Essay Database

Josef Stalin Josef Stalin was born in 1879, under the name Iosif Vissarionich Dzhugashvili. He was born in Gori, which is now the Republic of Georgia, and his parents were both Georgian peasants who did not know how to speak Russian. However, Stalin learned the Russian language at his school, a Georgian church school, which he attended from 1888 to 1894. Here, he earned a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary, where he started reading and learning …

…Stalingrad, and participated in the Allies' meetings at Tehran and Yalta in 1943, and Potsdam during 1945. After the war he extended Communist domination over most of the countries liberated by the Soviet armies. In his last years, increasingly paranoid and physically weak, Stalin was apparently planning another purge. In January of 1953, he ordered the arrest of many doctors from Moscow, mostly Jews, charging them with medical assassinations, but Stalin's sudden death in 1953 forestalled perhaps another bloodbath.