The Childhood of Joseph Stalin

Robert is joined by Cody Johnston to discuss the childhood of Stalin.

FOOTNOTES:

1. Stalin as a Theological Student
2. The Finnish City Where Lenin Met Stalin Still Lives in Russia's Shadow
3. On the Origin and Significance of the Name "Stalin"
4. Stalin, from Child to Bolshevik Leader
5. HOW STALIN BECAME STALINIST
6. Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928 
7. Young Stalin

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You know, Cody, the nice thing about felonies is that,
oh ship, we're recording, aren't we. Uh. The bad thing
about felonies, felonies are terrible. Don't commit them? Oh no,
there the always started in the middle of our conversation
about how felonies are bad and don't you don't do
crimes straight, don't crimes? Yeah, exactly, avoid crimes and embrace

(00:28):
head to resensuality. The motto of this podcast, Well, we
were talking about that is what we were talking about.
This is horrible, you guys. No, this is the best
introduction yet, Sophie, The introduction we planned that we're doing
now is the best one yet. Speaking of not doing crimes,
you know who was the best at not committing crimes? Ah,

(00:51):
the best at not committing crimes, the best at not
committing crimes. I mean, I was gonna say Jesus, but
that's the opposite. That's not true at all. He committed crime.
That was Jesus whole thing. Huge crimer huge crimer um. Yeah,
watch him, he's a crimer um. I don't know me,

(01:14):
Joseph the Sarianovitch Stalin really yeah, yeah, yeah, we're where
did I introduce the show's name. No, this is behind
the bast Welcome to the Don't Do Crimes Podcast with
Cody Johnston, my co host for Today and Today every day.

(01:37):
In this podcast, we talk about a terrible person from
history and revealed details from their past that the listeners
do not know. And today we're talking about the childhood
of our old best friend j Stall Joey, Joey Joe Steel,
little Joey, okay, little joe bo s bus like his

(01:58):
baby crimes, some of them, yeah, some baby crimes in here. Yeah. Okay.
Are you a fan of Joseph Stalin. I'm aware of
Joseph Stalin Okay, okay, not a Stalin stand not a
Stalhead standing standing, Yeah, standing, standing is what they call him. Yeah,
a job bro, Joe Bro. There we go. Um, what

(02:23):
do you know about Stalin's childhood? Not much actually about
his childhood. That's good here because otherwise this episode would
be disappointing. I know all about I know all about
his baby crimes, all about his his very tiny crimes. Well, Cody,
Joseph Vassarianovitch Juggas Veeley was born in eighteen seventy eight

(02:44):
in Gory, Georgia, And I will try to pronounce Jugashvilley
close to correct, but I won't, I won't, it won't happen.
At the time, Gory was a very tiny town on
the outskirts of the Russian Empire, sparsely popular, did and
largely underdeveloped. The area around Gory was beautiful. The czar's
brother kept a palace there, but it was also remote.

(03:07):
The future ruler of Russia would count himself lucky that
he came up in Gory, though see in the whier
CAUCUSUS region, only one in thirty children were allowed to
go to school because they just weren't that many schools
in Georgia, though one in fifteen children got to have
an education. Uh. This is because Gory had a large
merchant population and comparently a comparatively outsized amount of development.

(03:28):
The small town of seven thousand where Stalin grew up
featured four schools, including a two story church founded in
eighteen eighteen. In Gory, one in ten boys attended school.
He's all right, yeah, yeah, he's won the lottery. Yeah.
I mean, what is what is your ideal ratio of
of of people to attend school? My ideal ratio is

(03:51):
a hunt. It's uh, one out of one ten out
of ten. I think that should just be me and
out of all of them. Yeah, so like one out
of billions, it's you. Yeah, because all we really need
is one podcaster and a lot of people to dig.

(04:11):
That's true, to go to school to dig. Who's who's
teaching you? Though? At this school? Then uh, that is
a mystery. Nobody knows. You just walk into a building
and you just walk out, and I know where to
tell people to dig. And that is the ideal society.
So you've you're just like a dig major. Yeah yeah,
ok yeah, digging and uh philosophy, but you're not but

(04:36):
you're not like good enough to do the digging yourself. Well,
there's plenty of diggers. Someone needs to tell them where
to dig. Otherwise you just have a bunch of random
holes that's not gonna or like very coordinated holes. Yeah okay,
yeah yeah, And then I can tell people now we eat,
now we continue digging, and then they do it. Well,

(04:56):
I sip dacharies exactly one person, Yeah, which I've earned
and learned how to make in school, which is taught
by a mystery. All right, back to Stone. Joseph's parents
were Vissarian, juggish, Villey and a Katarina Gelazi. They'd been
married back in eighteen seventy two, when Vissarian was twenty
two and she was seventeen. Now Vissarian went by Basso

(05:20):
for regions that I'm sure makes sense to Georgians, and
a Katerina went by Keke, which does kind of make
sense to everybody. Uh. Beso was handsome, broad shouldered, intelligent
and industrious. He was a cobbler by trade and widely
seen as the best bootmaker in town. Keke was gorgeous
and charming and beloved by just about everybody in the town.
They had conceived two children before Joseph's birth. Bezo was,

(05:43):
in his wife's words, almost mad with happiness when the first, Mikhail,
was born in eighteen seventy five. Tragically, he died two
months later, driving Basso equally mad with grief. He began
to drink, but this was the nineteenth century, and he
didn't let something like a dead baby stop you from
rolling the dice on another baby. The Jugish Belis had
another son a year later, Georgy geergy g e I

(06:04):
R g I Uh. He died six months later, which, yeah,
I'm not going to be able to pronounce all these jeergy. Yeah.
He died six months later, which, from an optimistic point
of view, is a three improvement in his linking of
the first kid. They're doing it, they're making progress. Do
you think pointing that out to them would have made
them less set? I really don't. I feel like the

(06:30):
other of the other child. You know, when you look
at this statistically, you're a way better parent than you
were before. Look at how much O. That's called learning.
That's growth right there, that's growth right there. Don't worry
about it. Yeah, It's sort of like when you look
at the number of people who die on my jet
ski and just just total numbers, it looks like I'm

(06:51):
a bad jet ski pilot. But when you compare the
number of people who have died on my jet ski
in the last three years to the prior nine years,
I'm a great jet ski pilot. I've improved immensely. They're
exactly That's that's how you look at that is how
you look at statistics. So when Joseph was born that
December in eight his mom and his dad had reason
to be less than enthusiastic about his chances of survival.

(07:13):
So so as they called him. Was weak, fragile, and thin.
The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed.
He was sit constantly, and he was always on the
verge of death. And I don't normally say if only
that baby had died, but this is Stalin died two
out of three. You were so I thought the time

(07:34):
was a charm. Oh No, before Joseph's birth, Baso it vowed,
just let the child survive, and I'll crawl to Jerry
on my knees with a child on my shoulders. But
of course, promises to God are the easiest ones to ignore.
And once Joseph came out alive, Baso sort of forgot
about this. But then Joseph got sick, and Basso assumed
this was God, being like, you made a promise, and
now you're welching someone to murder your baby, because that's God.

