STALIN’S LIFE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 76, 29 July 1941, Page 3

STALIN’S LIFE

SON OF A GEORGIAN SERF IIOYHOOD MID PRIMITIVE NATURE Stalin remains "the unknown" among Hie world's outstanding leaders. His ! reticence, his shrinking from the lime- | light, seem now like theatrical hocus--1 pocus. But the silence and the shrinking are not poses, says a writer in ithe Melbourne “Age." ' They are native to him. Stalin kept consistently in the background before | he attained his present position, when there could have been no logical suspicion of theatricality. It was due to a natural distaste for phrase making and poses—and a distinct lack of talents in those diree- | tions as well—that Stalin did not : impress the word with his really tremendous role in the Russian revolution during 1917 and the crowded, | melodramatic years immediately after. Stalin, a man of vigorous physique, was born in 1879 at Gori, a suburb of Till is. the capital of Georgia, which is situated in the south of Russia. Georgia was a doughty i little Caucasian nation under Russian rule, and is now one of the i States of the Soviet Union. There j Stalin lived until he was 23. NO CHILDHOOD RECORD There is hardly any reliable inlorl mation regarding his childhood and youth— iu) recollections of relations or memories of acquaintance, no family papers or private letters, no school notes or boyish essays. All that is available is the guarded con- ! lidence of some of his comrades of those days. His mother told a foreign correspondent that Josef was her only son. Three had been born before him, but the}* all died before his birth. ‘‘Oh.” she said, "he was a good boy. He worked hard and was always reading and talking, and tried to understand. He went to school wlien he was eight." This maternal account is flatly contradicted by the accounts of Bolshevik Georgians. They found him hard, insensitive and without consideration for his mother. But she was so devoted that she wanted him to become a parish priest in the Greek orthodox church. Stalin, however, soon had his own way. He broke away from the church and started to work on socialistic revolutionary lines. Stalin’s real name was Josef Vissarionovich Djugashoili. As the Georgians obstinately resisted Russification, the people there retained their original language. Thus even today Stalin speaks Russian incorrectly with a strong Caucasian accent, which arouses the scornful irony of ‘‘real’' Russians. His mother required an interpreter. One cannot help thinking of the Corsican Bonaparte. whose mother tongue was Italian and who hated France before he came to govern it. just as the Georgian Stalin was to govern Russia whose imperial rule he had detested. Adolf Hitler’s case is similar, in a way. Austria and Prussia were rivals for centuries. Austria wanted to maintain her position as a dominating Geri man State. Prussia wanted to create (her own powerful Germany and make 'smaller German States like Saxony arid (Bavaria join under her rulership. In i 1864 a war between Prussia and Austria ! was the outcome of this rivalry, and 1 Prussia won. But the strange fact is that now an Austrian with a strong j Austrian accent rules Germany, and has even made his homeland a part of A HARD REGION A prominent Georgian wrote about | Stalin's homeland: ‘‘To see this lovely ! country the traveller must journey for hundreds of miles through virgin for- ! ests and waste land, spend nights i.i j the poor huts of the peasants, who complain of their poverty arid who somelimes. dying of fever, listen to the howl'ing of the jackals, hear the complaints of the inhabitants on the ravage- of (bears and wild boars in their maize j fields —in fact, see a country poor and : desolate in the midst of luxuriant vege- | tation.” I The past weighs heavily on the family and social life of the i Georgians. Stalin's parents ' his father was a cobbler and peasant) had been ; serfs. the system not having been abolished in Transcaucasia un il 1865. J But the nobility, who represented the i great landlords, still treated the pearants as creatures subject to their baron’s caprice. ' Such was Stalin's environment in his earliest years. He was surrounded by remnants of barbarism, by ruin, desolajtion and sometimes famine. This might {account for the attitude and the view ; of life of the man who is now the Red Czar of all Russians. When Josef (Vissarionovich succeeded Lenin as dictator he made his name similar to that of his predecessor and called himself ! Stalin.