0:02

You know, Cody, the nice thing about

0:04

felonies is that, oh ship, we're recording,

0:06

aren't we. Uh.

0:10

The bad thing about felonies,

0:12

felonies are terrible. Don't commit

0:14

them? Oh no, there the always

0:17

started in the middle of our conversation about how felonies

0:19

are bad and don't you don't do crimes

0:22

straight, don't crimes? Yeah, exactly,

0:25

avoid crimes and embrace

0:28

head to resensuality. The motto

0:30

of this podcast, Well, we were talking about that

0:32

is what we were talking about. This is horrible, you

0:34

guys. No, this is the best introduction

0:37

yet, Sophie, The introduction we planned

0:40

that we're doing now is the best one yet.

0:43

Speaking of not doing crimes, you

0:46

know who was the best at not committing

0:48

crimes? Ah,

0:51

the best at not committing crimes,

0:53

the best at not committing crimes. I

0:56

mean, I was gonna say Jesus, but that's the opposite.

0:58

That's not true at all. He committed crime.

1:02

That was Jesus whole thing. Huge

1:05

crimer huge crimer um.

1:08

Yeah, watch him, he's a crimer um.

1:12

I don't know me, Joseph

1:16

the Sarianovitch Stalin

1:21

really yeah, yeah, yeah,

1:24

we're where did I introduce

1:26

the show's name. No, this

1:28

is behind the bast Welcome to the

1:31

Don't Do Crimes Podcast with

1:33

Cody Johnston, my co host for

1:35

Today and Today every day. In this

1:37

podcast, we talk about a terrible person from

1:39

history and revealed details from their past

1:42

that the listeners do not know. And today

1:44

we're talking about the childhood

1:47

of our old best friend j Stall

1:50

Joey, Joey Joe

1:52

Steel, little Joey, okay,

1:55

little joe bo s bus

1:58

like his baby crimes, some

2:00

of them, yeah, some baby crimes in here. Yeah.

2:03

Okay. Are you a fan of Joseph

2:05

Stalin. I'm aware of Joseph Stalin Okay,

2:08

okay, not a Stalin stand not a

2:11

Stalhead standing standing, Yeah,

2:13

standing, standing is what they call him. Yeah,

2:16

a job bro, Joe Bro. There we go.

2:19

Um,

2:23

what do you know about Stalin's childhood?

2:26

Not much actually about his childhood. That's

2:28

good here because otherwise this episode

2:30

would be disappointing. I know all about

2:32

I know all about his baby crimes,

2:35

all about his his very tiny crimes.

2:38

Well, Cody, Joseph Vassarianovitch

2:41

Juggas Veeley was born in eighteen

2:43

seventy eight in Gory, Georgia, And

2:46

I will try to pronounce Jugashvilley

2:49

close to correct, but I won't, I

2:51

won't, it won't happen. At

2:54

the time, Gory was a very

2:56

tiny town on the outskirts of the Russian Empire,

2:59

sparsely popular, did and largely underdeveloped.

3:01

The area around Gory was beautiful. The czar's

3:04

brother kept a palace there, but it was also

3:06

remote. The future ruler of Russia would

3:08

count himself lucky that he came up in Gory,

3:10

though see in the whier CAUCUSUS

3:13

region, only one in thirty children were allowed

3:15

to go to school because they just weren't that many schools

3:18

in Georgia, though one in fifteen children

3:20

got to have an education. Uh.

3:22

This is because Gory had a large merchant population

3:24

and comparently a comparatively outsized

3:26

amount of development. The small town of seven

3:29

thousand where Stalin grew up featured four

3:31

schools, including a two story church

3:33

founded in eighteen eighteen. In

3:36

Gory, one in ten boys attended

3:38

school. He's all

3:41

right, yeah, yeah, he's won the lottery.

3:44

Yeah. I mean, what is what is your

3:46

ideal ratio of of of people

3:48

to attend school? My ideal

3:51

ratio is a hunt. It's uh,

3:54

one out of one ten out of ten. I

3:58

think that should just be me and

4:01

out of all of them. Yeah, so

4:03

like one out of billions,

4:06

it's you. Yeah, because all we really

4:08

need is one podcaster and a lot of people

4:11

to dig. That's true, to go to school to dig.

4:13

Who's who's teaching you? Though? At this school? Then

4:16

uh, that is a mystery. Nobody knows. You

4:18

just walk into a building and you just walk out,

4:22

and I know where to tell people to dig. And

4:24

that is the ideal society. So

4:26

you've you're just like a dig major.

4:29

Yeah yeah, ok yeah, digging

4:32

and uh philosophy,

4:35

but you're not but you're not like good enough to

4:37

do the digging yourself. Well,

4:39

there's plenty of diggers. Someone needs

4:41

to tell them where to dig. Otherwise you just have a

4:43

bunch of random holes that's not gonna

4:47

or like very coordinated holes. Yeah okay,

4:50

yeah yeah, And then I can tell people now we

4:52

eat, now we continue digging,

4:54

and then they do it. Well, I

4:56

sip dacharies exactly one

4:59

person, Yeah, which I've earned and

5:01

learned how to make in school, which is taught

5:03

by a mystery. All right, back

5:06

to Stone. Joseph's

5:08

parents were Vissarian, juggish, Villey

5:10

and a Katarina Gelazi. They'd

5:13

been married back in eighteen seventy two, when Vissarian

5:15

was twenty two and she was seventeen. Now

5:18

Vissarian went by Basso for regions

5:20

that I'm sure makes sense to Georgians, and a Katerina

5:22

went by Keke, which does kind of make sense to

5:25

everybody. Uh. Beso

5:27

was handsome, broad shouldered, intelligent

5:29

and industrious. He was a cobbler by trade

5:31

and widely seen as the best bootmaker in

5:34

town. Keke was gorgeous and charming

5:36

and beloved by just about everybody in

5:38

the town. They had conceived two children

5:40

before Joseph's birth. Bezo was,

5:43

in his wife's words, almost mad with happiness

5:45

when the first, Mikhail, was born in eighteen

5:47

seventy five. Tragically, he died

5:49

two months later, driving Basso equally

5:52

mad with grief. He began to drink,

5:54

but this was the nineteenth century, and he didn't let something

5:57

like a dead baby stop you from rolling the dice on another

5:59

baby. The Jugish Belis had another son

6:01

a year later, Georgy geergy

6:04

g e I R g I Uh.

6:06

He died six months later, which, yeah,

6:08

I'm not going to be able to pronounce all these jeergy.

6:11

Yeah. He died six months later, which,

6:13

from an optimistic point of view, is a three improvement

6:17

in his linking of the first kid. They're

6:19

doing it, they're making progress. Do

6:22

you think pointing that out to them would have made them less

6:24

set? I really don't. I

6:28

feel like the other

6:31

of the other child. You know, when you

6:33

look at this statistically, you're

6:35

a way better parent than you were before. Look

6:37

at how much O. That's called learning. That's

6:39

growth right there, that's growth

6:42

right there. Don't worry about it. Yeah,

6:44

It's sort of like when you look at

6:46

the number of people who die on my jet ski

6:48

and just just total numbers,

6:50

it looks like I'm a bad jet ski pilot. But

6:53

when you compare the number of people who have died on my jet ski

6:55

in the last three years to the prior nine

6:57

years, I'm a great jet ski pilot.