(07:58):
That was the deal. So he keke walked to the
church and donated a sheep to the priests. Now, unlike
his older brothers, Stalin survived, and in the early years
the family thrived. Gorey was a poor town and most
of the houses were made of mud, but bezos shoemaking
business did well enough for him to hire apprintices and
eventually ten employees. For a while, the family lived well.
Kek later recalled our family happiness was limited. One of

(08:21):
bezos apprentices later said he lived better than anyone else
of our profession. They always had butter in their house.
Gives you an idea of like where things are for
society at this point, he's got butter. But yeah. Now
this would later be very embarrassing for adults Stalin because
communist heroes are not supposed to come from prosperous middle

(08:42):
class roots. Yeah, they're not supposed to be butter haers.
You get fucking you get fucking starved to death for
having butter. Yeah. As an adult, he ruefully admitted, I'm
not the son of a worker. My father had a
shoeworkshop up, employing apprentices and exploiter. We didn't live badly,

(09:03):
and that was like, if only we'd lived badly, I wish,
I wish it had harder times. But luckily for his
future socialist credentials, his family happiness did not last long.
Bezo had started drinking after his first son's death, and
continued drinking for the rest of his life. He made
friends with a local Russian exile named Paca, who'd been
basically forced to flee to Georgia for his connections to

(09:23):
a group called the People's Will, a terrorist organization who
would repeatedly be tried and eventually succeeded to murder the Czar.
Some of Joseph's earliest memories were made talking to PoCA,
who liked Little So So and bought him a canary.
Like Bezo, Poco was a hardcore alcoholic. One winter, he
passed out on the snow and died, and Beaso had
to go to one sright. I didn't know that. You

(09:44):
was really abrupt. Yeah, that's fucking life back there. Everybody
knows someone who dies in the snow. I know it's
it's it really sounded like You're like, here's like a
fun little story about a time he got drunk. But
then the story ended, like all Stalin store in a miserable, miserable,
unthinkable death. Yeah. Yeah, So after his drinking buddy died,

(10:07):
Baso had to go to one of the local priests,
father Chuck Fianni, to find a drinking buddy. As an adult,
Stalin had a vivid memory of his dad and the
priest stumbling home, singing out a tune. He recalled the priest, saying,
you're a good bloke, Beso, even for a shoemaker, and
his father responded, you're a priest, but what a priest?
I love you all right, all right. So times in Georgia,

(10:29):
some characters, some characters. Now, Bezo was not a happy drunk,
and as he descended more and more to drink, he
became increasingly obsessed with local rumors about Joseph's parentage. See
Ke was close friends with a guy named dav Ri Chiwi,
the chief of police. The town mayor later testified that
Joseph was actually this guy's real son. There were also
rumors that a famous explorer who had crossed through the

(10:51):
town named Price Evolski had betted Keke and produced Joseph.
Some townsfolk declared that one of the town's for you
Jewish men was his real dad, But the most commonly
sighted potential father for Stalin was a guy named Yakov Ignatashvili.
Ignatashvili was the wealthiest man in town, a wine merchant
and a great boxer. Kek worked in his household from
time to time, and ignotish Villy did take a deep
liking to the family. He was named Joseph's godfather and

(11:14):
later paid for his education. There's no way to know
the truth, but we absolutely knew they were rumors. Some
locals accused KK of basically being a sex worker. Even
decades later, a reporter from the Washington Post who went
to Gory and talked to some of the people old
enough to have known Kek and Joseph uh found claims
that young Stalin called his mother the prostitute when they
had arguments. So we don't really know, yeah, or if

(11:40):
Kek was in fact a prostitute, or if she was
just really well liked, like like a snotty thing for
a kid to say. Yeah. And it's compounded by the
fact that in Georgian culture, men were expected to have
multiple mistresses, um, and like everybody was just fucking all
the time, which definitely makes it harder to know what

(12:00):
was actually going wrong. Right, Well, what else? What else
are you gonna do? It's joy I'll tell you what
else you're gonna do later, because it's fun as hell.
Um Yeah. Keke herself did little to downplay the rumors
that she had been sleeping around a lot, and Joseph
could be anybody's kid. In her old age, she urged
Labrinty Barrier that the head of the n k v
D Stalin's like secret belief. She urged his wife Nina

(12:22):
to take an illicit lovers and basically insinuated that she'd
done the same, saying, when I was young, I cleaned
house for people, and when I met a good looking boy,
I didn't waste the opportunity. So who knows? Yeah, there
it is. Yeah. As an aside, k was quite a character.
The book Young Stalin by Sebastian sebag Montfior includes a
number of bizarre anecdotes about her, usually based on her

(12:44):
own recollections. And I'm gonna read you one right now
to give you a sense of this woman's personality. Quote.
She managed to attract so So with a flower, at
which point keke jovially pulled out her breasts and showed
them to the toddler, who ignored the flower and died
for the breasts. But the drunk ruction exile Polka was
spying on them and burst out laughing. So I buttoned
up my dress. So this is like her playing with

(13:05):
little Yeah, these are like the story she tells to
everybody when her son is the ruler of Russia. She's
she's a character, kek rules. Yeah yeah, all right, all right, yeah.
So most historians seem to think that Basso was in
fact Joseph's real father, but the rumors at least were real,

(13:26):
and they drove an increasingly drunken Baso into regular rages.
On one occasion, he came home wasted and threw Joseph
on the ground so hard he pied blood for days.
He would regularly charge home drunk, looking for young Stalin
and screaming where is Keke's little bastard hiding under the bed?
So yeah, yeah, yeah, less less whimsical. Yeah, things switched

(13:48):
hard in old time e Georgia between whimsical and beating
a child until he p's blood for a couple of days. Yep.
One of young Stalin's schoolmates later recalled undeserved beatings made
the boy as hard and heartless as the father himself,
and this person came to believe that Bezo's abuses how
Stalin learned to hate people. Stalin did, in fact, spend

(14:09):
much of his early childhood hiding from his drunken father
or watching his dad beat his mom. By the time
he was five, his dad's business wasn't shambles, and Keke
was increasingly supporting the family. She started to fight back,
to punching her husband in retaliation for his violence. This
eventually cowed Bezo, and by the time has Joseph was six,
his father had fled the home. And this seems like
the best case scenario, right, Like it's like the Lifetime movie,

(14:31):
like she's abused, but then she learns to fight back
and father leaves the house. Unfortunately, violence doesn't work that way. Yeah. Um,
And as one friend of the family later recalled, quote,
his mother was head of the family now and the
fist which had subdued his father was now applied to
the upbringing of her son. She beat him unmercifully for disobedience.

