FOR THE MOTHERLAND

His birth name was Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, but to the world he will always be known simply as Stalin ("man of steel" in Russian). Stalin was born in 1878 to a poor Georgian family. His father was a cobbler who often beat his wife and young son. At the age of eight, Stalin began his education in the Gori Church School, where instruction was conducted in Russian and he was mocked for his Georgian accent. Stalin graduated first in his class at the age of fourteen and began attending school next at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. Stalin had no interest in becoming a priest, but the seminary was one of the few institutions of higher learning permitted in Georgia by the repressive tsarist government.

During his reign Stalin encouraged the development of a sycophantic cult of personality where he was worshipped as little less than a god. When he finally died in 1953 there was an enormous outpouring of genuine grief across the Soviet Union.Overall, it must be said that Stalin was successful in changing the backwards agricultural state of the tsars into a modern global superpower. No country deserves more credit for defeating Nazi Germany than the Soviet Union.