Joseph Stalin: Difference between revisions

==Biography==

[[File:Young stalin screenshot.jpg|left|thumb|264x264px|Young Stalin's Mugshot]]

Stalin was born as Ioseb Jughashvili to a Georgian family in Gori, Tiflis Governorate, Caucasus Viceroyalty, Russian Empire (now in modern Georgia) on December 18th, 1878. He was born into a poor family, two of his siblings died in infancy prior to his birth. His father [[Besarion Jughashvili|Besarion]] was an alcoholic and beat his wife named Keke and Joseph. He later changed his surname to "Stalin", meaning "Man of Steel" in Russian. He became interested in Marxism at a young age after reading some of [[Vladimir Lenin]]'s works. It was that this time that he joined the Bolshevik party. The party needed money and the young Stalin started doing bank heists to earn money for the party. Between 1902 and 1913, he got arrested eight times. In June 1907, Stalin along with other Bolsheviks were involved in a major bank robbery in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) in which they hijacked a stagecoach along with the police and guards. They got away with 241,000 rubles.

When Joseph Stalin was in his early-30's, he had a sexual-relationship with a 13-year old girl named Lidia long before he actually became the leader of the SSSR. Apparently one night the police walked in on the two having sexual intercourse. Shortly thereafter, Lidia claimed she was pregnant and that Stalin had in fact forced himself on her. 

While formally the office of the General Secretary was elective and wasn't initially regarded as the top position in the Soviet state, after Lenin's death in 1924, support became consolidated around Stalin. Instead of the ideology of world revolution professed by [[Leon Trotsky]], the Red Army organizer, proponent of world revolution, Stalin's ideology of socialism in one country became the primary line of the Soviet politics. There exists Stalinism, an ideology that centers around Stalin's ideas and policies in the Soviet Union.