(14:54):
So that's kind of reality saying, yeah, if you learn
to solve your problems with punching, maybe probably Yeah, it's
the tragedy of the fists. Bummer. Yeah, I came on
here to have a good time, a good time learning
about j Staalah apparently all right. Decades later, on his

(15:18):
last visit home to see his mother in the nineteen thirties,
Dictator of All Russia Joseph Stalin asked his mother why
she'd beaten him so much. She replied, it didn't do
you any harm. But yeah, I shouldn't have said, kek
rules like she's a character that if I sort of
gesture to everything around yea, yeah, did you no harm? Yeah? Now,

(15:46):
Stalin's biographers are very much sort of of multiple minds
on this. Sebastian sebag Montfiori, who was certainly the most
entertaining Staln biographer, draws a direct line between all this
childhood abuse and Stalin's future violence. Um. And he also
points out that Gory was a wild lea violent town
in a pretty fun way. And I'm going to quote
directly from the book Young Stalin Now. Gory was one

(16:06):
of the last towns to practice the picturesque and savage
custom of free for all town brawls with special rules
but no holds barred violence. The boozing, praying, and fighting
were all interconnected with drunken priests acting as referees. The
saloon bars of Gory were incorrigible stews of violence and crime,
town brawls, wrestling tournaments, and schoolboy gang warfare, where the
free Grelli fighting traditions at festivals Christmas and Shrove Tide.

(16:30):
Before Lent, both quarters fielded a parade led by transvestites.
Are actors writing as carnival kings on camels and donkeys,
surrounded by pipe players and singers and fancy dress. At
the Kenoba Carnival to celebrate Georgia's sixteen thirty four victory
over Persia, one actor played the Georgians are another the
Persian Shaw, who was soon pelted with fruit than doused
in water. The males in each family, from children upwards

(16:51):
also paraded, drinking wine and singing until night fell, when
the real fund began. This assault of free boxing. The
sport of Creavy was a mass duel with rules. Voice
of three wrestled other three year olds, Then children fought together,
then teenagers, and finally the men threw themselves into an
incredible battle, by which time the town was completely out
of control, a state that lasted into the following day.

(17:12):
Even at school, where classes fought, classes shops were often pillaged.
Isn't that since that's wild, That's that's so cool, That's like,
that's the only town that does what. No, it's not
the only town. It was one of the last ones
that used to be super common in big chunks of

(17:33):
like Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. This is the alternative
to sex you mentioned, right, Yeah, this everybody beat the
ship out of each other. The day where we all
fight believable. Let's all get wasted and just ruin each
other in the middle of the street. The priests will
be refereaced. Fight club town amazing. Everybody's drunk, everybody's punching

(17:54):
each other. It just it sounds like the best time.
I mean, that's like that's your dream. That's like an
amusement park. Yeah, it's like the good purge, Like instead
of it being like abusive, it's a way for the
whole town to celebrate by just wailing on each other.
Like I wish we still did that. Hey you can dream.

(18:14):
Maybe you're in America, you can do whatever you Yeah,
we could make this the new holiday that could get
rid of our partisan divide. Nationalist fight day. Yeah, bring
them together to beat the ship exactly. Everyone will feel
a little bit better and a little bit worse. Mm hmm. God,
what a great thing that would be. If we had
universal healthcare there it is, or or legal street drinking.

(18:37):
But you need one of the two. Yeah. So for
so first term universe healthcare and then second term is like, well,
now we got to fight each other. Yeah, now we
have to fight now that we know we'll be taken
care of now we can we have to get our
money's worth from this fucking health care exactly. Oh my god,
I mean I wish we did that just as a

(18:58):
podcasting team. Like it's a like a like a team
building retreat. Yeah, like we all fight in a pit
and Sophie gets really drunk and dressed as a priest
and referees. Yeah, it's a good plan, Sophie, were doing this.
You've got a new job. This is how we're celebrating
Shrove Tide when we figure out when Shrove Tide is.

(19:20):
We're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna we're gonna
do some trust falls. But then we're gonna be each
other fights. O. Katie is going to be in the
pit with everybody. We're all gonna be. It's gonna she's
got good reach. It's going to be quite a fist fight. Yeah. Well,
you're gonna have to change your attitude because you're you're

(19:41):
gonna be You're gonna be the referee. And the priest.
Oh yeah, yeah, she's turning around, she's turning it. I'm
just trying to picture that out. It's all about the
outfit and then everybody. It sounds like a little black
and white, you know, from the blood. I bet we

(20:01):
could get a lot of businesses to support, like a
national fist Fight Day. Yeah, yeah, like just like we'll
put your name on our jerseys and yeah, I hate
this continue okay, yeah, okay, it's easy. It's easy to
draw a direct line between the gigantic town wide beat
downs that Joseph uh Like participated in as a small

(20:23):
child and the terrific violence that he unleashed as the
Red CSAR of the U s SR. Citation. Well, there's
actually a lot of disagreement about this. There's a lot
of disagreement about another. Stalin. Historian Stephen Cottkin cautions against
that kind of thinking in his biography Stalin quote, a
sizeable chunk of humanity was beaten by one or more parents.

(20:45):
Nor did Gorey suffer from an especially violent Oriental culture.
Of these town wide fist fights, cat Can notes such
uh festive violence, mad cap bear fists followed by sloppy embraces,
was typical of the Russian Empire, from Ukrainian market towns
to Siberian villages. Gorey did not stand it out in
the least. So basically everybody is doing this like it's
weird to be like to focus on how this affected

(21:06):
Stalin's rule when it was like this was just the norm. Yeah. Um,
So well, two things I guess I take away from
that is one is that we should definitely do this now,
because we should definitely. If they're arguing that it didn't
affect him, then it won't affect us and we should
do it. Um, absolutely, But nobody's arguing with that, right.
But also, um, most of those people who experienced that

(21:27):
didn't become dictators, so there's not really like a control group,
I guess. Yeah, I guess the point is that like
the violent the kind of violence unleashed under Stalin was new, um,
but every generation of Russian ruler prior to Stalin had
kind of grown up in the same or yeah, and

(21:48):
so like the like, so it's weird to be like
suddenly it it mattered, right, like obviously, like everything that
happened to Stalin matter because he wound up with like
this kind of like incredible power. It's weird to focus
just on this thing that was a factor in all
of these other people's lives who didn't do that right.
It's more just like, well, this is uh not the reason,

(22:09):
but it is an element of you know what led him? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
and uh, we're gonna talk more about um joy Stall
and what made him into the man he became. But first,
you know what, Stalin would have loved Cody as a
committed communist. Um, I was gonna say, beating people. If

(22:36):
there's one thing communists love, it's capitalism. Yep, we go
Stone sending out a lot of promo codes. Oh, Stalin
loved promo. If you needed to know where to buy
a mattress, Joseph Stalin was the guy to ask. I
believe that. Yeah, that's why they call them Casper's because
of all the go oh we shouldn't make that joke.

(23:00):
Had break time, Yeah, we're back. We were talking about
the cargo cult of masculinity. Uh, and how all those
weird Daily Wire Ben Shapiro guys love to pose with
cigars and other like totems of masculinity without actually doing

(23:24):
anything that might be considered brave or courageous, and you know,
it's frustrating and annoying and deeply irritating. But it might
be why this right wing power grab has been such
like a slow creep, rather than the kind of things
we see people like Stalin carry out, people like Hitler
carry out, people who, while they were gigantic pieces of ship,
grew up being very accustomed to immediate and terrible violence,

(23:46):
and they were very hard pussyfoot around. Yeah, as opposed
to be all these like uh ivylie ivy league dorks
do with their leather chairs and cigars, talking about how
it's a republic not a demaocracy and nobody needs to
really vote and yeah, but but doing it dressing it
up so it doesn't sound like they're saying we should
have fascism. Anyway, Let's go back to the good old

(24:10):
fashioned clean living of Joseph Stalin. Yeah, it's probably unfair
to say that historians focused too much on the darker
aspects of Stalin's upbringing, because you've got this guy who
killed millions of people. So let's talk about he was
beaten as a kid, who his town had all these
gigantic drunken fights, how he was impoverished and abused um.