6:59

I've improved immensely. They're exactly

7:01

That's that's how you look at that is

7:04

how you look at statistics. So

7:06

when Joseph was born that December in eight

7:09

his mom and his dad had reason to be less than enthusiastic

7:12

about his chances of survival. So so as

7:14

they called him. Was weak, fragile, and

7:16

thin. The second and third toes of his

7:18

left foot were webbed. He was sit constantly,

7:21

and he was always on the verge of death. And

7:23

I don't normally say if only that baby had died,

7:26

but this is Stalin died

7:31

two out of three. You were so I

7:33

thought the time was a charm. Oh No, before

7:37

Joseph's birth, Baso it vowed, just let

7:39

the child survive, and I'll crawl to Jerry on my knees

7:41

with a child on my shoulders. But of course,

7:44

promises to God are the easiest ones to ignore.

7:46

And once Joseph came out alive, Baso sort

7:48

of forgot about this. But then Joseph

7:50

got sick, and Basso assumed this was God, being

7:52

like, you made a promise, and now you're welching

7:54

someone to murder your baby, because that's

7:57

God. That was the deal.

7:59

So he keke walked to the church and donated

8:02

a sheep to the priests. Now,

8:04

unlike his older brothers, Stalin survived, and

8:06

in the early years the family thrived. Gorey was

8:08

a poor town and most of the houses were made of mud,

8:10

but bezos shoemaking business did well enough

8:12

for him to hire apprintices and eventually ten

8:15

employees. For a while, the family

8:17

lived well. Kek later recalled our

8:19

family happiness was limited. One

8:21

of bezos apprentices later said he

8:23

lived better than anyone else of our profession. They

8:26

always had butter in their house. Gives

8:28

you an idea of like where things are for society

8:31

at this point, he's got butter.

8:32

But yeah.

8:36

Now this would later be very embarrassing for

8:38

adults Stalin because communist heroes are

8:40

not supposed to come from prosperous middle class

8:42

roots.

8:46

Yeah, they're not supposed to be butter haers. You

8:48

get fucking you get fucking starved to death

8:51

for having butter. Yeah.

8:55

As an adult, he ruefully admitted, I'm

8:57

not the son of a worker. My father had a shoeworkshop

9:00

up, employing apprentices and exploiter. We

9:02

didn't live badly, and that was like,

9:04

if only we'd lived badly, I

9:06

wish, I wish it had harder times.

9:09

But luckily for his future socialist credentials,

9:11

his family happiness did not last long.

9:13

Bezo had started drinking after his first son's

9:16

death, and continued drinking for the rest of his life.

9:18

He made friends with a local Russian exile named

9:20

Paca, who'd been basically forced to flee to

9:22

Georgia for his connections to a group called the People's

9:24

Will, a terrorist organization who would repeatedly

9:27

be tried and eventually succeeded to murder

9:29

the Czar. Some of Joseph's earliest memories

9:31

were made talking to PoCA, who liked Little So

9:33

So and bought him a canary. Like Bezo,

9:36

Poco was a hardcore alcoholic. One

9:38

winter, he passed out on the snow and died, and

9:40

Beaso had to go to one sright. I

9:43

didn't know that. You was really abrupt.

9:46

Yeah, that's fucking life back

9:48

there. Everybody knows someone who dies in the snow.

9:51

I know it's it's it really sounded like You're like,

9:53

here's like a fun little story about a time he got

9:55

drunk. But then the story ended,

9:58

like all Stalin store in

10:01

a miserable, miserable, unthinkable

10:03

death. Yeah. Yeah,

10:05

So after his drinking buddy died, Baso had

10:07

to go to one of the local priests, father Chuck

10:09

Fianni, to find a drinking buddy. As

10:11

an adult, Stalin had a vivid memory of his dad

10:14

and the priest stumbling home, singing out

10:16

a tune. He recalled the priest, saying, you're

10:18

a good bloke, Beso, even for a shoemaker,

10:20

and his father responded, you're a priest,

10:22

but what a priest? I love you all

10:25

right, all right. So

10:28

times in Georgia, some characters,

10:31

some characters. Now, Bezo

10:33

was not a happy drunk, and as he descended

10:35

more and more to drink, he became increasingly obsessed with

10:38

local rumors about Joseph's parentage. See

10:40

Ke was close friends with a guy named dav Ri

10:42

Chiwi, the chief of police. The town

10:44

mayor later testified that Joseph was actually this

10:47

guy's real son. There were also

10:49

rumors that a famous explorer who had crossed

10:51

through the town named Price Evolski had betted

10:53

Keke and produced Joseph. Some townsfolk

10:55

declared that one of the town's for you Jewish men was his

10:57

real dad, But the most commonly sighted

11:00

potential father for Stalin was a guy named Yakov

11:02

Ignatashvili. Ignatashvili

11:04

was the wealthiest man in town, a wine merchant

11:06

and a great boxer. Kek worked in his household

11:09

from time to time, and ignotish Villy did take a

11:11

deep liking to the family. He was named Joseph's

11:13

godfather and later paid for his education.

11:16

There's no way to know the truth, but we absolutely

11:18

knew they were rumors. Some locals accused

11:20

KK of basically being a sex worker. Even

11:22

decades later, a reporter from the Washington

11:24

Post who went to Gory and talked to some of the people

11:26

old enough to have known Kek and Joseph

11:29

uh found claims that young Stalin called

11:31

his mother the prostitute when they had arguments.

11:34

So we don't really know, yeah,

11:39

or if Kek was in fact a prostitute, or

11:41

if she was just really well liked, like

11:44

like a snotty thing for a kid

11:46

to say. Yeah. And it's compounded

11:49

by the fact that in Georgian culture, men

11:51

were expected to have multiple mistresses,

11:54

um, and like everybody

11:56

was just fucking all the time, which definitely

11:59

makes it harder to know what was actually going wrong.

12:01

Right, Well, what else? What else

12:03

are you gonna do? It's joy I'll tell you what else you're gonna

12:05

do later, because it's fun as hell. Um

12:08

Yeah. Keke herself did little

12:10

to downplay the rumors that she had been

12:12

sleeping around a lot, and Joseph could be anybody's

12:14

kid. In her old age, she urged Labrinty

12:17

Barrier that the head of the n k v D

12:19

Stalin's like secret belief. She urged

12:21

his wife Nina to take an illicit lovers

12:23

and basically insinuated that she'd done the same,

12:26

saying, when I was young, I cleaned house for

12:28

people, and when I met a good looking boy, I didn't

12:30

waste the opportunity. So who knows?

12:33

Yeah, there it is. Yeah.

12:36

As an aside, k was quite a character. The

12:38

book Young Stalin by Sebastian sebag Montfior

12:41

includes a number of bizarre anecdotes about her,

12:43

usually based on her own recollections. And

12:45

I'm gonna read you one right now to give you a sense

12:47

of this woman's personality. Quote. She

12:49

managed to attract so So with a flower, at which

12:51

point keke jovially pulled out her breasts and

12:53

showed them to the toddler, who ignored the flower and

12:56

died for the breasts. But the drunk ruction exile

12:58

Polka was spying on them and burst out laughing.

13:00

So I buttoned up my dress. So

13:03

this is like her playing

13:05

with little Yeah,

13:08

these are like the story she tells to everybody

13:11

when her son is the ruler of Russia. She's

13:14

she's a character, kek

13:17

rules. Yeah yeah, all right, all right, yeah.

13:20

So most historians seem to think that Basso

13:23

was in fact Joseph's real father, but the

13:25

rumors at least were real, and they drove an

13:27

increasingly drunken Baso into regular rages.

13:29

On one occasion, he came home wasted and

13:31

threw Joseph on the ground so hard he pied

13:33

blood for days. He would regularly

13:36

charge home drunk, looking for young Stalin and

13:38

screaming where is Keke's little bastard hiding

13:40

under the bed? So yeah,

13:43

yeah, yeah, less less

13:45

whimsical. Yeah, things switched

13:48

hard in old time e Georgia between whimsical

13:50

and beating a child until he p's blood

13:53

for a couple of days. Yep.

