60 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?

Russified as Dzhugashvili; he was his parents' third child and the only one to survive infancy.

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

When the workshop declined he became a violent alcoholic, and mother and son left home by 1883.

What childhood accident left Stalin with a lifelong disability in his left arm?

He was 12; a smallpox infection at six had already scarred his face, later airbrushed from photographs.

What was Stalin training to become when he enrolled at the Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894?

He read Marx there and left in April 1899 to attend secret workers' meetings instead.

Stalin's early nickname 'Koba' came from the bandit hero of which Georgian novel?

Alexander Kazbegi's book joined Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? as a formative influence.

What was Stalin's job at the Tiflis observatory in October 1899?

He used the post to gather socialist supporters and organise a May Day strike.

In which Georgian port did Stalin organise strikes at the Rothschild refinery before his first arrest in 1902?

Some local Marxists suspected the militant newcomer of being an agent provocateur.

How did Stalin first meet Lenin?

He disagreed with Lenin there about contesting Duma elections, which he considered a waste of time.

About how many people died in the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery Stalin organised for the Bolsheviks?

His men used guns and homemade bombs in Erivansky Square; the Mensheviks voted to expel him and he ignored them.

How did Stalin's first wife, Kato Svanidze, die in November 1907?

He allegedly said that with her death 'died my last warm feelings for humanity'.

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

His role as editor was kept secret; the name means 'Truth'.

Under what false name did Stalin travel to Vienna in January 1913?

There he researched 'Marxism and the National Question', his first major theoretical work.

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

He first used it in 1912; 'K. Stalin' signed the 1913 article on the national question.

Why was Stalin ruled unfit for army service when conscripted in February 1917?

He was serving four years of exile in Turukhansk when Russia entered the war.

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

He then edited the party paper and served as acting party leader, overseeing the Sixth Congress.

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

He granted one Baltic nation's request for independence in December 1917.

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

He befriended Voroshilov and Budyonny there and ordered executions on a scale that alarmed Lenin.

Which city was Stalin determined to capture in 1920, disobeying orders to help at Warsaw?

Tukhachevsky blamed him for the defeat at Warsaw and Trotsky accused him of 'strategic mistakes'.

In what year did Lenin nominate Stalin as the party's General Secretary?

It was meant to be a purely organisational post; James Harris calls it 'a dirty job' of managing 350,000 semi-literate officials.

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

When it was read to delegation leaders in 1924, Stalin offered to resign, and the humility saved him.

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

He turned on both of them in 1924 and had them executed after the first Moscow Trial in 1936.

What doctrine from Stalin's 1926 On Questions of Leninism clashed with the Bolshevik belief in world revolution?

It became a central tenet of party dogma under his rule.

In what year was Trotsky deported from the Soviet Union?

He had been exiled to Kazakhstan in 1928 and was murdered in Mexico by the NKVD in 1940.

Which city was renamed Stalingrad in April 1925?

Yuzovka in Ukraine had become Stalino the year before; Stalingrad became Volgograd in 1961.

When was the first five-year plan, launched in 1928, declared complete?

It built Magnitogorsk and began the White Sea-Baltic Canal, much of it with forced labour.

By 1936, roughly what share of Soviet farming households had been collectivised?

Officially voluntary, the collectives filled up out of fear of sharing the kulaks' fate.

How many deaths did the Soviet famine of 1932–33 cause, at its peak?

In Ukraine it is known as the Holodomor; historians still debate whether it was intentional.

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

Appendicitis was the official story, even to their children; friends said Stalin became emotionally harder afterwards.

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

Stalin issued a decree setting up NKVD troikas that could sentence people without the courts.

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

Genetics in the Soviet Union was set back for decades.

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

It was rebuilt in the 1990s; the 1937 census still found 57% of respondents willing to call themselves religious.

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

Stalin later blamed the purge's 'excesses' on him; his replacement Beria was a fellow Georgian.

According to the article, how many people were shot during the Great Purge?

More than 1.6 million were arrested, and an unknown number died under torture.

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

A secret protocol divided Eastern Europe; Stalin had replaced the Western-oriented Litvinov with Molotov in May.

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

The Finns kept the Red Army at bay despite numerical inferiority; the Soviets settled for territorial concessions.

About how many Poles were executed by the NKVD in the 1940 Katyn massacre?

The Soviets blamed the Germans until 1990.

Where was the Soviet government prepared to evacuate to in 1941, though Stalin stayed in Moscow?

He believed his flight would damage troop morale; the German advance stalled after two months.

Which German field marshal did Stalin refuse to exchange for his captured son Yakov?

Yakov died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943; Stalin's Order No. 270 had branded all captured soldiers traitors.

What did Stalin's Order No. 227 of July 1942 do with soldiers who retreated without authorisation?

It is remembered by the slogan 'Not one step back'.

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

He took the title Generalissimo later, in June 1945.

How did Stalin react on learning that Westerners affectionately called him 'Uncle Joe'?

Time named him Man of the Year in 1942 and the London Philharmonic played a concert for his birthday in 1941.

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

Stalin and Roosevelt got on well; both wanted the British Empire dismantled after the war.

How much in reparations from Germany did Roosevelt and Churchill concede to Stalin at Yalta?

He also secured Sakhalin and the Kurils in return for entering the war against Japan.

What did Stalin do with Hitler's remains after Berlin fell?

He had wanted Hitler captured alive; the aim was to stop the remains becoming a Nazi relic.

How many returning Soviet prisoners of war were interrogated in 'filtration' camps after 1945?

About half were then sent to labour camps; Stalin remembered the Decembrist officers who came home from Paris in 1815 with ideas.

Where was the first Soviet atomic bomb tested in August 1949?

Stalin said atomic weapons 'can hardly be used without spelling the end of the world'.

Which communist leader did Stalin denounce in 1948, target for assassination and consider invading?

Tito's talk of a Balkan federation and support for the Greek communists infuriated him.

How long did Stalin's blockade of Berlin last before he ended it in May 1949?

He gambled the West would not risk war; the airlift proved him wrong.

The 1952 'doctors' plot' accused Kremlin physicians, most of them Jewish, of what?

Stalin ordered them tortured for confessions; they were released within weeks of his death.

How long did Stalin lie on a couch at his dacha, hand-fed with a spoon, before dying on 5 March 1953?

Staff found him semi-conscious on the bedroom floor; the autopsy showed a cerebral haemorrhage.

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

Titled 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences', it was given to a closed session of the 20th Congress.

What happened to Stalin's body in October 1961?

Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd the same year.

How tall was Stalin as an adult?

He was a lifelong smoker of pipe and cigarettes, refused to fly, and owned around 2,700 classical records.

Which daughter of Stalin defected to the United States after his death?

She took her mother's surname, Alliluyeva; her brother Vasily was promoted through the Red Army and lived lavishly.

Which magazine named Stalin its 'Man of the Year' in 1942?

A year earlier the London Philharmonic Orchestra had marked his birthday with a concert.

What was the name of the son Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva adopted in 1921?

The couple's biological children were Vasily and Svetlana; Yakov came from Stalin's first marriage.

Which Israeli ambassador's warm welcome by Jewish crowds in Moscow angered Stalin in 1948?

The USSR had been among the first states to recognise Israel, hoping for a Middle East ally.

What title did Stalin adopt in June 1945 as he watched the victory parade from Lenin's Mausoleum?

Zhukov led the parade; Stalin already held the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union from 1943.

The 1928 prosecution of 'industrial specialists', the first major Soviet show trial, is named for which town?

The same year Stalin declared that class war would intensify as socialism developed, warning of a 'danger from the right'.