(24:31):
But Joseph actually had like focusing on all that stuff.
It's real, it's important, it's a factor in what he
grew up to be. But it's also important to note
that Joseph had, all things considered a pretty happy childhood
considering the time he grew up in the place that
he grew up, and he said so repeatedly as an adult.
Even the fact that his father's business collapse when he
was ten and impoverished his family wasn't hugely traumatic, he

(24:52):
later joked. He became a proletarian, so his ruin was
my advantage. The same year his father left, Joseph caught
smallpox when an epidemic swept through town, killing six of
his godfather's children. Young Stalin survived, perhaps thanks to a
faith healer and his His mother took him to in desperation,
but his face was horribly scarred, and the other children
nicknamed him POxy. Luckily, Joseph and Keke had a wide

(25:13):
circle of family friends who absolutely adored young Stalin. They
paid the family's medical bills and helped secure Joseph admission
into the very best of local schools. So he has
all these traumas, but he's also hugely supported by this
community that thinks he's brilliant and loves him from a
very early age. He never feels like he's alone. He's
unsupported as a community of support, a community who like

(25:36):
is willing to sacrifice for him, which is not emphasized enough,
like and people talking about his upbringing like this is
as much of a factor as him getting hit by
his mom and stuff. Yeah, because I mean we all
want we want to supportive community for our children. Yeah. Now, um,
These wide circle of family friends also helped secure Joseph
admission into the very best of the schools in Gory,

(25:58):
which is not that he knew did a whole lot
of help. He needed the money, but he was brilliant
as a child, and when he sat the examination he
did so well that the school started him off in
the second grade immediately. So he just skipped the first
grade because he was such like an autodidact so learned already.
Uh didn't have much money, but Joseph's wealthy godfather ensured
he showed up to that first day of school in style.

(26:20):
One of his classmates later recalled, I saw among the
school children an unknown boy wearing a large formal Georgian
coat down to his knees, new boots with high legs,
a tight, wide leather belt, and a black peak cap
with lacquer advisors shining in the sun. This very short person,
quite thin, was wearing tight trousers and boots and a
pleated shirt with a scarf and a red Chintz school bag.
No one else dressed like that in the whole class,

(26:42):
the whole school. School boys surrounded him in fascination. So
he is hipster, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dressing for I
guess attention well, but also like being dressed by these
adults who adore him for attention because they think he's special. Um,
and we're willing to lie. They want to present, they
want to present, present their special boy to the world. Yeah.

(27:04):
And as the strangest boy in school, Joseph was obviously
a target for bullies, but he gave as good as
he got. The town priest, father shark Viani, claimed there
was hardly a day when someone had not beaten him up,
sent him home crying, or when he hadn't beaten up
someone else. So he is always fighting as a boy,
which is normal and like in Georgia at this point, right,
he would have been a weird from the fight down,

(27:25):
he said, he's from the fight down where we show
our love through fist punch. Yeah, yeah, um and yeah.
I mean as soon as you you bring attention to
yourself at that age, you're like, all right, I'm a
target now, and yeah, I'm a target now, and that's
just gonna make me into a tough son of a bit,
which he objectively was. One time he fought with his
friend Aramis Velley in the playground. The fight wound up

(27:47):
as a draw, but when Aramish Velly turned around, Stalin
leapt on him from behind and tackled him to the grass.
He was famous for fighting dirty and was regularly beaten
within an inch of his life. As a result. Young
Stalin developed a habit of changing out of his fancy
clothing with its tall white collars after bidding his mother
farewell in the morning. It was the only way to
stop it from being stained with his and other children's blood.

(28:08):
So this is yeah, this was a goal for him.
He was like, this is my plan. I'm gonna get
the ship kicked out of me, or I'm gonna kick
the ship out of someone else, And I really don't
care which because it is a day of the week.
It is a day of the week, and I am eleven.
It's a little kid. He's a time to go get
covered in blood like I do every single day, taking

(28:31):
out his fancy clothes, putting on his fighting outfit. Again,
I believe all children should be raised this way. Um,
this is clear, like kids in all towns that lack
sufficient Internet access. The children of Gory divided up into
rival street gangs based on neighborhood. These gangs battled regularly

(28:51):
with each other, but they also played, and there was
an odd kind of equality in the streets. Stalin played
and fought, but the children of princes in generals, He
and his friends would wander off into the wood with knives, bows,
and slingshot to damage whatever they came across one just
like on a mission to damage. Here's your weapons, boys,
things destroy time. Okay, yeah, boys, this is what you do.

(29:19):
Gonna go destroy something. One favorite target was the apple
orchard of a local prince, and George is filled with princes.
Like prince means like special, like fancy boy thing there
there's like you're like you're definitely like of a higher
class than other people, but like everywhere's littered with princes.
They're filthy with them. So one of their favorite targets

(29:40):
was the apple orchard of a local prince. One time,
young Stalin set this orchard on fire, and we don't
really know why the property. He just liked doing it. Yeah, yeah,
you know again, it was a day of the week.
It was the day of the week, and just another
reason I deeply identify I with Joseph. Still, he hadn't

(30:01):
getting into a big enough fight. He definitely got into
a fight earlier that day. Yeah, but it wasn't it
wasn't enough. So we had to start a fire, which
is essentially a fight with the land exactly. Yeah, man
versus nature today. Yeah, I'm gonna quote again from Sebastian
sebag Montfjor's Young Stalin quote. So So was very naughty.

(30:21):
His younger friend Georgie recalls through the streets. He loved
his catapult and homemade bowl. Once a herdsman was bringing
his herd home when so So jumped out and catapulted
a cow in the head. The ox went crazy, the
herd stampeded, and the herdsman chase so So, who disappeared.
Already elusive, he used to slip through my hands like
a fish, wrote another school friend, and it was no
use trying to catch him. So So once terrorized a

(30:43):
shopkeeper by igniting some explosive cartridges to the straightest shop.
His mother had to hear a lot of cursing about
her son, her son, the terrorists. Like the terrorists just
blowing up things as a small ship. Believable, I mean believable,
but yeah, it's amazing. Terrorists, little fancy little prince boots

(31:11):
just going out starting fires, little lord fauntleroy suits blowing
up businesses with explosives. On another occasion, so So shoved
a young child into a fast moving river and almost
drowned him. When the boy complained, young Stalin shrugged and said,
in essence, will you figure out how to swim? Didn't you? Dang?

