50 Fun Facts About Joseph Stalin

In which country of the Russian Empire was Stalin born?

He grew up speaking Georgian and did not start learning Russian until he was eight or nine; he kept the accent all his life.

What was Stalin's birth surname?

Jughashvili, Russified as Dzhugashvili, was his name at birth in Gori in December 1878, though he later gave his birth date as 21 December 1879.

What was the trade of Stalin's father, Besarion?

Shoemaker Besarion's workshop in Gori slid into ruin, and he became a violent drunk who beat both his wife and his son.

The 1932–33 famine known as the Holodomor struck which Soviet republic?

Ukraine lost millions to starvation in 1932–33 under Stalin's forced collectivisation of agriculture.

What was Stalin training to become when he enrolled in Tiflis in 1894?

A Russian Orthodox priest was the aim, but he left the Tiflis seminary in 1899 without a degree and later claimed he had been expelled for Marxist propaganda.

Stalin's alias 'Koba' came from what kind of fictional hero?

A rebel outlaw, the hero of Alexander Kazbegi's novel The Patricide, gave young Stalin the name he went on using in the revolutionary underground.

Why did Stalin abandon his job at the Tiflis observatory in March 1901?

Police raided the building while he was away, so he escaped arrest and went underground as a revolutionary.

In which Black Sea port did Stalin organise strikes at the Rothschild refinery before his 1902 arrest?

Batumi was where his refinery strikes led to his arrest in April 1902 and, after more than a year in jail, exile to Siberia.

What did Stalin later say disappointed him on first meeting Lenin, at a 1905 Bolshevik conference?

How ordinary Lenin looked: Stalin had pictured a giant, and Lenin even came early to chat with delegates, a modesty Stalin later called one of his strongest points.

How did Bolshevik raiders seize money in the 1907 Tiflis robbery linked to Stalin?

Bombed a cash convoy, and the raid so outraged Menshevik leader Georgi Plekhanov that he called for breaking off all relations with the Bolsheviks.

How did Stalin react after his son Yakov survived trying to shoot himself in the late 1920s?

Mocked his failure, scoffing that Yakov couldn't even shoot straight, and when the Germans later captured Yakov, Stalin had his wife jailed.

Which Bolshevik newspaper did Stalin launch as a daily in April 1912?

Pravda ('Truth') first appeared in St Petersburg on 22 April 1912 Old Style; Stalin helped launch it and served as an editor, though his role was not made public.

The name Stalin is derived from the Russian word for what?

Stalin comes from stal', the Russian word for steel, giving 'man of steel'; he first used the name in 1912 and signed an article as K. Stalin in 1913.

Why was Stalin ruled unfit for army service at his February 1917 medical examination?

Called up from Siberian exile, he was examined at Krasnoyarsk in February 1917 and rejected because of his crippled arm, the legacy of a childhood injury.

After the July Days of 1917, what did Stalin do for Lenin?

Moved him between safe houses, then out to Razliv; while Lenin hid, Stalin edited the party paper and led the Bolsheviks' Sixth Congress.

What government post did Stalin hold in Lenin's first cabinet from 1917?

As People's Commissar for Nationalities from November 1917 he ran the Narkomnats, the body charged with the non-Russian peoples of the former empire, a post he held until 1923.

To which Volga city, later renamed after him, was Stalin sent in May 1918 to organise food procurement?

Tsaritsyn, where he had suspected counter-revolutionaries shot, often without trial, was renamed Stalingrad in 1925 and Volgograd in 1961.

In 1920, Stalin was blamed for failing to reinforce the Red Army's attack on which capital?

Warsaw held in August 1920, and Tukhachevsky blamed Stalin, whose front had pressed on towards Lvov, while Trotsky accused him of 'strategic mistakes'.

Accused of collaborating with Germany, which North Caucasus people did Stalin deport in February 1944?

Chechens, with the Ingush, were shipped to Central Asia, and their autonomous republic was abolished.

What did Lenin's Testament, circulated by Krupskaya, suggest about Stalin?

Lenin's postscript of January 1923 called Stalin too rude and suggested he should be removed as General Secretary in favour of someone more tolerant; read to delegates in May 1924, it led Stalin to offer a resignation that was refused.

With which two Bolsheviks did Stalin form an unofficial troika against Trotsky during Lenin's illness?

Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev formed the troika during Lenin's final illness to sideline Trotsky; Stalin broke with them in 1925, and both were shot in August 1936 after the first Moscow show trial.

Which doctrine did Stalin defend in his 1926 work On Questions of Leninism?

'Socialism in one country', the claim that the USSR could build socialism without revolutions abroad, was defended in Stalin's 1926 On Questions of Leninism and became party dogma against Trotsky's internationalism.

Which coal-mining city was called Stalino until 1961?

Donetsk, first named Yuzovka after Welsh industrialist John Hughes, dropped Stalin's name in 1961, when de-Stalinisation stripped his name from towns and streets.

What was Stalin's first five-year plan, launched in 1928, chiefly meant to build up?

Heavy industry was the priority, because Stalin warned that the lagging Soviet Union must catch up with the advanced countries or be crushed.

Stalin's March 1930 newspaper article blaming local officials for collectivisation excesses bore what title?

