The bloody story of a sickly child who murdered millions to build modern Russia

The boy, little Joseph, has urinated blood. It's not the first time. His father, Visarion, shoemaker, drunk, violent, and always suspecting that Joseph is not a child of his blood, alternates fury, alcohol and blindness also hitting his wife, Yekaterina Gueladze, Keke, almost kill her.

One day, before that scene, Iosif dares and throws a knife.
The drop goes beyond the glass. The woman asks for help, and the chief of police of the region gets a way out: she moves mother and son as far as possible, and she makes her way working until exhaustion in what fits. Everything is for Joseph and his education. And he will not stop until he enrolls him in a religious school ...

The child was born in Gori, a small Georgian village, on December 6, 1878. For many years it will be Yósif Vissariónovich Dzhugashvili, until he settled in history as Joseph (Stalin) Stalin, a word that means "steel." Nickname that will not disappoint ...



But he was born fragile. Your left foot has fingers joined by a membrane (defect called syndactyly), which will never allow you to walk normally.

Before turning 7, he gets measles, scarlet fever and smallpox, which leaves perennial marks on his face ...

Teen, he is run over by a horse cart and breaks an arm. His mother, superstitious and fatalistic, believes that his son has a curse -something that years will prove, but in the opposite direction-, and strives to equip him with weapons against the adversity of fate: he imagines him turned into a pope, a tall religious leader, a spiritual leader ... and almost right. Because Iosif, precocious reader and pushed by it, reaches what in his socially helpless condition is a great victory: a scholarship to study at the Theological Seminary of Tbilisi, Georgian Orthodox line. An experience that he hated until his death.

But those avatars of health -and their scars-, plus the rumors of their status as a bastard son, were not appeased by the serenity and silence of the seminary. The violence, like a relentless gene, pushes him to bloody street fights that his mother tries to mitigate ... with no less terrible physical punishments. A vicious circle that makes it more and more provocative and threatening.

Actually, a two-faced one. A double face. Because everyday quarrels, sometimes with boys older than him, have a strange counterweight: Iosif writes poems nothing despicable, sings with excellence (he could succeed in that field), and passionately embraces the reading of revolutionary books. A revolution that will not take long ...

First stumble In the seminary they are not willing to tolerate his rebellion, let alone his proclaimed atheism. Ergo, they expel him. Stop being "Soso", his nickname as a child: they begin to call him Koba (Invincible), name of a literary hero.

He hardly saw his father again a couple of times, a soul lost between cruelty, vodka and wine, which disappears from his life in an unclear way: one version says that he was killed in a tavern brawl; another, who died in 1909 in a hospital in Tbilisi, devastated by tuberculosis, and ended up in a common grave.

The October Revolution (1917) finds it among the most radical Bolsheviks. In 1922, at 44, he is secretary general of the central committee of the Communist Party. Two years later, when Vladimir Lenin died, he monopolized the power and purge of opponents of the party. Among them, Leon Trotsky, his greatest political enemy. They divide irreconcilable positions. Stalin wants an exclusively Russian revolution, and his rival, a permanent struggle ..., and international.



Banished from the Soviet Union in 1929 and exiled in Mexico, Stalin orders him killed. In 1940, a peak blow to his head cut off his life. The murderer is the Catalan communist militant Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río ...

From then on, the political career of Stalin, that fragile health child and that adolescent who sang and wrote poems as well as braided in wild street fights ..., will not stop his colossal growth. Scale all the degrees of the suffocating communist bureaucracy, send millions to death - it is a book paranoid, according to Psychology - and twice again, it will be read by history as a criminal no less than Adolf Hitler, but also as the man who after the Second World War transformed the USSR into the second largest economy in the world.



Not without cost in lives. His policy of abrupt passage from agrarian country to industrial power shook peasants and farmers stripped, revolts broke no less violent than in the time of the last Tsar (Nicholas II), and the immense territory, food production severed, suffered and shuddered with the tragic famine of 1932-1933 ... while Stalin responded to his criminal way: millions of souls thrown into the labor camps, and millions more deported with condemned to live in the opposite side of hell: the most remote and frozen areas ...

But the Georgian - one of Stalin's nicknames - did not stop killing even when the fields returned to production. In 1937 he deployed the so-called Great Purge: total elimination of hundreds of thousands of alleged conspirators and enemies of the regime ... without even forgiving Red Army leaders.

And finally, the big bang. Broken his pact of non-aggression to Nazi Germany, the man with the perpetual mustache threw all his war power to recover the old territories of the Empire: Poland, Finland, the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, Bucovina ... and his greatest victory: he tore apart Hitler in the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad (only there, a million dead), the atrocious Russian winter that annihilated Napoleon fulfilled his role, and did not stop until a Red Army soldier hoisted the banner of the sickle and hammer on the Dome of the Foreign Ministry, on the mortal remains of Berlin and the corpse of Hitler ...

Suddenly, the small and sickly Iosef was one of the players with the best decks at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, where the new map of Europe was drawn. And already, for positive and negative reasons (one writer said it was "a mixture of intellectual and murderer"). An unavoidable and fearsome leader for the entire planet.

Not even Lenin, the factotum of October 1917, could stop his madness for power. In a letter of January 4, 1923, he said: "Stalin is too abrupt, and this defect, fully tolerable among us, the communists, becomes intolerable in the office of secretary general." I propose to the comrades that they look for a way to pass Stalin to another position and appoint another man more tolerant, more loyal, more correct, more attentive, less capricious.It is not a smallness, and if it is, it is a smallness that can reach decisive importance ".

 Stalin is too abrupt, and this defect, fully tolerable among us, the communists, becomes intolerable in the position of secretary general

A dramatic anecdote more than revealing: his son Yákov was taken prisoner in the battle of Smolensk and was dragged to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. At first they did not recognize him, but someone revealed his identity. They tried to bend him to propaganda in favor of Germany, but he refused. Second chance of survival: exchange it for Marshal Friedrich Paulus. But Stalin responded "the Soviet Union does not exchange soldiers for marshals". Yakov died in that field on April 15, 1943, perhaps killed while trying to flee. The cause was never known. Before he had tried to commit suicide. And his father never showed pity or anger over the death of his son. Worse yet: upon learning of his suicide attempt, according to writer Sebag Montefiore, he said:
- He did not even know how to kill himself ...

The dictator's family life was also proof of his icy character. Yakov was the son of Stalin's first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, who died in 1907, barely four years after they married. His second wife was Nadezhda Allilúyeva, who died in 1932. Officially, due to a serious illness. But it is possible that she committed suicide after a terrible fight with her husband.

They had two children: Vasili and Svetlana. The first, decorated by the air force, died of alcoholism in 1962. Five years later, Svetlana fled to the United States: a social and political scandal that the press ran until the last chapter: the daughter of the Russian tyrant protected by his worst enemy…

He never came back: he died in Wisconsin in 2011.