8 Interesting Facts About Joseph Stalin
Tags: True Crime, History, World War II, Soviet Union, Facts

1. A Rough Childhood

Stalin was born in December 1878 to a washerwoman mother and an alcoholic cobbler father. When Stalin turned seven, he caught smallpox and was left with scars all over his face. He was bullied by other children and his father abused him physically. Stalin had a pretty rough childhood. At the age of 12, he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage. This accident deformed his left arm which became significantly shorter than his right. It was due to this deformity that Stalin was never sent to the front lines while serving in the army.

2. His Mother Wanted Him to Become a Priest

Stalin’s mother sent him to a seminary in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi to become a priest in December 1895. But Stalin, instead of reading scripture became interested in the readings of Karl Marx and also joined a local communist party. In 1899, he was expelled from the seminary when people found out that had turned into an atheist.

3. A Man Of Multiple Names

Stalin had many nicknames. Some of them were pretty weird. Perhaps the strangest was the “Comrade Index Card”. This name was given to him by Leon Trotsky who was his rival in the Communist Party. The story behind the name was that when Stalin became the General Secretary of the party, he allegedly didn’t do anything more than sorting and organizing files. Leon mocked him and gave him the name “Comrade Index Card”.

4. The Great Purge

Throughout the 1930s, Stalin being the General Secretary of the Communist Party conducted many purges across the country. His administration detained, expelled, or executed thousands of political rivals and ethnic minorities. The period between 1936 and 1938 was called the Great Purge and Stalin had nearly 750,000 people executed and sent millions to forced labor camps. Human rights activists uncovered a mass grave of over 30,000 people in 2002 in a forest near Toksovo, a small town close to St. Petersburg.

5. The Katyn Massacre of 1940

Stalin was without a doubt one of the most ruthless political leaders in history. Between April and May 1940, Stalin ordered the execution of almost 22,000 polish prisoners called the Katyn Massacre. It was one of the worst acts of mass murder in history. Initially, the Soviets blamed the Nazis for the killings, however, in 1990 they accepted the responsibility.

6. The Army of Half-Human Soldiers

Stalin strongly believed that human soldiers were not strong, they were weak, they felt pain and required feeding. He wanted to have strong and ferocious soldiers who are cheap to look after. He also didn’t want his soldiers to have any feelings of morality and conscience. That’s when he proposed the idea of having half-human soldiers. The program is well-documented. Soviet scientists were given the task of creating mutant soldiers but failed after some of the experiments won’t horribly wrong.

7. Death of His Eldest Son

Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin’s son from his first marriage was a part of the Red Army during World War Two. Yakov either surrendered or was captured in the early months of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis offered to release him in exchange for another prisoner but surprisingly, Stalin refused. No one knows why. Valkov was killed in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943.

8. Nobel Peace Prize Nominations

You won’t believe it. The man responsible for killing millions of people was nominated for the Nobel prize TWO times. It’s true that the nominations were before his brutal policies and murders but still. Maybe it was because of the role he played in ending the second world war. He received nominations in 1945 and 1948.