Stalin died 50 years ago today. He was born Josif Djugashvili, of the
poorest Georgian peasant stock. The family was not close. Stalin's father
was a cobbler, a wife beater and a drunk. From the time he left the
Orthodox seminary to join the Bolshevik party in 1904 until the year of her
death in 1937, Stalin met his mother no more than four times. With the
partial exception of his first wife, who died in 1907, Stalin appears to
have experienced no bonds of attachment to any human.
The Bolshevik party was the most extreme tendency of Russian Marxism.
Before the abdication of the tsar in February 1917, Stalin worked as a
professional revolutionary, and was arrested and exiled several times. By
the time he was voted onto the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912, he had
become the party's expert on the problem of the empire's non-Russian
minority nationalities.
MORE ON...
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/03/04/1046540190908.html
