On December 18, 1879, in the Russian peasant village of Gori, Georgia, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili - later known as Joseph Stalin - was born. The son of Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and Ketevan Geladze, a washerwoman, Joseph was a frail child. At age 7, he contracted smallpox, leaving his face scarred. The other village children treated him cruelly, instilling in him a sense of inferiority. Because of this, Joseph began a quest for greatness and respect. He also developed a cruel streak for those who crossed him. Joseph did well in school, and his efforts gained him a scholarship to Tiflis Theological Seminary in 1894. A year later, Joseph came in

Being quite a philosophical person, he was very interested in history at that time, and read books very often, sometimes daily. It’s said that he claimed to read “around 500 pages a day.” He was very hard working, and was often found writing and studying very late at night. He wrote a few books in his time too.“The pinkish bud has opened", "Rushing to the pale-blue violet" And, stirred by a light breeze", and "The lily of the valley has bent over the grass". Under the pen name Soselo, he authored and published dozens of poems.

In December 1895, Stalin’s mother sent him to a seminary in the Georgian capital of Tiflis (modern-day Tbilisi). He rebelled against studying scripture, however, instead reading the writings of Karl Marx and joining a local socialist group. Eventually he became an atheist, and in 1899 was expelled from the seminary for failing to attend exams.

Stalin’s son from his first marriage, Yakov, was a soldier in the Red Army during World War Two and was either captured or surrendered in the initial stages of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The Nazis proposed to free him in a prisoner swap but Stalin refused, possibly because he believed that Yakov had surrendered voluntarily. He died in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1943.

Like Lenin before him, Stalin also had his own interpretation of Marxism. In Stalin’s case this interpretation was very nationalistic and focused on building up the Soviet Union rather than on global revolution.