The man who the world would come to know as Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, on December 21, 1879, in the Georgian village of Gori, a small town in the southern reaches of the Russian Empire. He was the third child born to Vissarion Dzhugashvili, a poor shoemaker and his wife Yekaterina, who worked as a house cleaner. The young Iosif was the only one of their children to survive childhood. Stalin's father Vissarion was an abusive hard drinking man who eventually failed as an independent artisan and left his family to work in a factory in Tiflis which was the capital of Georgia when Stalin was five years old. For the rest of Stalin's childhood, Joseph and Yekaterina lived in the home of a priest named Father Charkviani where the hard-working woman attempted to make sure that her only son would be educated enough to escape the drudgery of a lower class life.
Like many other great rulers like the Austrian born German Hitler and the Corsican born French leader Napoleon, Stalin was an outsider in the empire he came to rule. Georgians possessed their own culture and language which was very different from the official Russian language of the empire, and the you
The Tiflis Theological Seminary was a religious institution but did not limit its instruction to religious teachings. It was Georgia's principle center of higher learning and drew manny upper-class students from all across the region. This set the scene for much conflict between the strict Russian Orthodox priests who ran the school and the radical Georgian student body. In the years before Stalin arrived a number of violent incidents had erupted including a series of student strikes and the murder of a priciple. The five years that Stalin spent at the Seminary fell within relatively quiet period, but the student body remained independent minded.
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