13:56

One of young Stalin's schoolmates later recalled

13:59

undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless

14:01

as the father himself, and this person

14:03

came to believe that Bezo's abuses how Stalin learned

14:06

to hate people. Stalin

14:08

did, in fact, spend much of his early childhood hiding

14:10

from his drunken father or watching his dad beat

14:12

his mom. By the time he was five, his dad's

14:14

business wasn't shambles, and Keke was increasingly

14:17

supporting the family. She started to fight back,

14:19

to punching her husband in retaliation

14:21

for his violence. This eventually cowed

14:23

Bezo, and by the time has Joseph was six, his

14:25

father had fled the home. And this seems

14:27

like the best case scenario, right, Like it's

14:30

like the Lifetime movie, like she's abused,

14:32

but then she learns to fight back and father

14:35

leaves the house. Unfortunately,

14:38

violence doesn't work that way. Yeah.

14:42

Um, And as one friend of the family later

14:44

recalled, quote, his mother was head of the family

14:46

now and the fist which had subdued his father was

14:48

now applied to the upbringing of her son. She

14:50

beat him unmercifully for disobedience.

14:54

So that's kind of reality saying,

14:58

yeah, if you learn to solve your problems

15:00

with punching, maybe probably

15:03

Yeah, it's the tragedy

15:05

of the fists. Bummer.

15:09

Yeah, I came on here to have a

15:11

good time, a good time learning

15:13

about j Staalah apparently

15:17

all right. Decades later, on his last visit

15:19

home to see his mother in the nineteen thirties, Dictator

15:21

of All Russia Joseph Stalin asked his mother

15:24

why she'd beaten him so much. She replied,

15:26

it didn't do you any harm. But

15:32

yeah, I shouldn't have said, kek rules like

15:35

she's a character that if I sort of gesture

15:38

to everything around yea, yeah,

15:42

did you no harm? Yeah?

15:45

Now, Stalin's biographers

15:47

are very much sort of of multiple minds on

15:49

this. Sebastian sebag Montfiori, who was certainly

15:51

the most entertaining Staln biographer, draws

15:53

a direct line between all this childhood abuse and

15:55

Stalin's future violence. Um. And

15:57

he also points out that Gory was a wild

16:00

lea violent town in a pretty fun way.

16:02

And I'm going to quote directly from the book Young Stalin

16:04

Now. Gory was

16:06

one of the last towns to practice the picturesque

16:09

and savage custom of free for all town

16:11

brawls with special rules but no holds barred

16:13

violence. The boozing, praying, and fighting

16:16

were all interconnected with drunken priests

16:18

acting as referees. The saloon bars

16:20

of Gory were incorrigible stews of violence

16:22

and crime, town brawls, wrestling

16:24

tournaments, and schoolboy gang warfare, where the

16:26

free Grelli fighting traditions at festivals

16:29

Christmas and Shrove Tide. Before Lent, both

16:31

quarters fielded a parade led by transvestites.

16:33

Are actors writing as carnival kings on camels

16:35

and donkeys, surrounded by pipe players

16:37

and singers and fancy dress. At the Kenoba

16:40

Carnival to celebrate Georgia's sixteen thirty

16:42

four victory over Persia, one actor played

16:44

the Georgians are another the Persian

16:46

Shaw, who was soon pelted with fruit than doused

16:48

in water. The males in each family, from children

16:51

upwards also paraded, drinking wine and singing

16:53

until night fell, when the real fund began.

16:55

This assault of free boxing. The

16:57

sport of Creavy was a mass duel with

17:00

rules. Voice of three wrestled other three

17:02

year olds, Then children fought together, then

17:04

teenagers, and finally the men threw themselves

17:06

into an incredible battle, by which time

17:08

the town was completely out of control, a

17:10

state that lasted into the following day. Even

17:12

at school, where classes fought, classes

17:14

shops were often pillaged. Isn't

17:18

that since that's

17:20

wild, That's that's so

17:22

cool, That's

17:24

like, that's the only town that does

17:27

what. No, it's not the only town.

17:29

It was one of the last ones that used to be

17:31

super common in big chunks of like Eastern

17:33

Europe and the Caucuses. This is the alternative

17:36

to sex you mentioned, right, Yeah, this everybody

17:38

beat the ship out of each other. The day

17:40

where we all fight believable. Let's

17:43

all get wasted and just ruin each

17:45

other in the middle of the street. The

17:47

priests will be refereaced. Fight

17:49

club town amazing. Everybody's

17:52

drunk, everybody's punching each other. It

17:54

just it sounds like the best time. I mean, that's

17:56

like that's your dream. That's like an amusement park.

17:59

Yeah, it's like the good purge,

18:01

Like instead of it being like abusive,

18:04

it's a way for the whole town to celebrate by

18:06

just wailing on each other. Like

18:08

I wish we still

18:11

did that. Hey you can dream.

18:14

Maybe you're in America, you can do whatever you Yeah,

18:16

we could make this the new holiday that could

18:18

get rid of our partisan divide. Nationalist

18:21

fight day. Yeah, bring

18:23

them together to beat the ship exactly.

18:26

Everyone will feel a little bit better and a little bit

18:28

worse. Mm hmm. God,

18:31

what a great thing that would be. If we had universal

18:33

healthcare there it is, or

18:36

or legal street drinking. But you need one

18:38

of the two. Yeah. So for so first

18:40

term universe healthcare and then second term is like,

18:42

well, now we got to fight each other. Yeah,

18:44

now we have to fight now that we know we'll be taken

18:46

care of now we can we have to get our money's worth

18:48

from this fucking health care exactly. Oh

18:53

my god, I mean I

18:56

wish we did that just as a podcasting

18:58

team. Like it's a like a

19:02

like a team building retreat. Yeah, like

19:04

we all fight in a pit and Sophie gets

19:06

really drunk and dressed as a priest and referees.

19:09

Yeah, it's

19:12

a good plan, Sophie, were doing this. You've

19:14

got a new job. This

19:16

is how we're celebrating Shrove Tide when we figure

19:19

out when Shrove Tide is. We're gonna figure

19:21

it out, and we're gonna we're gonna do

19:23

some trust falls. But then

19:27

we're gonna be each other fights.

19:30

O. Katie is going to be in the pit with everybody. We're

19:32

all gonna be. It's gonna she's

19:34

got good reach. It's going to be quite a fist fight.

19:37

Yeah. Well, you're

19:39

gonna have to change your attitude because you're you're gonna

19:41

be You're gonna be the referee. And

19:43

the priest. Oh

19:46

yeah, yeah, she's turning

19:48

around, she's turning it. I'm just trying

19:50

to picture that out. It's

19:53

all about the outfit and then everybody. It sounds

19:55

like a little black and white, you know, from

19:59

the blood. I bet

20:01

we could get a lot of businesses to support, like

20:03

a national fist Fight Day. Yeah,

20:06

yeah, like just like we'll put your name on our jerseys

20:08

and yeah, I hate this continue

20:11

okay, yeah, okay,

20:13

it's easy. It's easy to draw a direct

20:15

line between the gigantic town

20:17

wide beat downs that Joseph uh

20:20

Like participated in as a

20:22

small child and the terrific

20:25

violence that he unleashed as the Red CSAR of

20:27

the U s SR. Citation. Well,

20:30

there's actually a lot of disagreement about this. There's

20:33

a lot of disagreement about another.

20:35

Stalin. Historian Stephen Cottkin cautions

20:37

against that kind of thinking in his biography

20:40

Stalin quote, a sizeable

20:42

chunk of humanity was beaten by one or more parents.

