Full Name: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili ( Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили )
Revolutionary Name: Joseph Stalin
Nickname: Joseph Stalin ( Иосиф Сталин )

Father: Vissarion Ivanovich Djugashvili (shoemaker)
Mother: Ekaterina Geladze
Wife: Rosa Kaganovich (m. 1934–1938), Nadezhda Alliluyeva-Stalina (m. 1919–1932), Ekaterina Svanidze (m. 1906–1907)
Children: Yakov Dzhugashvili, Vasily Dzhugashvili, Svetlana Alliluyeva

Famous As: Communist Revolutionary & Ruler of former USSR
Occupation: Dictator, Politician
Service: Soviet Armed Forces
Rank: 
  • Marshal of the Soviet Union (1943–1945)
  • Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (1945–1953)
Date of Birth: 18 December 1878
Place of Birth: Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire
Date of Death: 5 March 1953 (aged 74)
Death Place: Kuntsevo Dacha near Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union

Education: Church school (Gori, Georgia, Russian Empire), Tiflis Theological Seminary
Nationality: Soviet
Political Party: Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Height: 1.68 m
Religion: None, formerly Georgian Orthodox

Books: The Road to Power, Correspondence Between Stalin, Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill and Attlee During World War II {Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), Joseph Stalin (1878-1953), Winston Churchill (1874-1965)}, Stalin's Letters to Molotov (1925-1936), The Stalin-Kaganovich correspondence (1931-36), The foundations of Leninism

Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest leaders of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and became a Soviet dictator upon Vladimir Lenin's death was born on 18 December 1878 in Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire. Stalin’s original name was Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

Early Life: Joseph Stalin was his mother's fourth child to be born in less than four years. The first three died and as Joseph was prone to bad health, his mother feared on several occasions that he would also die. Stalin grew up poor and an only child. His father, Vissarion Dzhugashvili was a shoemaker and alcoholic who beat his son, and his mother, Ekaterina was a laundress and illiterate (unable to read or write). Shortly before his graduation, however, he was expelled in 1899 for spreading subversive views (ideas that went against those of the government).

Joseph's mother was deeply religious and in 1888 she managed to obtain him a place at the local church school. In spite of his health problems, he could able to make good progress at school and eventually won a free scholarship to the Tiflis Theological Seminary. While studying at the seminary Joseph joined a secret organization called Message Dassy. Members were supporters of Georgian independence from Russia. Some were also socialist revolutionaries and it was through the people he met in this organization that Stalin first came into contact with the ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895).

During the time of the 1904–1905 revolution, Stalin made a name for himself as the organizer of daring bank robberies and raids on money transports, an activity that Marxist leader Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) considered important due to the party's need for funds. Many other Marxists considered this type of highway robbery unworthy of a revolutionary socialist. Vladimir Lenin was impressed with Stalin's achievements and in 1905 he was invited to meet him in Finland.

Rise to power: In 1922, Stalin was appointed to the newly created office of general secretary of the Communist Party. During Lenin's last illness and after his death in 1924, Stalin served as a member of the three-man committee that ran the affairs of the party and the country. Stalin represented, for the time, the right-wing (conservative) party that wanted to stay true to the ideas of the revolution. He and his spokesman, Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938), warned against revolutionaries and argued in favour of continuing the more cautious and patient policies that Lenin had installed with the New Economic Policy (NEP).

By 1928 (the first year of the Five-Year Plans) Stalin's supremacy was complete. From this year, he could be said to have exercised control over the party and the country (although the formalities were not complete until the Great Purges of 1936-1938). The final stage of Stalin's rise to power was the ordered assassination of Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, where he had lived since 1936 (he was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1929.). Indeed, after Trotsky's death, only two members of the "Old Bolsheviks" (Lenin's Politburo) remained - Stalin himself and his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov.

World War II: The USSR suffered greatly in World War II and Stalin personally directed the war against Nazi Germany. So, in 1939, communist and German dictator Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) signed a foreign policy written agreement. Joseph Stalin then proceeded to annex elements of Poland and the Balkan country, still because of the Baltic states of the Baltic State, Latvia and Lithuania. He additionally launched an associate degree invasion of Suomi. Then, in the Gregorian calendar month of 1941, Deutschland busted the Nazi-Soviet written agreement and invaded the USSR, creating vital early inroads. (Stalin had unheeded warnings from the Americans and also the British, still as his own intelligence agents, a couple of potential invasions, and also the Soviets weren't ready for war.) As German troops approached the Soviet capital of Moscow, Joseph Stalin remained there and directed a scorched earth defensive policy, destroying any provides or infrastructure which may profit the enemy. The tide turned for the Soviets with the Battle of Volgograd, from August 1942 to the Gregorian calendar month of 1943, throughout that the Red Army defeated the Germans and eventually drove them from Russia.

Personal Life: In 1906, Stalin married Ekaterina "Kato" Svanidze (1885-1907), a seamstress. The couple had one son, Yakov (1907-1943), who died as a prisoner in Germany during World War II. Ekaterina perished from typhus when her son was an infant. In 1918 (some sources cite 1919), Stalin married his second wife, Nadezhda "Nadya" Alliluyeva (1901-1932), the daughter of a Russian revolutionary. They had two children, a boy and a girl. Nadezhda committed suicide in her early 30s. Then he married Ekaterina Svanidze in 1906.

Death: Stalin, who grew increasingly paranoid in his later years and one of the greatest leaders of the former Soviet Union and General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union died on March 5, 1953, at age 74, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.