'Dizzy with Success', published on 2 March 1930, blamed over-zealous local officials for forcing peasants into collectives; millions promptly left the farms before the pressure resumed.

How did Stalin's second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, die in November 1932?

After a row with Stalin at a Kremlin dinner on the evening of 8 November, she shot herself with a pistol in her room that night; officially the cause was given as appendicitis.

Whose murder in December 1934 triggered the repression that became the Great Purge?

Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party boss, was shot at the Smolny Institute, and in the crackdown that followed, many suspects were shot without trial.

Which agrobiologist did Stalin champion despite most scientists dismissing his work as pseudo-science?

Trofim Lysenko's rejection of Mendelian genetics won Stalin's backing; in 1948 genetics was formally outlawed, and rival geneticists such as Vavilov had already been arrested.

Which Moscow church was demolished in 1931 to make way for a never-built Palace of the Soviets?

The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was dynamited on 5 December 1931; the Palace of the Soviets planned for the site was never finished, and the cathedral was rebuilt in the 1990s.

Who headed the NKVD from 1936 during the worst of the Great Purge, before being executed himself in 1940?

Nikolai Yezhov ran the NKVD from September 1936 to November 1938, the period Russians call the Yezhovshchina; he was arrested in 1939 and shot in February 1940.

What did most defendants at Stalin's Moscow show trials do?

Confessed to invented plots under relentless pressure, and many defendants were then sentenced to death and shot.

Which German foreign minister co-signed the August 1939 non-aggression pact with Molotov?

Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and signed the pact with Molotov on 23 August 1939, with Stalin looking on; a secret protocol divided Poland and the Baltic states between the two powers.

Which country's Winter War stand in 1939–40 got the USSR expelled from the League of Nations?

Finland's resistance in the Winter War, from November 1939 to March 1940, cost the Red Army dearly; the League of Nations expelled the USSR in December 1939 for the invasion.

The NKVD's 1940 Katyn massacre of about 22,000 Poles mainly targeted which group?

Army and police officers, with border guards and members of the intelligentsia, were shot on Stalin's orders, and Moscow blamed the Germans until it admitted the truth in 1990.

What became of Stalin's son Yakov, captured by the Germans in 1941?

Died in a camp, at Sachsenhausen in April 1943, after Stalin reportedly refused a German offer to swap him for a general captured at Stalingrad.

What did Stalin's Order No. 227 of 1942 do with troops who retreated without orders?

Sent them to penal units on the most dangerous sectors, under the slogan 'Not one step back!', while squads behind the lines shot 'panic-mongers and cowards'.

What rank did Stalin award himself in March 1943 to mark the victory at Stalingrad?

Stalin was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union on 6 March 1943, a month after the German surrender at Stalingrad, and began wearing the uniform in public.

Where did the Big Three first meet in November 1943, at a location of Stalin's choosing?

Tehran, Stalin's pick, was where Churchill and Roosevelt finally committed to invading northern France by May 1944, the second front he had demanded since 1941.

At Yalta, what did Stalin agree to do within three months of Germany's surrender?

Declare war on Japan was the promise, and in return the Soviet Union was to gain southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands.

Which Soviet commander took Germany's surrender at Karlshorst on Stalin's behalf on 8 May 1945?

Georgy Zhukov presided over the signing, but his wartime fame made Stalin see him as a threat, and in 1946 he was sent off to command the Odessa military district.

How did Stalin's first atomic bomb come to copy Fat Man?

Espionage at Los Alamos, including by physicist Klaus Fuchs, handed Moscow Fat Man secrets, a leak later exposed through decrypted Venona cables.

Which communist leader did Stalin denounce in 1948 and plot to assassinate?

Josip Broz Tito's backing for Greek communist guerrillas and plans to absorb Albania clashed with Stalin, and after the 1948 split Yugoslavia turned to the United States for aid.

What were Kremlin doctors, most of them Jewish, accused of in January 1953?

Murdering Soviet leaders was the charge, but soon after Stalin's death the case was exposed as a fabrication and the doctors were cleared.

Where was Stalin found collapsed in March 1953, days before he died?

On the floor of his dacha near Moscow he was found on 1 March, yet doctors arrived only the next morning; he died of a brain haemorrhage on 5 March.

Who delivered the 1956 'Secret Speech' denouncing Stalin's cult of personality?

Nikita Khrushchev delivered 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences' to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress on 25 February 1956, stunning the delegates.

What happened to Stalin's body in October 1961?

Moved to the Kremlin Wall: the 22nd Party Congress voted to take him out of Lenin's Mausoleum, and on the night of 31 October 1961 he was reburied behind it.

By what acronym is Stalin's system of forced-labour camps known?

Gulag, short for Main Camp Administration, became known worldwide through Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973.

What was the name of Stalin's daughter, who defected in 1967?

Svetlana walked into the US embassy in New Delhi in March 1967 and asked for political asylum.

What rank did Stalin accept in June 1945, after the victory over Germany?

Generalissimo was created as a rank on 26 June 1945, yet Stalin never approved a uniform for it and never once wore one.

Stalin's 1928 Shakhty show trial put which group in the dock?

Engineers and managers were accused of plotting sabotage with the coal mines' former owners abroad, and eleven of them were sentenced to death.