6 poems under the name Soselo, his poems were eventually printed in children’s books as well as newspapers. It was obvious that he understood the influence of the arts as he used them for his political ends.

3. Stalin went on to become a real crime boss

See page for author, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Tiflis also known as Tbilisi was a city that was drowned in political unrest. At the time Stalin was mostly inspired by Koba, the protagonist A. Kazbegi “The Patricide” who was a Georgian freedom fighter that had joined a number of revolutionary organisations. He adopted that identity as his own and adopted Lenin’s ideals of land grabs, he soon went on to become a real criminal boss who incited worker strikes and full-blown raids.

4. He had been exiled 6 times 

There is debate about the exact number of times Stalin was exiled because he led a very secretive life, however, it is believed that he was exiled six times in the years that led up to the February Revolution of 1917. At the time, the government wasn’t nearly as harsh as it was under Stalin so he was always able to flee.

He always came up with interesting ways to escape, in 1909 he ran from Solvychegodsk while dressed as a woman. Lenin also had to go through the same experience when he was forced to shave his hair and put on a wig which allowed him to leave for Finland to escape punishment. 

5. He had relationships with many other women 

Stalin was a lady’s man, he had two marriages, the first of which ended in typhus and the second in suicide, both marriages didn’t last for long. He had relationships with many women which led to a father-Abraham situation, he had many children all over.

6. Stalin was particularly useful for Lenin’s political goals

Because they belonged to the same ethnic background, Stalin was Lenin’s key ally, and their relationship worked out fairly well. His literary skills helped Lenin when he appointed him to the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912. He soon had the opportunity to co-found the Pravda newspaper along with changing his name to Stalin. His chosen nickname has a lot of similarities to the well-known alias Lenin. Stalin’s influence inside the party grew as a result of the success of his book “Marxism and the National Issue.”

7. Stalin had some extremely unusual sleeping habits

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Stalin had incredibly odd sleeping patterns.  According to reports, he was a night owl who slept till four in the morning, woke up only around noon, and was most productive in the evening. In light of this, it is less unexpected that Stalin and Churchill once partied till three in the morning during the 1942 Moscow Conference. On a side note, one of Stalin’s strategies was to get his visitors so drunk that they would spill any potential secrets they might be keeping.

8. Stalin was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948

This may be the most surprising fact on this list. Despite the fact that the Soviet Union had well over 20 million people who died under his leadership, he still got the Nobel Peace Prizes in 1945 and 1948 for his involvement in the war effort. The mainstream media in the West really downplayed his tyrannical leadership and instead selected him as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for the same reasons. 

9. Russians consider him a positive figure in Russia

Mikhail Mikhaylovich Kalashnikov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

You’d be surprised to know that in 2019 Vladimir Putin was actually less popular than Stalin. More Russians approved of Stalin probably because of the many years of Putin’s administration which many were not too happy about and others, especially in Georgia, Stalin is seen as a hero and liberator even though others remembered him as a murderer. The year after his statue in Gori was secretly removed in 2010, a successor was erected before being swiftly removed once more.

10. Stalin tried to resign four times 

In his testament, written after Lenin’s death in 1924, he urged the party to oppose Trotsky and be careful of Stalin’s growing authority. Yet because he was ready for it, he accepted its contents and asked to resign immediately, saving his job.

Then, in 1926 and 1927, he sent resignation proposals to the chairman of Sovnarkom in letters, probably in an effort to expose prospective enemies. Both requests were turned down. As if to test the cult of personality he had created, he attempted to resign once more in 1952, months before his passing.

11. Stalin nurtured a famine throughout Ukraine between 1932 and 1933

Stalin created a famine that killed over 7 million people throughout Ukraine. Ukraine was determined to become independent from the Soviet authority this move was obviously not what Stalin wanted. As a way of punishing Ukrainians, Stalin imposed limits on the number of agricultural products that Ukrainian farms could export to the USSR.

At some point, there was no longer enough food to feed the Ukrainian people and Stalin sealed Ukraine’s borders to stop the importation of food when Ukrainian communists appealed to the Soviet government, purging the Ukrainian Communist Party by using military force. All food supplies in private Ukrainian homes were also taken by Stalin’s command.

12. Stalin’s rule was ruthless on prisoners and concentration camps

Image by Military Museum on the Finna service hosted by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Vladimir Lenin founded the first Soviet concentration camps for forced labour in 1919. Yet, it wasn’t until Stalin’s control in the early 1930s that these concentration camps—also known as the Gulags—became well known. At the Gulags, inmates were required to perform strenuous physical labour for at least 14 hours each day. These jobs included using crude tools to dig through frozen Soviet lands and down trees, or manually mining coal and copper.

The amount of food that prisoners received depended on how much work they accomplished each day, but even a full ration was worthless. Robbers, rapists, killers, thieves, and political rivals made up this labour force. Yet, the majority of the detainees were those who had been detained by the Soviets for minor larceny, tardiness, or unjustified absences from work.

13. He promoted the elimination of religion

Early in Stalin’s rule, the communist government worked to get rid of religion by seizing church property, belittling religious views and followers, and encouraging atheist indoctrination in educational institutions.

The majority of the clergy and followers of the Russian Orthodox Church were either expelled by the Soviets or sent to the Gulags. Up until 1941, the communist government actively encouraged the methodical suppression of Islam and outlawed the practice of Judaism.

14. One of Stalin’s most heavily used tactics of oppression was censorship

Censorship was one of Stalin’s most common oppressive methods. Stalin developed a personality cult among artists whom the government coerced into producing works that glorified the dictator. Those who consumed art, literature, and music that the Soviet government sent to the Gulags. As a result, some artists attempted or committed suicide.

15. The Communist Party strictly controlled Education in the Soviet Union 

Unknown authorUnknown author; image flipped by Gaeser, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the Soviet Union, education was strictly under the Communist Party’s supervision and was indoctrination-based. The subjects schools would teach and test on what was set by the government. Stalin-approved textbooks like A Brief History of the USSR were used by teachers to teach history classes.

In the end, Stalin is remembered as a treacherous totalitarian leader who was violent and just as bad as Hitler. There’s no denying that he was an influential figure of the 20th century and without him the world and Russia would have taken a different path.