20:45

Nor did Gorey suffer from an especially violent

20:47

Oriental culture. Of these town wide

20:49

fist fights, cat Can notes such uh festive

20:52

violence, mad cap bear fists followed by sloppy

20:54

embraces, was typical of the Russian Empire,

20:56

from Ukrainian market towns to Siberian villages.

20:59

Gorey did not stand it out in the least. So

21:01

basically everybody is doing this like it's

21:03

weird to be like to focus on how this affected

21:06

Stalin's rule when it was like this was just the norm.

21:08

Yeah. Um, So well,

21:11

two things I guess I take away from that is one

21:13

is that we should definitely do this now, because we should

21:15

definitely. If they're arguing that it didn't affect him,

21:17

then it won't affect us and we should do it. Um,

21:20

absolutely, But nobody's arguing with that,

21:22

right. But also, um,

21:25

most of those people who experienced

21:27

that didn't become dictators, so

21:30

there's not really like a control

21:32

group, I guess. Yeah,

21:35

I guess the point is that like the violent

21:37

the kind of violence unleashed under

21:39

Stalin was new, um,

21:42

but every generation of Russian ruler prior

21:44

to Stalin had kind of grown up in the same or

21:48

yeah, and so like the like, so

21:50

it's weird to be like suddenly

21:52

it it mattered, right, like obviously,

21:54

like everything that happened to Stalin matter because he wound

21:57

up with like this kind of like incredible power.

22:00

It's weird to focus just on this thing

22:02

that was a factor in all of these other people's lives

22:04

who didn't do that right. It's more just

22:06

like, well, this is uh not the

22:09

reason, but it is an element of

22:11

you know what led him? Yeah? Yeah,

22:13

yeah, and uh, we're gonna

22:15

talk more about um

22:18

joy Stall and what made him into the man he

22:21

became. But first, you

22:23

know what, Stalin would have loved Cody

22:25

as a committed communist. Um,

22:30

I was gonna say, beating people. If

22:36

there's one thing communists love, it's

22:38

capitalism. Yep, we

22:41

go Stone sending

22:43

out a lot of promo codes. Oh,

22:45

Stalin loved promo. If

22:47

you needed to know where to buy a mattress, Joseph

22:50

Stalin was the guy to ask. I believe

22:52

that. Yeah, that's why they call

22:54

them Casper's because of all the go oh we shouldn't

22:56

make that joke. Had

23:03

break time, Yeah,

23:11

we're back. We were talking about

23:13

the cargo cult of masculinity. Uh,

23:15

and how all those weird Daily Wire Ben Shapiro

23:17

guys love to pose with cigars and

23:20

other like totems of masculinity without

23:22

actually doing anything that might

23:24

be considered brave or courageous, and

23:27

you know, it's frustrating and annoying and

23:29

deeply irritating. But it might be why this

23:32

right wing power grab has been such like a slow

23:34

creep, rather than the kind of things we see

23:36

people like Stalin carry out, people like Hitler

23:39

carry out, people who, while they were gigantic

23:41

pieces of ship, grew up being very

23:44

accustomed to immediate and terrible violence,

23:46

and they were very hard pussyfoot around. Yeah,

23:49

as opposed to be all these like uh

23:52

ivylie ivy league dorks

23:55

do with their leather chairs and cigars, talking

23:57

about how it's a republic not a demaocracy

24:00

and nobody needs to really vote and

24:02

yeah, but but doing it dressing it

24:04

up so it doesn't sound like they're saying we should have fascism.

24:08

Anyway, Let's go back to the good old

24:10

fashioned clean living of Joseph

24:12

Stalin. Yeah,

24:15

it's probably unfair to say that historians

24:18

focused too much on the darker aspects

24:20

of Stalin's upbringing, because you've got this guy who killed

24:22

millions of people. So let's talk about he was

24:24

beaten as a kid, who his town had all these gigantic

24:26

drunken fights, how he was impoverished

24:28

and abused um.

24:31

But Joseph actually had like focusing

24:33

on all that stuff. It's real, it's important, it's a factor

24:35

in what he grew up to be. But it's also important

24:37

to note that Joseph had, all things considered a

24:39

pretty happy childhood considering the time

24:41

he grew up in the place that he grew up, and he

24:43

said so repeatedly as an adult.

24:46

Even the fact that his father's business collapse when

24:48

he was ten and impoverished his family wasn't

24:50

hugely traumatic, he later joked.

24:52

He became a proletarian, so his ruin was

24:55

my advantage. The same year

24:57

his father left, Joseph caught smallpox when an

24:59

epidemic swept through town, killing six of his

25:01

godfather's children. Young Stalin

25:03

survived, perhaps thanks to a faith healer and

25:05

his His mother took him to in desperation, but

25:07

his face was horribly scarred, and the other children nicknamed

25:10

him POxy. Luckily, Joseph and

25:12

Keke had a wide circle of family friends

25:14

who absolutely adored young Stalin.

25:17

They paid the family's medical bills and helped

25:19

secure Joseph admission into the very best

25:21

of local schools. So he has all these

25:23

traumas, but he's also hugely supported

25:25

by this community that thinks he's brilliant and loves

25:28

him from a very early age. He never

25:30

feels like he's alone. He's unsupported as

25:33

a community of support, a community who

25:35

like is willing to sacrifice for him,

25:38

which is not emphasized enough, like and

25:40

people talking about his upbringing like this is as much

25:42

of a factor as him getting hit by his

25:44

mom and stuff. Yeah, because I

25:46

mean we all want we want to supportive

25:49

community for our children. Yeah.

25:51

Now, um, These wide

25:54

circle of family friends also helped secure Joseph admission

25:56

into the very best of the schools in Gory,

25:58

which is not that he knew did a whole lot of help. He

26:00

needed the money, but he was brilliant

26:03

as a child, and when he sat the examination

26:05

he did so well that the school started him

26:07

off in the second grade immediately. So he just

26:09

skipped the first grade because he was such like an autodidact

26:12

so learned already. Uh

26:15

didn't have much money, but Joseph's wealthy godfather

26:17

ensured he showed up to that first day of school in

26:19

style. One of his classmates later recalled,

26:22

I saw among the school children an unknown boy

26:24

wearing a large formal Georgian coat down

26:26

to his knees, new boots with high legs, a

26:28

tight, wide leather belt, and a black peak cap

26:31

with lacquer advisors shining in the sun. This

26:33

very short person, quite thin, was wearing tight

26:35

trousers and boots and a pleated shirt with a scarf

26:38

and a red Chintz school bag. No one

26:40

else dressed like that in the whole class, the whole school.

26:42

School boys surrounded him in fascination.

26:45

So he is hipster,

26:48

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dressing for

26:50

I guess attention well, but

26:52

also like being dressed by

26:54

these adults who adore him for attention

26:56

because they think he's special. Um,

26:59

and we're willing to lie. They want to present, they want

27:01

to present, present their special boy to the world. Yeah.

27:04

And as the strangest boy in school, Joseph

27:07

was obviously a target for bullies, but he

27:09

gave as good as he got. The town priest,

27:11

father shark Viani, claimed there was hardly

27:13

a day when someone had not beaten him up, sent

27:15

him home crying, or when he hadn't beaten up

27:17

someone else. So he is always

27:19

fighting as a boy, which is normal and like in Georgia

27:22

at this point, right, he would have been a

27:24

weird from the fight down, he said, he's from

27:26

the fight down where we show

27:28

our love through fist punch. Yeah,

27:30

yeah, um and yeah. I mean as soon as you

27:32

you bring attention to yourself at

27:34

that age, you're like, all right, I'm a target now,

27:37

and yeah, I'm a target now, and that's

27:39

just gonna make me into a tough son of a bit, which

27:41

he objectively was. One

27:44

time he fought with his friend Aramis Velley in

27:46

the playground. The fight wound up as a draw, but when

27:48

Aramish Velly turned around, Stalin leapt

27:50

on him from behind and tackled him to the grass.

