This episode explores the early life of Joseph Stalin, from his violent, impoverished childhood in Georgia to his rise as a Bolshevik organizer and his strained relationship with Lenin. It reveals how a brutal father, a severe smallpox infection, and a runaway cart shaped a man who would later become a tyrant responsible for millions of deaths, while also highlighting his early poetry and his failed bank robbery, which he orchestrated under the alias Coba.
Summarized by Podsumo
Stalin's childhood was marked by extreme poverty, a drunken abusive father, a severe smallpox infection that left his face permanently pockmarked, and a runaway horse and carriage that broke his left arm, leaving it permanently shorter and stiffer.
Stalin deliberately falsified his birth year, claiming he was born in 1879 instead of 1878, likely to dodge military conscription, and this habit of falsification became a recurring theme in his life.
Despite his brutal upbringing, Stalin was a promising poet in Georgian and briefly trained for the priesthood at a seminary, where he adopted the alias 'Coba' after a fictional bandit hero, before becoming a revolutionary and a failed bank robber.
Stalin was not a frontline hero of the 1917 Russian Revolution; he was a backroom organizer and bean counter, while Lenin and Trotsky were the charismatic leaders who rallied the masses.
Putin has publicly defended Stalin as an 'effective manager' and is rehabilitating him by reinstating Soviet-era statues, conflating criticism of Stalin with attacks on Russia.
"Excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways of attacking the Soviet Union and Russia. He has sort of conflated in his mind the fact that, you know, we've apologized too much about the past, we have apologized too much about strong men. Putin has modelled himself and has always said the people he looks up to are Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin."
"Falsification came easily to him. Changing the date helped him dodge the draft, dodge conscription when he was a young man."
"The real heroes at this point are Lenin and Trotsky. Stalin is doing the unglamorous work that nobody else wants to do, but it's still important. He has a seat at the table."