(31:33):
That is that is some abusive ship. Ah, he's the best.
It's called it's called tough love. It's not all right. Yeah,
but Stalin was also known to be a steadfast friend
much larger boys, without a second thought to defend one
of his friends. One of these friends later wrote that

(31:53):
Stalin reserved most of his rage and violence for quote
people who vote through greater age or strength dominated because
they seem like his father. He developed a vengeful feeling
against everyone positioned above himself. So he for for the people,
fighting for the people. He's taking out, he's taking out
the bullies. And I think that might be a better
sort of source of kind of some of his early

(32:15):
like this idea, like he has this domineering father and
then this dominating mother, and it inculpates him in this
like inability to have anyone in charge. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah,
you're gonna resist any kind of authority and anything is yeah,
being a bully, and so you're gonna but he desperately
needs to have authority over his friends, like over the
people around him, Like and he'll he'll fucking take a

(32:36):
bullet for you if you will do whatever he's so, yeah,
if you'll be But if you resist him at all,
he's going to light an orchard on fire because in
the water. Yeah, because then you're the bully by saying no,
thank you, says Joseph had a pathological need to be
in charge, and his friendship was definitely contingent upon being
the unquestioned leader of any group. He found himself in

(32:57):
his buddy Aramash Veeley wrote that he quote could be
a good friend so long as one bowed to his
dictatorial will. When one of his friends stole communion bread
and another boy ratted him out, Joseph quote cursed his life,
called him an informer, a spy, made him hated by
the other boys, and then he beat him black and blue.
On March thirteenth one, when Joseph was three, the Emperor

(33:18):
Alexander the Second had been assassinated by members of the
people's will the a giant comical bombs thrown into his carriage.
His successor, Alexander the Third, head crackdown on descent for
some reason. This included banning the Georgian language from being
taught in schools and so By the time so So
was in school, he and his students were required to read, write,
and speak in Russian. Slipping up and speaking in his

(33:38):
native tongue was punishable by Quote having to stand in
a corner or holding a long piece of wood for
a whole morning, or being locked in a detention cell
without food or water and in complete darkness until late evening.
So yeah, good times, teacher, Make those kids hold a
piece of wood for a whole morning. Learning is good

(34:00):
m M. The most despised teacher in the school was
a man named Lavrov. He was a Russian and who
nursed a violent hatred of Georgian culture. He made young
Joseph the best student in class his assistant a job
that mainly involved having Joseph inform on any students speaking
in Georgian. Now, young Stalin had zero issue informing on
other kids, as we'll see, but he was a proud

(34:20):
Georgian and he was not willing to put up with
basically clamping down on his ancestral language. So he gathered
up a small gang of eighteen year old students in
ambushed Lavrov in an empty classroom. Stalin promised to murder
his teacher if he continued to punish kids for speaking
Jordan's which is a nice similarity between him and uh

(34:42):
fucking Saddam Hussein, Like they both threatened to murder one
of their educational leaders at one point at while they
were school. Yeah, that's an interesting parallel right there. Well,
I mean, you know, Saddam was a big fan of
j stal So it's a bold evolutionary It's like one

(35:02):
of those yeah, those uh late eighties movies where you
take over the school, no more homework, No more homework,
but like you murder the teacher instead, Yeah, you have
teenagers kill your teacher for you, just like in I
want to say, Revenge of the Nerds. Know that was
just a rape movie. Yeah, yeah, different. Yeah. Lavrov backed

(35:25):
down in the face of these threats because, yeah, because
he didn't want to get murdered. Now it would not
be accurate to view Stalin as just some hard nosed
child gangster. He also loved many of his teachers and
was beloved by them. His favorite was the singing teacher Simon.
Simon wrote that young Stalin had a beautiful, sweet, high
voice and was always his first choice for solos. He

(35:46):
also noted that so So had a gift for working
a crowd and performing. In fact, he was so good
at this that he started up a side business as
a wedding singer. What yeah, young Stalin just burning down
vineyards orchards of constant fistfights and and a wedding singer.
Complicated guy, you know, yeah, Simon recalled. People would turn

(36:09):
up just to watch him sing, saying, let's go see
how the Jugishvili voy amazes everyone with that voice. Yeah,
Joseph was also a gifted painter and actor, and even
a comedian. All of his classmates agreed he was something
of a prodigy, talented it just about everything he tried.
This was not easy for him. Young Stalin spent all
of his spare time reading and constantly had his nose

(36:30):
in a book. He would walk around town with books
shoved into the belt of his trousers. He was the
very top of the class and never skipped school or
showed up late. But so So was also a good
tutor and volunteered hours of his time to help worse
students in class with their studies. He happily volunteered to
inform on his classmates too, whenever they were late to
class or cheated on tests. He was nicknamed the Gendarme,

(36:51):
which means his classmates all basically called him a cop.
So Yeah, Yeah, Bezo. His father was impoverished and frequently
out of work by the time Joseph was an adolescent,
and normally he was happy to let kek take the boy,
but from time to time he'd be seized by a
drunken impulse to kidnap his son and take charge of him.
At one point, according to KK, Bezo burst into the

(37:13):
school drunkenly to grab so So by force. After this,
Joseph had to be smuggled into class every day under
the coats of his uncle's key, claimed that everyone in
town helped to hide him, lying to Bezo that he'd
switch schools. Jeez, this this is a complicated young boy. Yeah,
a lot of stuff going on with this kid. It
is a a full childhood. He's gonna he's gonna get

(37:36):
smuggled in and then also find a place to change
into his fighting clothes after he gets smuggled him so.
Stalin's early childhood was complex and multifaceted, filled with abuse
and trauma, but also love and an incredibly supportive community.
None of the ship Bezo put him through stopped Stalin
from consistently excelling academically. In fact, the only thing that

(38:00):
made him miss school for any length of time was
his apparently magnetic attraction to being run over by carriages.
You take me on a wild ride here, Robert, what
do you I don't know. I don't even know why.
I'm surprised at this point. That was a sentence that
you said out loud to me about a person. You

(38:22):
cannot stop, young Stalin from getting hit by fucking carriages.
You know I wouldn't want to. I'm gonna quote again
from young Stalin. The boys enjoyed playing chicken grabbing the
axles of galloping carriages. Perhaps this was how Stalin was
hurt once again. The poor mother was mad with fear,

(38:42):
but the doctors treated him for free or ignot aged.
Villy was quietly paying the bills, her son said later
also called in the village quack, who doubled as the
local barber. The accident gave him yet another reason. On
top of his web foot pock marks and rumors of
bastardy for vigilance and inferiority for being different. It permanently
damaged his left arm, which means he could never be
the bow ideal of the Georgian warrior. He later said

(39:03):
it prevented him from dancing properly, but he still managed
to fight. Yeah, he did. So he gets hit by
a carriage playing chicken with his friends, fox up his arm. Uh. Now,
Joseph did not want to be a shoemaker, which is
what his dad wanted him to probably yeah, yeah, yeah,
So after his dad kidnapped him, he returned home and
went back to school um and the pre Cintifla Yeah

(39:26):
so yeah, sorry. So his dad kidnaps him um at
a couple of different points. At one point like takes
him into like the town to go like learn to
be a shoemaker. Um and basically Keck has to go
to like the pre Cintiflis and force um them to
like make his dad give their son back to her
Um and so So continues his studies until eighteen ninety.