27:52

He was famous for fighting dirty and was regularly

27:55

beaten within an inch of his life. As a result. Young

27:57

Stalin developed a habit of changing out of his fancy

28:00

clothing with its tall white collars after bidding

28:02

his mother farewell in the morning. It was the only way

28:04

to stop it from being stained with his and other children's

28:06

blood. So this is

28:08

yeah, this was a goal for him. He was

28:11

like, this is my plan. I'm gonna get

28:13

the ship kicked out of me, or I'm gonna kick the ship out

28:15

of someone else, And I really don't care which because

28:17

it is a day of the week. It is a

28:19

day of the week, and I am eleven.

28:24

It's a little kid. He's a

28:26

time to go get covered in blood like

28:29

I do every single day, taking out

28:31

his fancy clothes, putting on his fighting

28:33

outfit. Again,

28:36

I believe all children should be raised this way.

28:39

Um, this is clear,

28:43

like kids in all towns that lack sufficient Internet

28:45

access. The children of Gory divided up into rival

28:47

street gangs based on neighborhood. These

28:50

gangs battled regularly with each other, but they

28:52

also played, and there was an odd kind of equality

28:54

in the streets. Stalin played and fought,

28:56

but the children of princes in generals, He

28:58

and his friends would wander off into the wood with knives,

29:00

bows, and slingshot to damage whatever they

29:03

came across one just

29:05

like on a mission to damage.

29:08

Here's your weapons, boys, things

29:14

destroy time. Okay, yeah,

29:17

boys, this is what you do. Gonna

29:19

go destroy something. One

29:23

favorite target was the apple orchard of a local

29:25

prince, and George is filled with princes. Like

29:27

prince means like special, like fancy

29:29

boy thing there there's like you're like you're

29:31

definitely like of a higher class than

29:33

other people, but like everywhere's

29:36

littered with princes. They're filthy with them.

29:38

So one of their favorite targets was the apple orchard

29:41

of a local prince. One time, young Stalin

29:43

set this orchard on fire, and we don't really

29:45

know why the property.

29:51

He just liked doing it. Yeah, yeah, you know

29:54

again, it was a day of the week. It was

29:56

the day of the week, and just another

29:58

reason I deeply identify I with Joseph.

30:00

Still, he hadn't getting into a big

30:02

enough fight. He definitely got into a fight earlier

30:05

that day. Yeah, but it wasn't

30:07

it wasn't enough. So we had to start a fire, which

30:10

is essentially a fight with the land exactly.

30:12

Yeah, man versus nature today.

30:14

Yeah, I'm gonna quote again from

30:17

Sebastian sebag Montfjor's Young Stalin

30:19

quote. So So was very naughty.

30:21

His younger friend Georgie recalls through

30:24

the streets. He loved his catapult

30:26

and homemade bowl. Once a herdsman was bringing

30:28

his herd home when so So jumped out and catapulted

30:30

a cow in the head. The ox went crazy,

30:33

the herd stampeded, and the herdsman chase so So,

30:35

who disappeared. Already elusive, he

30:37

used to slip through my hands like a fish, wrote another

30:39

school friend, and it was no use trying to catch

30:41

him. So So once terrorized a shopkeeper

30:44

by igniting some explosive cartridges

30:46

to the straightest shop. His

30:48

mother had to hear a lot of cursing about her

30:50

son, her son, the terrorists.

30:53

Like the terrorists just

30:56

blowing up things as a small ship.

30:58

Believable, I mean believable,

31:01

but yeah,

31:04

it's amazing. Terrorists,

31:08

little fancy little

31:10

prince boots just going out starting fires,

31:13

little lord fauntleroy suits

31:15

blowing up businesses with explosives.

31:19

On another occasion, so So shoved a young

31:22

child into a fast moving river and almost drowned

31:24

him. When the boy complained, young Stalin

31:26

shrugged and said, in essence, will you figure

31:28

out how to swim? Didn't you? Dang?

31:33

That is that is some abusive

31:36

ship. Ah, he's the best. It's

31:40

called it's called tough love. It's not all

31:43

right. Yeah, but

31:45

Stalin was also known to be a steadfast

31:47

friend much larger boys,

31:49

without a second thought to defend one of his friends.

31:52

One of these friends later wrote that Stalin reserved

31:54

most of his rage and violence for quote people

31:57

who vote through greater age or strength

31:59

dominated because they seem like his father. He

32:01

developed a vengeful feeling against everyone positioned

32:04

above himself. So

32:06

he for for the people, fighting for the people. He's

32:09

taking out, he's taking out the bullies. And

32:11

I think that might be a better sort of source

32:13

of kind of some of his early like this idea,

32:16

like he has this domineering father and then this dominating

32:18

mother, and it inculpates him

32:20

in this like inability to have anyone

32:23

in charge. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah, you're gonna resist

32:25

any kind of authority and anything

32:27

is yeah, being a bully, and so you're gonna but he

32:29

desperately needs to have authority over

32:32

his friends, like over the people around

32:34

him, Like and he'll he'll fucking take

32:36

a bullet for you if you will do

32:38

whatever he's so, yeah, if you'll be But if you resist

32:41

him at all, he's going to light an orchard on fire because

32:43

in the water. Yeah, because then you're the bully

32:46

by saying no, thank you, says

32:50

Joseph had a pathological need to be in

32:52

charge, and his friendship was definitely contingent

32:54

upon being the unquestioned leader of any group.

32:56

He found himself in his buddy Aramash

32:58

Veeley wrote that he quote could be a good friend

33:00

so long as one bowed to his dictatorial

33:03

will. When one of his friends stole communion

33:05

bread and another boy ratted him out, Joseph

33:07

quote cursed his life, called him an informer,

33:09

a spy, made him hated by the other boys, and

33:11

then he beat him black and blue.

33:15

On March thirteenth one, when Joseph

33:17

was three, the Emperor Alexander the Second

33:19

had been assassinated by members of the people's will

33:21

the a giant comical bombs thrown into his

33:23

carriage. His successor, Alexander

33:25

the Third, head crackdown on descent for some

33:28

reason. This included banning the Georgian language

33:30

from being taught in schools and so By

33:32

the time so So was in school, he and his students

33:34

were required to read, write, and speak in

33:36

Russian. Slipping up and speaking in

33:38

his native tongue was punishable by Quote having

33:41

to stand in a corner or holding a long piece

33:43

of wood for a whole morning, or being locked

33:45

in a detention cell without food or water and

33:47

in complete darkness until late evening.

33:50

So yeah,

33:52

good times, teacher, Make

33:55

those kids hold a piece of wood for

33:57

a whole morning. Learning is good m

34:00

M. The most despised

34:02

teacher in the school was a man named Lavrov. He

34:05

was a Russian and who nursed a violent hatred

34:07

of Georgian culture. He made young Joseph the

34:09

best student in class his assistant a job

34:11

that mainly involved having Joseph inform on any

34:14

students speaking in Georgian. Now,

34:16

young Stalin had zero issue informing on

34:18

other kids, as we'll see, but he was a proud

34:20

Georgian and he was not willing to put up with

34:22

basically clamping down on his ancestral language.

34:25

So he gathered up a small gang of eighteen year

34:27

old students in ambushed Lavrov in an empty

34:29

classroom. Stalin promised to murder

34:31

his teacher if he continued to punish kids for speaking

34:34

Jordan's which

34:39

is a nice similarity between him and

34:41

uh fucking Saddam Hussein,

34:44

Like they both threatened to murder one of their educational

34:46

leaders at one point at while they were school. Yeah,

34:50

that's an interesting parallel right there.

