answersLogoWhite

0

Stalin lived to be 65 years old and had 2 weddings

Some interesting facts about Joseph Stalin are:

  • He was only 5'5" tall.
  • His face was heavily scarred from childhood smallpox and had all official photos of him airbrushed so they would not show.
  • He was disqualified for service in the Tsarist army in World War 1 because of a childhood injury that permanently weakened his left arm.
  • His mother wanted him to be a priest so he went to the seminary. His father wanted him to be a shoemaker so he did some work with his father. His mother won, but not for long. He was kicked out of the seminary for revolutionary activities.
  • He sent a wreath to his mother's funeral.
  • He shaved Lenin's beard and mustache off when Lenin had to go into hiding in Finland in July 1917.
  • Stalin pulled off bank robberies to help fund Bolshevik activities.
  • He was suspected by other revolutionaries of being a secret agent for the Tsarist police, the Okhrana, because he kept getting off pretty lightly when he was arrested now and then.
  1. His birth name was Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili
  2. At the age of seven, he contracted smallpox, which permanently scarred his face
  3. Stalin's first child, Yakov, died of typhus in 1907
  4. Stalin was conscripted by the Russian army to fight in World War I, but was deemed unfit for service because of his damaged left arm
  5. At sixteen, he received a scholarship to a Georgian Orthodox seminary

  1. Twice while in the Parish School he was struck by vehicles: the first time "playing chicken" with other boys in the street and the second time run over in the church yard while waiting for choir practice, breaking both legs this time. This cost him more than a year of school recovering and the bones never completely set right.
  2. He acquired over time the following nicknames: Soso(short form of the Georgian for Josef, Soselo), Poxy(Chopura, because he was scarred from smallpox as a young child), Crimped (Gera, see item 1 above). Koba(meaning "the indomitable" in Turkish, a nickname he gave himself).
  3. He was considered a good student (when he was actually in school) and had an excellent alto singing voice.
  4. He went to seminary to become a Russian Orthodox Priest, and got kicked out for possession of forbidden literature and other infractions.
  5. His only paying job before taking control of the USSR was as a meteorologist in the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory. His duties were to record the temperature and barometric pressure every hour, as well as shoveling snow in the winter and sweeping in the summer. But it only lasted just under 16 months before police raids on the observatory (looking for political agitators and forbidden literature) forced him to move on.
  6. During the failed 1905-1906 revolution he helped fund the revolution as a bank robber.
  7. He was drafted for the Russian Army during WW1, but was rejected due to physical disabilities (see item 1 above). To travel from the Siberian prison camp he was in at the time to the draft office over 100 miles away and back to the Siberian prison camp, he rode in a sleigh pulled by reindeer.
  8. He spent the entire period of the 1917-1918 revolution idle in a Siberian prison camp.
User Avatar

Wiki User

9y ago

What else can I help you with?