(39:46):
Went on a school trip with the choir. He's hit
by another runaway carriage. Um. Yeah. The twelve year old
Stalin's legs were shattered by the wooden wheels and he
was taken to Tiflis again and spent months out of
school recovering. His legs were so damaged that for the
rest of his life he walked with an awkward sideways gate.
From this, he acquired his second nickname, crimped. So people
call him pockmarked and crippled basically and a cop. Yeah,

(40:11):
three nicknames. He was brought to Tifflis, the nearby city,
to recover. Now by this point, so So had moved
there to work in a shoe factory, and once he
learned his son was in town, he waited outside the
hospital and yet again kidnapped Stalin and hit him from
his mother. His kid gets kidnapped many times as he
gets hit by wide range of fun activity. Again, he's

(40:33):
like twelve at this point of course. Yeah yeah, this
is like right after he got a bunch of eighteen
year olds to threaten to murder his teacher. Yes. Yeah.
Beso forcibly enrolled his son as an apprentice at the
shoe factory where he worked. When Keke tried to take
Joseph back, he screamed at her. Beso screamed at her,
you want my son to be a bishop, over my
dead body. He'll be educated. I'm a shoemaker and my

(40:54):
son will be one two. Keke did not take this
lying down eight hundreds. Georgia was, you know, pretty obviously
a very patriarchal place. Fathers tended to get their way,
but that did not happen in this case. Biographer Stephen
Cotkin writes, Kek brooked no compromise. She rejected the Tiffless
church's authorities proposed solutions that social be allowed to sing
in their Tiffless school choir or remaining with his father.

(41:16):
She accepted nothing less than so So's return to gory
for the start of the next school year in September
eighteen ninety. Her triumph over her husband in a deeply
patriarchal society was reported by family friends who took the
woman's side, and by the boy himself in the parental
tug of war between becoming a priest or a cobbler,
so so preferred school and therefore his mother. So it's
like a really strange thing that she gets her way

(41:38):
in this, Stalin gets his way in this. It's kind
of tells you what sort of person she was. Interesting that, Yeah,
if the if society, uh, like that's an issue, and
if the dad got his way, then uh, things would
have turned out way differently. They might have, they might

(41:59):
have might have might have might have. Uh. Stalin's months
of absence from school seemed to have no impact on
his grades. He caught up instantly and was right back
to being at the top of his class, but his
behavior was notably different. After his second kidnapping from his father, Yeah,
well weird, how weird How that has an impact? He

(42:19):
started facing regular punishment from his teachers, and he organized
his first protest against a school inspector named Butterski, who
viciously punished students for using Georgian Stalin organized a protest, which,
fueled by his rhetoric, almost turned into a riot, and
this is his first like mass demonstration with Stalin organizes.
In eighteen ninety two, when Joseph was fourteen, a group

(42:40):
of three peasant bandits were captured by the police and
sentenced to die by hanging. Because it was the eighteen nineties,
the school's teachers decided the right thing to do was
to take their young students out to go watch several
strangers die horrifically. Some biographers suspect again that this brutality
had a deep impact on Stalin's future violence, but this
misses the point. The condemned men had stolen a cow

(43:00):
and killed a policeman. They'd spent months living in the forest,
attacking rich people and handing out food to other peasants.
They were basically Georgian Robin Hood's, only not very good
at it. Stalin and his friends sympathized with the bandits,
and they felt it was wrong for the priests who
taught them thou shalt not kill, to participate in gleefully
sanctioned state murder. Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean, yeah,

(43:21):
so Stalin winds up like very sympathetic with these revolutionaries
and kind of recognizing gradually that the like, the order
of his society is fucked up, um partly as a
result of this. Like, it doesn't seem like he gains
like a blood thirst for execution from this this, Right,
it's more of a view of society and less unlike
what to do about it? Yeah, now, Cody, you know

(43:43):
what won't execute peasants for stealing a cow and killing
a cop. I do know. It's products. It's products, and
it's products and services. That's right. That's right. All of
the products and services in this are firmly pro cow stealing.
And can we say that so for orchard definitely pro
orchard fires. Yeah, so lightning orchard on fire and buy

(44:04):
some of these products. We're back. So. Stalin loved to
read Big, Big Bookworm as a kid, and one of
his favorite books as a teenager was Darwin's The Origin
of Species. He fell madly in love with the book,
and he pushed on all of his friends. Darwin's theories

(44:25):
seemed to have helped pushed the young Joseph, whose mother
desperately wanted him to be a priest into atheism. One
of his friends, Grisha, later recalled a day when he
and Stalin lay on the grass talking about the injustice
of poverty. He claims, young Stalin suddenly said, God's not unjust.
He doesn't actually exist. We've been deceived. If God existed,
he'd have made the world more just. When Grisha pressed

(44:46):
him on this, he referred his friend to Charles Darwin.
The revelation did not immediately stop Stalin from pursuing a
career in the clergy, though, for a young brilliant boy
in a town like Gory, the seminary was basically the
only way to ever actually build a future or get
an education Asian. So when he was fifteen years old,
Stalin took the entrance exams for the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, Georgia.

(45:06):
This was an extremely prestigious institution, and Keke had to
once again polls strings and colin favors from friends to
get Stalin in. Even with his exceptional grades, the Spiritual
Seminary was not cheap, and Stalin was by far the
poorest child in the school. Keke had to work her
fingers to the bone in order to pay for his schooling,
but to her it was worth it to give ric
Son a chance to become a bishop. Now. The seminary

(45:28):
enforced a brutal schedule for its students, so So was
expected to wake up at seven am, attend a prayer
session before an active breakfast, and then attend classes and
prayers until ten pm. The schedule was only broken up
by luncheon, dinner, and an hour and a half in
the late afternoon, where he was free to go about
in the city. Despite or perhaps because of this discipline,
the seminary in Tifflis had a tendency to breed rebels.
A huge number of the Bolshevik rebels who overthrew the

(45:50):
Czar's empire came from this specific seminary in Georgia. Yeah yeah,
it was like a school for revolutionaries. Unwittingly, yeah uh.
In eighteen eighty five, a little before Stalin went there,
a student had beaten up one of his teachers for
saying Georgian was a dog's language. The next year, that
same rector was murdered with a sword. So yeah, the

(46:13):
Saint your Daddy's grand escalation. Yeah yeah. There were constant
student strikes in protests, and years later another Bolshevik would
claim no secular school produced as many atheists as the
Tiffless Seminary. Outside of class hours, Stalin drank and probably
carried on a handful of romantic liaisons. There are even

(46:33):
semi credible rumors that he may have fathered a child
during this time. But the bulk of his time was
spent writing poetry. He contributed several of his poems to
a local newspaper, and they were good enough that Ilia
Chop Chattavis. I'm not going to pronounce that right. The
greatest poet in Georgia met directly with Stalin. He ordered
the magazine to publish five of Stalin's poems and called