34:53

Well, I mean, you know, Saddam

34:55

was a big fan of j stal So it's

34:58

a bold evolutionary

35:02

It's like one of those yeah, those uh

35:04

late eighties movies where you take over the school,

35:07

no more homework, No more homework,

35:09

but like you murder the teacher instead,

35:12

Yeah, you have teenagers kill your teacher for

35:14

you, just

35:16

like in I want to say, Revenge of the Nerds.

35:19

Know that was just a rape movie. Yeah,

35:21

yeah, different. Yeah.

35:24

Lavrov backed down in the face of

35:26

these threats because, yeah,

35:28

because he didn't want to get murdered. Now

35:31

it would not be accurate to view Stalin as

35:33

just some hard nosed child gangster. He

35:35

also loved many of his teachers and was beloved

35:37

by them. His favorite was the singing teacher

35:40

Simon. Simon wrote that young Stalin had

35:42

a beautiful, sweet, high voice and was always

35:44

his first choice for solos. He also noted

35:46

that so So had a gift for working a crowd and performing.

35:49

In fact, he was so good at this that he started

35:51

up a side business as a wedding singer. What

35:54

yeah, young Stalin just

35:57

burning down vineyards orchards

36:00

of constant fistfights and

36:03

and a wedding singer. Complicated

36:06

guy, you know, yeah, Simon recalled.

36:09

People would turn up just to watch him sing, saying,

36:11

let's go see how the Jugishvili voy amazes

36:14

everyone with that voice. Yeah,

36:17

Joseph was also a gifted painter and actor,

36:19

and even a comedian. All of his classmates

36:21

agreed he was something of a prodigy, talented

36:24

it just about everything he tried. This

36:26

was not easy for him. Young Stalin spent

36:28

all of his spare time reading and constantly had

36:30

his nose in a book. He would walk around town

36:32

with books shoved into the belt of his trousers.

36:34

He was the very top of the class and never

36:37

skipped school or showed up late. But

36:39

so So was also a good tutor and volunteered

36:41

hours of his time to help worse students in class

36:43

with their studies. He happily volunteered

36:45

to inform on his classmates too, whenever they were

36:47

late to class or cheated on tests. He was

36:49

nicknamed the Gendarme, which means his classmates

36:52

all basically called him a cop. So

36:55

Yeah,

36:58

Yeah, Bezo. His father was impoverished

37:01

and frequently out of work by the time Joseph was an

37:03

adolescent, and normally he was happy to let kek

37:05

take the boy, but from time to time he'd be

37:07

seized by a drunken impulse to kidnap his son

37:09

and take charge of him. At one point, according

37:12

to KK, Bezo burst into the school drunkenly

37:14

to grab so So by force. After this,

37:16

Joseph had to be smuggled into class every day

37:18

under the coats of his uncle's key, claimed

37:21

that everyone in town helped to hide him, lying

37:23

to Bezo that he'd switch schools. Jeez,

37:26

this this is a complicated young boy.

37:29

Yeah, a lot of stuff going on with

37:31

this kid. It is a

37:33

a full childhood. He's gonna he's

37:36

gonna get smuggled in and

37:38

then also find a place to change

37:40

into his fighting clothes after he gets

37:42

smuggled him

37:46

so. Stalin's early childhood was complex

37:48

and multifaceted, filled with abuse and trauma,

37:50

but also love and an incredibly supportive

37:53

community. None of the ship Bezo put

37:55

him through stopped Stalin from consistently

37:57

excelling academically. In fact, the

37:59

only thing that made him miss school for any length

38:01

of time was his apparently magnetic attraction

38:03

to being run over by carriages. You

38:07

take me on a wild ride here, Robert, what

38:11

do you I

38:15

don't know. I don't even know why. I'm surprised at this point.

38:18

That was a sentence that you said out loud to

38:20

me about a person. You cannot

38:23

stop, young Stalin from getting hit by fucking

38:25

carriages. You know I wouldn't want to.

38:30

I'm gonna quote again from young Stalin. The

38:33

boys enjoyed playing chicken grabbing the

38:35

axles of galloping carriages. Perhaps

38:38

this was how Stalin was hurt once

38:40

again. The poor mother was mad with fear,

38:42

but the doctors treated him for free or ignot

38:45

aged. Villy was quietly paying the bills, her

38:48

son said later also called in the village quack, who

38:50

doubled as the local barber. The accident gave

38:52

him yet another reason. On top of his web foot

38:54

pock marks and rumors of bastardy for vigilance

38:57

and inferiority for being different. It permanently

38:59

damaged his left arm, which means he could never be the

39:01

bow ideal of the Georgian warrior. He later

39:03

said it prevented him from dancing properly, but he

39:05

still managed to fight. Yeah, he did.

39:08

So he gets hit by a carriage playing chicken

39:10

with his friends, fox up his arm.

39:12

Uh. Now, Joseph did not want to be a shoemaker,

39:15

which is what his dad wanted him to probably

39:19

yeah, yeah, yeah, So after

39:21

his dad kidnapped him, he returned home and went

39:23

back to school um and the pre Cintifla

39:26

Yeah so yeah, sorry. So his dad

39:28

kidnaps him um at a couple of different points.

39:30

At one point like takes him into like the

39:32

town to go like learn to be a shoemaker.

39:35

Um and basically Keck has to go to like the pre

39:37

Cintiflis and force um them

39:40

to like make his dad give their

39:42

son back to her Um and so

39:44

So continues his studies until eighteen ninety.

39:46

Went on a school trip with the choir. He's hit by

39:48

another runaway carriage. Um.

39:51

Yeah. The twelve year old Stalin's legs

39:53

were shattered by the wooden wheels and he was taken to

39:55

Tiflis again and spent months out of school recovering.

39:57

His legs were so damaged that for the rest of his

39:59

life he walked with an awkward sideways gate.

40:01

From this, he acquired his second nickname, crimped.

40:05

So people call him pockmarked and crippled

40:08

basically and a

40:10

cop. Yeah, three nicknames. He

40:14

was brought to Tifflis, the nearby city, to recover. Now

40:16

by this point, so So had moved there to work

40:18

in a shoe factory, and once he learned his son was

40:20

in town, he waited outside the hospital and yet

40:22

again kidnapped Stalin and hit him from his

40:24

mother. His kid gets kidnapped many

40:27

times as he gets hit by wide

40:31

range of fun activity. Again, he's like

40:33

twelve at this point of course. Yeah yeah,

40:36

this is like right after he got a

40:38

bunch of eighteen year olds to threaten to murder his teacher.

40:41

Yes. Yeah. Beso forcibly

40:43

enrolled his son as an apprentice at the shoe factory

40:45

where he worked. When Keke tried to take Joseph

40:47

back, he screamed at her. Beso screamed

40:50

at her, you want my son to be a bishop, over my

40:52

dead body. He'll be educated. I'm a shoemaker

40:54

and my son will be one two. Keke

40:56

did not take this lying down eight hundreds.

40:59

Georgia was, you know, pretty obviously

41:01

a very patriarchal place. Fathers tended

41:03

to get their way, but that did not happen in

41:05

this case. Biographer Stephen Cotkin

41:07

writes, Kek brooked no compromise.

41:09

She rejected the Tiffless church's authorities proposed

41:12

solutions that social be allowed to sing in their Tiffless

41:14

school choir or remaining with his father. She

41:16

accepted nothing less than so So's return to gory

41:19

for the start of the next school year in September eighteen

41:21

ninety. Her triumph over her husband in a deeply

41:23

patriarchal society was reported

41:25

by family friends who took the woman's side,

41:27

and by the boy himself in the parental tug

41:29

of war between becoming a priest or a cobbler,

41:31

so so preferred school and therefore his mother.

