· Stalin was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, a village in Transcaucasian Georgia, a province of the Russian Empire within the Caucasus mountains.
             · Note: Stalin was not a Russian, contrary to popular belief--Georgians are a distinct minority within the former Soviet Union. Stalin did not even speak Russian especially well; he never was quite able to get rid of his accent.
             · Stalin was the only one of four children to survive infancy.
             · Stalin's father was named Vissarion Dzhugashvili; he was an unsuccessful cobbler. Who drank heavily and beat the boy savagely.
             · Stalin's mother, Yekaterina Geladze Dzhugashvili, worked as a house servant for various upper-class Georgian families.
             · Stalin was rather sickly as a child; he was badly scarred by smallpox, and septicemia crippled his left arm. Stalin reportedly had an exceptional singing voice and sung in his school choir. Nevertheless, he is described as having been in excellent physical shape as a teenager; throughout much of his life he was muscular and well-built.
             · Stalin was enrolled in a local Orthodox parochial school in Gori in 1888 at the age of 9. When he was 14, his father died in 1890 from wounds he received in a brawl. Stalin won a free scholarship in 1894 to the Orthodox Russian theological seminary at Tiflis to be educated for priesthood. In his fourth year he joined Mesame Dasi, a secret group supporting Georgian nationalism and socialism.
             · Stalin was expelled from the seminary in 1899, when he was about to graduate.
             · Stalin first tried tutoring and then clerical work at the Tiflis Observatory, but he abandoned his clerical job in May 1901, when he was about to be arreste
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