(46:53):
him the young man with the burning eyes. Poetry was
huge in Georgia at the time in a way that
we really can't under stand, and poets were some of
the land's greatest heroes. And Stalin actually becomes famous for
his poetry while he's still a teenager. Um. He wrote
it under the pseudonym Socello. But he was extremely popular
and and famous as a poet before he was ever
famous as a revolutionary, and his work is actually still

(47:16):
praised as quite good today. Um, it's like one of
those things you have a lot of stories of, like
bad artists who become dictators. Install is the opposite, Like
every artistic endeavor he took part, and he was really
good at yeah, he was really talented in general at yeah. Yeah,
And some of the poems he wrote hold a few

(47:36):
hints about the man that he became. And I'm gonna
quote from young Stalin again. So Solo's next poem, A
Crazed Ode to the Moon, reveals more of the poet.
A violent, tragically depressed outcast in a world of glaciers
and divine providence is drawn to the sacred moonlight. And
his third poem, Stalin explores the contrast between violence and
man and nature and the gentleness of birds, music and singers.
The fourth is the most revealing. Stalin imagines a prophet

(47:58):
not honored in his own country, a wandering poet poisoned
by his own people. Now seventeen, stolen already envisions a
paranoiac world where great profits could only expect conspiracy and murder.
So he's a little little kind of kind of goth Yeah, yeah, conflicts.
He's very successful and his later like the bank robbery,

(48:22):
that's one of his first famous actions. Part of why
he's able to carry it out is that, like one
of the guards that he relies on for inside information
is a huge fan of his poems. Um yeah, it's yeah,
it's yeah. But he doesn't keep it up for very long.
After like a year or so of incredible success, Joseph
stops writing poetry. Um. And he later explains, I lost
interest in writing poetry because it requires one's entire attention

(48:44):
a hell of a lot of patients, and in those
days I was like quicksilver. Just he just gets bored
of it. Yeah, he's got too much running through his brain. Yeah, yeah,
because yeah, many fist fights to get in right. Well yeah,
I mean yeah, you need like quiet reflection and uh peace,
And he's not got a lot of peace inside him. Yeah,

(49:04):
that is not the guy he is. It is likely
that Stalin's interest in writing poems was overwritten by a
new interest in revolutionary socialist literature. The seminary had a
small group of rebellious students who would gather together at
night and read forbidden works of political theory, eventually graduating
to heavy hitters like the Communist Manifesto. Stalin and his
friends joined a local club for reading illegal books the

(49:26):
Cheap Library, which basically worked as a book sharing program.
They also bought books from the local store, and Stalin
would regularly steal books too, joking to his friends that
he had expropriated them for the revolution. They would wait
until lights out to read when the priests were all asleep.
Most nights, so So would stay up until the wee
hours of the morning, sacrificing most of a night's sleep
for the chance to read a legal literature. He was

(49:48):
caught several times, usually reading books by Victor Hugo. His
favorite book was The Patricide by Alexander Kezbeggie, which featured
a bandit hero named Koba. Coba was a Georgian partisan,
basically a terrorist, fighting for liberation from Russia. Young Stalin
fell in love with Coba. One of his friends recalled Coba,
became so So's god and gave his life meeting. He
wished to become Coba. He called himself Coba and insisted

(50:11):
we call him that. His face shown with pride and
pleasure when we called him Coba. The name meant a
lot to Stalin. The vengeance of the Caucasus Mountain people's
the ruthlessness of the bandit, the obsession with loyalty and betrayal,
and the sacrifice of person and family for a cause.
It was a name he already loved his substitute father.
Years later, Stalin would adopt the named coba Is one
of his revolutionary pseudonyms. So he's basically like, he gets

(50:36):
super into fucking fan fiction. Yeah, he's a big old
fan boy dork, like they all are, like Hitler with
his cowboy novels. Yeah, it's all the same, like gamers
who become Nazis and wrongly sort of like fetishize. I
don't know, the god Emperor from Warhammer. Yeah. Yeah, it's

(50:57):
this train in authoritarian personality, like every personality. I guess
we all are vulnerable to it. Everybody picks a cool
person from history or fiction, Like, yeah, everyone wants to
be the special boy does the special Everybody wants to
be the special boy who does the special thing. It
is a powerful human needs. By the late eighteen nineties,
uh Stalin had gone from romantic poet to Marxist fanatic.

(51:18):
His reading had convinced him that quote the revolutionary proletariat
alone is destined by history to liberate mankind and bring
the world happiness. This apothesis, he believed would require trial
and suffering and change, but would ultimately result in scientifically
proven socialism. After a couple of years of diligent reading,
Joseph got frustrated by the fact that all his group
did was read. Though. He complained to the leader of

(51:39):
the reading circle, a guy named DevD Aarni, and insisted
that the group get involved in something real, something violent.
DevD Aarreini refused, and Stalin broke off to make his
own study group dedicated to fucking ship up as well
as reading. The first outlet for his youthful rage would
be a particularly aggressive seminary priest nicknamed black Spot for
a hideous mole on his head. And eighteen ninety seven,

(52:00):
Stalin had been caught thirteen times reading band books, and
as a result, black Spot launched a crusade to break
up these secret reading circles. He would search the boy's
foot lockers and dirty laundry. Over the months, he grew
obsessed with catching Stalin. And I'm gonna quote again from
young Stalin. At prayers, the boys had the Bible open
on their desks and read marks are plucking off the
sage of Russian Marxism on their knees. In the courtyard

(52:21):
started a huge pile of firewood in which Stalin and
Iramushvili would hide the band works in where they would
sit and read them. Abashidze whose black Spot, waited for
this and then sprang out to catch them, but they
managed to drop the books into the logs. We were
locked up in the detention cell at once, sitting late
into the evening and darkness without food. But hunger made
us rebellious, so he banged on the doors until the
monk brought us something to eat. Stalin grew his hair

(52:43):
out long as an active protest, deliberately targeting black Spot.
When the priest demanded he cut it, Stalin thumbed his
nose at the man. This prompted the priest to crack
down harder, and one night he finally succeeded in catching
their reading circle in the act writing filthy jokes in
a notebook. The priests leapt into the room and grabbed
the journal out of stalin His hand, and young Stalin
refused to give it up, and they wound up fighting
over the book. The priest won black Spot March. Stalin

(53:07):
back to his room and forced the boys to soak
their journal with wax and then lighted on fire. After this,
he continued stalking Stalin, catching him again a few nights later,
reading forbidden books. This was enough to get a letter
sent home to Keke, who rode to Tiflis immediately to
talk with her son. They had what Josepher called is
their first argument over this. At one point Keke told him,
my son, you're my only child. Don't kill me. How

(53:28):
will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas the second
leave that to those who have brothers and sisters. Hurt
by his mother's pain and fear, Joseph shared her that
he was not a rebel. Keke called this his first lie. Yeah, yeah,
it was. Joseph's behavior continued to degrade, and his grades
finally slipped to He was still one of the best

(53:48):
students at the seminary, but was no longer at the
top of the class. Seminary journals note that he declared
himself an atheist, refused to pray, talked in class, and
would not take his hat off as a sign of
respect to the monks. He received eleven warnings in the
space of a few days which prompted black Spot and
his fellow priests to search his possessions. Um. Yeah, so
he's he's he's uh you could say, acting out at