41:35

So it's like a really strange thing

41:37

that she gets her way in this, Stalin

41:39

gets his way in this. It's kind of tells

41:41

you what sort of person she was. Interesting

41:44

that, Yeah, if the if

41:46

society, uh,

41:49

like that's an issue, and

41:52

if the dad got his way, then uh,

41:55

things would have turned out way differently. They

41:57

might have, they might have might

42:00

have might have might have. Uh.

42:03

Stalin's months of absence from school seemed

42:05

to have no impact on his grades. He caught up instantly

42:07

and was right back to being at the top of his class,

42:09

but his behavior was notably different. After

42:12

his second kidnapping from his father, Yeah,

42:15

well weird, how weird

42:18

How that has an impact? He started

42:20

facing regular punishment from his teachers, and

42:22

he organized his first protest against a school

42:24

inspector named Butterski, who viciously punished

42:27

students for using Georgian Stalin organized

42:29

a protest, which, fueled by his rhetoric,

42:31

almost turned into a riot, and this

42:33

is his first like mass demonstration

42:35

with Stalin organizes. In

42:38

eighteen ninety two, when Joseph was fourteen, a

42:40

group of three peasant bandits were captured by

42:42

the police and sentenced to die by hanging. Because

42:44

it was the eighteen nineties, the school's teachers decided

42:47

the right thing to do was to take their young students out

42:49

to go watch several strangers die horrifically.

42:52

Some biographers suspect again that this brutality

42:54

had a deep impact on Stalin's future

42:56

violence, but this misses the point.

42:58

The condemned men had stolen a cow and killed

43:01

a policeman. They'd spent months living in the forest,

43:03

attacking rich people and handing out food to other

43:05

peasants. They were basically Georgian Robin

43:07

Hood's, only not very good at it. Stalin

43:09

and his friends sympathized with the bandits, and they

43:11

felt it was wrong for the priests who taught them thou

43:14

shalt not kill, to participate in gleefully

43:16

sanctioned state murder. Yeah, I

43:18

mean yeah, I mean, yeah,

43:21

so Stalin winds up like very

43:23

sympathetic with these revolutionaries and kind

43:25

of recognizing gradually that the

43:28

like, the order of his society is fucked up,

43:30

um partly as a result of this. Like, it doesn't seem

43:33

like he gains like a blood thirst for execution

43:35

from this this, Right, it's more of a

43:37

view of society and less unlike what to

43:39

do about it? Yeah, now,

43:42

Cody, you know what won't execute peasants

43:44

for stealing a cow and killing a cop. I

43:46

do know. It's products.

43:49

It's products, and it's products and services.

43:51

That's right. That's right. All of the products

43:53

and services in this are firmly pro cow

43:55

stealing. And can we say

43:58

that so for orchard

44:00

definitely pro orchard fires. Yeah, so

44:03

lightning orchard on fire and buy some of

44:05

these products. We're

44:12

back. So. Stalin

44:14

loved to read Big, Big Bookworm as a

44:16

kid, and one of his favorite books as a teenager

44:19

was Darwin's The Origin of Species.

44:21

He fell madly in love with the book, and he pushed

44:23

on all of his friends. Darwin's theories seemed

44:25

to have helped pushed the young Joseph, whose mother desperately

44:28

wanted him to be a priest into atheism.

44:30

One of his friends, Grisha, later recalled

44:32

a day when he and Stalin lay on the grass talking about

44:34

the injustice of poverty. He claims, young

44:36

Stalin suddenly said, God's not unjust.

44:39

He doesn't actually exist. We've been

44:41

deceived. If God existed, he'd have

44:43

made the world more just. When Grisha

44:45

pressed him on this, he referred his friend to Charles

44:48

Darwin. The revelation

44:50

did not immediately stop Stalin from pursuing

44:52

a career in the clergy, though, for a young brilliant

44:54

boy in a town like Gory, the seminary was basically

44:57

the only way to ever actually build a future

44:59

or get an education Asian. So when he was

45:01

fifteen years old, Stalin took the entrance exams

45:03

for the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, Georgia.

45:06

This was an extremely prestigious institution,

45:08

and Keke had to once again polls strings

45:10

and colin favors from friends to get Stalin in. Even

45:13

with his exceptional grades, the Spiritual

45:15

Seminary was not cheap, and Stalin was by

45:17

far the poorest child in the school. Keke

45:20

had to work her fingers to the bone in order to pay for his

45:22

schooling, but to her it was worth it to give ric

45:24

Son a chance to become a bishop. Now.

45:27

The seminary enforced a brutal schedule for

45:29

its students, so So was expected to wake up

45:31

at seven am, attend a prayer session before

45:33

an active breakfast, and then attend classes and prayers

45:35

until ten pm. The schedule was only

45:38

broken up by luncheon, dinner, and an hour and a half

45:40

in the late afternoon, where he was free to go about

45:42

in the city. Despite or perhaps because

45:44

of this discipline, the seminary in Tifflis had a

45:46

tendency to breed rebels. A huge

45:48

number of the Bolshevik rebels who overthrew the Czar's

45:51

empire came from this specific seminary

45:53

in Georgia. Yeah yeah, it was

45:55

like a school for revolutionaries. Unwittingly,

45:58

yeah uh. In eighteen

46:01

eighty five, a little before Stalin went there, a student

46:03

had beaten up one of his teachers for saying Georgian

46:05

was a dog's language. The next year,

46:07

that same rector was murdered with a sword.

46:10

So yeah, the

46:13

Saint your Daddy's grand escalation.

46:17

Yeah yeah. There were

46:19

constant student strikes in protests, and years

46:21

later another Bolshevik would claim no secular

46:23

school produced as many atheists as the Tiffless

46:26

Seminary. Outside of

46:28

class hours, Stalin drank and probably

46:30

carried on a handful of romantic liaisons.

46:32

There are even semi credible rumors that he may

46:34

have fathered a child during this time. But

46:37

the bulk of his time was spent writing poetry.

46:39

He contributed several of his poems to a local

46:41

newspaper, and they were good enough that Ilia Chop

46:44

Chattavis. I'm not going to pronounce that right.

46:46

The greatest poet in Georgia met

46:48

directly with Stalin. He ordered the

46:50

magazine to publish five of Stalin's poems

46:52

and called him the young man with the burning

46:55

eyes. Poetry was huge

46:57

in Georgia at the time in a way that we really can't

46:59

under stand, and poets were some of the land's

47:01

greatest heroes. And Stalin actually

47:03

becomes famous for his poetry while he's

47:05

still a teenager. Um. He wrote it

47:08

under the pseudonym Socello. But he was extremely

47:10

popular and and famous as a poet

47:12

before he was ever famous as a revolutionary,

47:14

and his work is actually still praised as quite good

47:17

today. Um, it's like one

47:19

of those things you have a lot of stories of, like bad

47:21

artists who become dictators. Install

47:24

is the opposite, Like every artistic endeavor

47:26

he took part, and he was really good at yeah,

47:28

he was really talented in general at

47:30

yeah. Yeah,

47:34

And some of the poems he wrote hold a few hints

47:36

about the man that he became. And I'm gonna quote from

47:38

young Stalin again. So Solo's

47:40

next poem, A Crazed Ode to the Moon,

47:43

reveals more of the poet. A violent, tragically

47:45

depressed outcast in a world of glaciers and divine

47:47

providence is drawn to the sacred moonlight.

47:49

And his third poem, Stalin explores the contrast

47:52

between violence and man and nature and the gentleness

47:54

of birds, music and singers. The fourth

47:56

is the most revealing. Stalin imagines a prophet

47:58

not honored in his own country, a wandering

48:00

poet poisoned by his own people. Now

48:03

seventeen, stolen already envisions a paranoiac

48:05

world where great profits could only expect conspiracy

48:08

and murder. So he's

48:11

a little little kind of kind of goth Yeah,

48:13

yeah, conflicts.

