Evening star., 1943-12-19
STAL|N, MAN OF STEEL, HITS OPPOSITION

ing to Gunther, that she neglected an
ailment that turned out to be appendi-
citis. BY the time she admitted she was
suffering it was too late and she died
of peritonitis. Contrary to the custom
in the families of high Soviet officials.
she was not cremated, but was buried
in the church yard of the Covent of
New Virgins.
Stain has never remarked.
He relaxes occasionally in his datcha,
or country house, near Moscow, and goes
for the baths to Sochi, winter resort on
the Black Sea, where he has house on
a mountainside. AS the world knows, he
is an inveterate pipe smoker. Like
Winston Churchill, he is fond of brandy,
and he holds his own with the best,
whatever the drink, through the in
Vulnerable toasts at a Russian formal
dinner. At Teheran state dinner he
rose whenever one of the company was
toasted, went up to him and clinked
glasses.
Gunther recalls that when he "re-
ceived' William c. Bullitt, the first
American Ambassador to the Soviet
Union after its recognition by the United
States in 1888, he simply dropped in on
party arranged by another Soviet official,
toasted everybody at the table, talked
with great intelligence about the United
States land relaxed, smoking his pipe,
while the commissars sat at a piano
singing songs almost like brothers in a
fraternity"
There is space here for only the
sketchiest account of Stalin's career. He
was born in the little town of Gori, in
Georgia. on December %, 1879; thus he
will be "a years old next Wednesday.
His father was shoemaker, and worked
in the nearby town Of Tiflis, capital of
the republic. The trade was hereditary
in the family, and Stain probably would
have carried on the tradition if his
mother Ekaterina (the Russian Cath
erine) had not determined to raise him
in the social scale.
Stains father earned a bare living
and the mother took in washing and
sewing to help out. The father died
when the boy was II. Hoping to make
Sosso a priest, the mother scraped up
enough money to put him in the Ortiz
odox Theological Seminary at Tiflis. He
entered at Is and left four years later.
Incessant Revolutionary.
His life became one of incessant rev.
olutionary activity. In 1907, as men,
ber of the Tiflis Party Committee, he
helped to arrange the appropriation
for the party funds, of $4,000 which
was being carried to the State Bank
under Cossack escort. Bombs were
hurled at the troops and three persons
were killed and more than so. soldiers
and passersby, wounded The Tif1is af-
fair evoked sharp criticism in revolu-
tionary circles and Stain, though he
had not directly taken part in the at
tack was banished from the party for
a short period.
His work in these formative, years
made up complete apprenticeship in
revolution. He wrote and circulated sub
versive literature, melted strikes and
demonstrations. For time he edited
a Bolshevik paper, Vremia, in the
Georgian language. He went abroad
three times to attend party congresses
at Stockholm, Cracow and Prague. In
collaboration with Lenin he write a
book on the nationality question. At
this time, 1912, he was leader of the
Bolshevik section of the Social Demo-
cratic party in the Duma ard an editor
of Pravda, the party newspaper at st.
Petersburg.
In this period he was arrested five
times by the Cars police and sent into
exile. He escaped four times; once he
served out his term. Shortly before the
outbreak Of the first. World War he
was banished for the sixth time, on this