(54:12):
this point. Yeah. I mean he's being radicalized. Yeah, he's
he's been radicalized and he's acting out. Yeah. Um so uh,
this all kind of comes to a head, um with
you know, sort of a fight between Stalin and this monk,
the black Spot, who is like his his like really
the guy who pushes Stalin out of you know, what

(54:33):
might be considered a normal path in life and kind
of on this revolutionary course. Like he's clearly his head
was leading him there, but this is the guy that
he's sort of binds all of those feelings of frustration
up in. Right. It's like, yeah, you go to college
and you read and learn, and you like find these
groups of people, but you don't have Yeah. This sort
of like uh this you you like uniting figure. Yeah,

(54:58):
that pushes you yeah farther, Yeah, abbasids the black Spot.
This like this this priest kind of becomes the symbol
of everything that's wrong with society to Stalin. Yeah. Uh
and I'm gonna quote one more time from the book
Young Stalin about sort of the last fight they have
in the seminary. They sprinted back into the seminary just
in time to see the inspector force open Stalin's trunk

(55:19):
and find some forbidden works. Abashidz grabbed them and was
triumphantly bearing his prize up the stairs when one of
the group charged and rammed the monk, almost loosening his
grip on the books, but black Spot held on valiantly.
The boys jumped on him and knocked the volumes out
of his hands. Stalin himself ran up, seized the books
and took to his heels. He was banned from visiting
town and Kelby and his like the friend who had
charged the priest, was expelled. Yet ironically so so schoolwork

(55:43):
seemed to improve. He received very good fours from most
subjects in a five for logic. Even now, he still
enjoyed his history lessons. Indeed, he so liked his history teacher,
the only seminary teacher he admired, that he later took
the trouble to save his life. Meanwhile, the black Spot
had lost control of Stalin, but could not restrain his
own obsessive pursuit of this malcontent. They were getting closer
to the breaking point, the monk crept up on him

(56:03):
and peaked at him, reading yet another forbidden book. He
then pounced, taking the book from him, but Stalin simply
wrenched it out of his hands, to the amazement of
the other boys. He then went on reading it. Abshidze
was shocked. Don't you know who I am? He shouted.
Stalin rubbed his eyes and said, I see the black
spot and nothing else. He had crossed the line. Yeah.
Joseph was expelled in May of eighteen ninety nine. The

(56:25):
official cause was non appearance at exams, but this is
not entirely accurate. For years, Joseph would claimed that he
had been expelled from Marxist propaganda. His mother, however, claimed
that he had been taken out of school against his
will by her when he caught pneumonia. But the real
cause seems to be more banel than either of these.
The black Spot raised the tuition rates just high enough
that Keke could no longer afford to pay for Joseph

(56:45):
to stay enrolled, and this seems to be what forced
him out of seminary. But this was not a great
tragedy for young Stalin. He had long ago decided he
was never going to become a priest. According to Sebastian Montfiore,
black Spot had perversely turned stal And into an atheist
Marxist and taught him exactly the oppressive tactics surveillance, spying,
invasion of inner life, violation of feelings, and Stalin's own

(57:07):
words that he would recreate in his Soviet police state.
And that Cody takes us up to Stalin's adulthood. What
a fun childhood, j Stall baby, Yeah, a little baby
Joe doing crimes, learning lessons, right, having secret yeah, secret teachers,

(57:31):
priest fights, sworn enemy, is a p yeah, yeah, putting
on his fight clothes. But getting getting kidnapped a couple
of times, kidnapped more times than any of the other
students we've talked or subjects we've talked about. He really
got kidnapped a lot. Well, And I mean, you know,
usually you get kidnapped once and that's kind of that's

(57:54):
that's the one. Mm hmm. Good ship. Yeah, Well, Cody
has changed your openny of our old buddy j Stall
at all. Um. I wouldn't say it's changed. I would
say it's more robust. It's some illuminations, Um, yeah, what
I mean, it's sort of every step of the way,

(58:15):
You're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, he took
that way, he took that with him, carried that with
him for a long Yeah. That that one stayed with him. Yeah,
and just sort of every action he took and every
action taken against it's like, yep, all right, there you go.
That's yeah, very eliminating. Cool ship, cool ship. Well, Cody,

(58:35):
has this convinced you to start your own Marxist utopia
in the steps of Russia? It convinced me more. Yah, yeah, Okay,
we're gonna we're gonna fight days, We're gonna get just
going to be fighting fight days and kidnapping children. I
learned the opposite lesson there that I've learned that kidnapping
is good, So it is good. This has always been

(58:55):
a pro kidnapping podcast. That's okay. I didn't I didn't
want it. I didn't want to presume. So no, Sophie,
we're sponsored by the concept of kidnapping, right, I mean, yeah,
it's their number one sponsor is the concept of kidnapp
Promo code do it d o I TA point point
promo code kidnapping at the New app Kidnapper with no

(59:19):
e Take the Children dot Com, Take the Children dot Com.
Oh boy, Cody, you want to plug your plug doubles?
I can't wait and so I won't. I'll do it now.
Uh yeah, I got a show called some More News.
You can check it out on YouTube. We got a Twitter,
my personal twitters Dr Mr Cody. We have podcasts my
cost Katie Stole, Even more News. I've got another podcast

(59:41):
with my co host Katie Stole and my other co host,
Robert Evans, called Worst Year Ever. Check out that sounds
it's pretty good. Um, it's terrible in terms of the
subject matter and the time in which it's recorded. Um.
And yeah, our patreon dot com slash some more News
if you want to support that, and I don't. What's up, guys,
How are you doing? Hey? Are you doing? The Democrats

(01:00:06):
are losing the impeachment vote as we speak, because the
Democrats are losers apparently. Yeah, the Democrats. You know, what
Joseph Stalin wouldn't have done is taken no for an
answer from Congress. But that's not a good thing. Yeah, yeah,
maybe not something that they should do. So by the
time this episode comes out on Thursday, because the Senate's

(01:00:29):
voting on Wednesday, big old losers, a bunch of losers. Yeah,
they already lost the witness vote today. Our only hope
is that the coronavirus makes it into a really nice
DC steakhouse. It thins up Congress a little bit. I
feel like the other things are going to happen. Nope,
that is it. I feel like if that happens and

(01:00:52):
it's spread more and maybe maybe it won't be contained
to just a few members of Congress, that we want
to go away. Nope, nope, all right, that's it. That
is the only hope, and your only hope is to
listen to more Behind the Bastards. You can find us
on the internet along with the sources for this episode,
Behind the Bastards dot com. You can find me on
Twitter at I right, okay, you can find us on

(01:01:13):
Twitter and Instagram at at bastards pod. Um. You know
that's the that's the episode. Uh, Go go out into
the world and remember the most important lesson of Joseph Stalin.
Regularly fistfight all of your neighbors. Then catapult the cow. Yeah,
catapult the hell out of a cow. Wait, wait, wait,

(01:01:38):
I'm so sorry listening