![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() His personal library would ultimately grow to more than 20,000 volumes. Stalin had a passion for books, which he marked up and filled with placeholders to find particular passages. He smoked a pipe, using tobacco from cigarettes, which he would unroll and slide into the pipe-usually two cigarettes’ worth-and then light with matches. He drank mineral water and wines from his native Georgia. He liked colored pencils-blue, red, and green. He loved gardening and Russian steam baths. The vast shadow of Stalin the despot often hides Stalin the human being. Beginning in the late 1920s, he forced through the building of a socialist state, herding 120 million peasants onto collective farms or into the gulag and arresting and murdering immense numbers of loyal people in the officer corps, the secret police, embassies, spy networks, scientific and artistic circles, and party organizations. A month later, Lenin was incapacitated by a stroke, and Stalin seized his chance to create his own personal dictatorship inside the larger Bolshevik one. In 1922, Lenin appointed him head of the Communist Party. He played a central role in the Russian Civil War and the creation of the Soviet Union. Suddenly, the 39-year-old Stalin was a leading member of the new Bolshevik regime. Stalin’s life was altered forever by the outbreak of total war in 1914, which helped precipitate the Russian tsar’s abdication in February 1917 and, later that year, a putsch by radical leftists led by Vladimir Lenin. Instead of becoming a priest, he became an underground revolutionary fighting tsarist oppression, spending the next 20 years hiding, organizing, and serving time in prison and internal exile in Siberia. (“To this day his beautiful, sonorous lyrics echo in my ears,” one reader would later recall.) But he did not sit for his final-year exams at the Tiflis Seminary and failed to graduate. He received good marks in school and, as a teenager, got his poems published in well-regarded Georgian periodicals. Stalin’s childhood, illnesses and mishaps included, was largely normal for the time. ![]() His father was a cobbler his mother, a cleaning lady and seamstress. He was born in 1878 to a poor family in Gori, Georgia, then part of the Russian empire. Through the first four decades of his life, Joseph Stalin achieved little. ![]()
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