48:18

He's very successful and

48:20

his later like the bank robbery, that's one of his

48:22

first famous actions. Part of why he's able

48:24

to carry it out is that, like one of the guards that

48:26

he relies on for inside information is

48:28

a huge fan of his poems. Um

48:31

yeah, it's yeah, it's yeah. But he doesn't

48:33

keep it up for very long. After like a year or so

48:35

of incredible success, Joseph stops

48:38

writing poetry. Um. And he later

48:40

explains, I lost interest in writing poetry

48:42

because it requires one's entire attention a hell

48:44

of a lot of patients, and in those days I was like quicksilver.

48:47

Just he just gets bored of it. Yeah, he's

48:49

got too much running through his brain. Yeah,

48:52

yeah, because yeah, many fist fights to get

48:54

in right. Well yeah, I mean yeah,

48:57

you need like quiet reflection and uh

49:00

peace, And he's not

49:02

got a lot of peace inside him. Yeah,

49:04

that is not the guy he is. It

49:08

is likely that Stalin's interest in writing poems

49:10

was overwritten by a new interest in revolutionary

49:12

socialist literature. The seminary had

49:14

a small group of rebellious students who would gather together

49:17

at night and read forbidden works of political

49:19

theory, eventually graduating to heavy

49:21

hitters like the Communist Manifesto. Stalin

49:23

and his friends joined a local club for reading illegal

49:26

books the Cheap Library, which basically

49:28

worked as a book sharing program. They

49:30

also bought books from the local store, and Stalin

49:32

would regularly steal books too, joking

49:35

to his friends that he had expropriated them

49:37

for the revolution. They would wait

49:39

until lights out to read when the priests were all asleep.

49:41

Most nights, so So would stay up until the wee hours

49:44

of the morning, sacrificing most of a night's sleep

49:46

for the chance to read a legal literature. He

49:48

was caught several times, usually reading books

49:50

by Victor Hugo. His favorite book was The

49:52

Patricide by Alexander Kezbeggie,

49:55

which featured a bandit hero named Koba. Coba

49:57

was a Georgian partisan, basically a terrorist,

50:00

fighting for liberation from Russia. Young

50:02

Stalin fell in love with Coba. One of his

50:04

friends recalled Coba, became so So's

50:06

god and gave his life meeting. He wished to become

50:08

Coba. He called himself Coba and insisted

50:11

we call him that. His face shown with pride

50:13

and pleasure when we called him Coba. The name meant

50:15

a lot to Stalin. The vengeance of the Caucasus

50:17

Mountain people's the ruthlessness of the bandit,

50:20

the obsession with loyalty and betrayal, and

50:22

the sacrifice of person and family for a cause.

50:24

It was a name he already loved his substitute

50:27

father. Years later, Stalin would adopt

50:29

the named coba Is one of his revolutionary pseudonyms.

50:33

So he's basically like,

50:35

he gets super into fucking fan fiction. Yeah,

50:39

he's a big old fan boy dork, like they all are, like

50:41

Hitler with his cowboy novels. Yeah,

50:44

it's all the same, like

50:46

gamers who become Nazis and

50:50

wrongly sort of like fetishize.

50:52

I don't know, the god Emperor from Warhammer. Yeah.

50:56

Yeah, it's this train in authoritarian

50:59

personality, like every personality. I guess we

51:01

all are vulnerable to it. Everybody picks a cool person

51:03

from history or fiction, Like, yeah,

51:05

everyone wants to be the special boy does the special Everybody

51:08

wants to be the special boy who does the special

51:10

thing. It is a powerful human needs. By

51:13

the late eighteen nineties, uh Stalin

51:15

had gone from romantic poet to Marxist fanatic.

51:18

His reading had convinced him that quote the revolutionary

51:20

proletariat alone is destined by history

51:22

to liberate mankind and bring the world happiness.

51:25

This apothesis, he believed would require trial

51:27

and suffering and change, but would ultimately result

51:29

in scientifically proven socialism.

51:32

After a couple of years of diligent reading, Joseph

51:34

got frustrated by the fact that all his group

51:36

did was read. Though. He complained to the leader

51:39

of the reading circle, a guy named DevD Aarni,

51:41

and insisted that the group get involved in something real,

51:44

something violent. DevD Aarreini refused,

51:46

and Stalin broke off to make his own study group

51:49

dedicated to fucking ship up as well as

51:51

reading. The first outlet for his youthful

51:53

rage would be a particularly aggressive seminary

51:55

priest nicknamed black Spot for a hideous

51:58

mole on his head. And eighteen ninety

52:00

seven, Stalin had been caught thirteen times reading

52:02

band books, and as a result, black Spot launched

52:04

a crusade to break up these secret reading circles.

52:07

He would search the boy's foot lockers and dirty laundry.

52:10

Over the months, he grew obsessed with catching Stalin.

52:12

And I'm gonna quote again from young Stalin. At

52:15

prayers, the boys had the Bible open on their desks

52:17

and read marks are plucking off the sage of Russian

52:19

Marxism on their knees. In the courtyard

52:21

started a huge pile of firewood in which Stalin

52:24

and Iramushvili would hide the band works

52:26

in where they would sit and read them. Abashidze

52:29

whose black Spot, waited for this and then

52:31

sprang out to catch them, but they managed to drop the books

52:33

into the logs. We were locked up in the detention

52:35

cell at once, sitting late into the evening and darkness

52:37

without food. But hunger made us rebellious,

52:39

so he banged on the doors until the monk brought us something

52:41

to eat. Stalin grew his hair out

52:44

long as an active protest, deliberately targeting

52:46

black Spot. When the priest demanded he cut it,

52:48

Stalin thumbed his nose at the man. This prompted

52:50

the priest to crack down harder, and one night he finally

52:53

succeeded in catching their reading circle in the act

52:55

writing filthy jokes in a notebook. The

52:57

priests leapt into the room and grabbed the journal out

52:59

of stalin His hand, and young Stalin refused

53:01

to give it up, and they wound up fighting over the book.

53:04

The priest won black Spot

53:06

March. Stalin back to his room and forced

53:08

the boys to soak their journal with wax and then

53:10

lighted on fire. After this, he continued

53:13

stalking Stalin, catching him again a few

53:15

nights later, reading forbidden books. This

53:17

was enough to get a letter sent home to Keke, who rode

53:19

to Tiflis immediately to talk with her son. They

53:22

had what Josepher called is their first argument

53:24

over this. At one point Keke told him,

53:26

my son, you're my only child. Don't kill

53:28

me. How will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas

53:30

the second leave that to those who have brothers and

53:32

sisters. Hurt by his mother's pain and

53:34

fear, Joseph shared her that he was not a rebel.

53:37

Keke called this his first lie. Yeah,

53:41

yeah, it was. Joseph's

53:44

behavior continued to degrade, and his grades

53:46

finally slipped to He was still one of the best

53:48

students at the seminary, but was no longer at the

53:51

top of the class. Seminary journals

53:53

note that he declared himself an atheist, refused

53:55

to pray, talked in class, and would not take

53:57

his hat off as a sign of respect to the monks. He

54:00

received eleven warnings in the space of a few days

54:02

which prompted black Spot and his fellow priests

54:04

to search his possessions. Um.

54:07

Yeah, so he's he's he's

54:10

uh you could say, acting out at

54:12

this point. Yeah. I mean he's being radicalized. Yeah,

54:14

he's he's been radicalized and he's acting

54:16

out. Yeah. Um

54:19

so uh, this

54:21

all kind of comes to a head, um

54:23

with you know, sort of a fight between Stalin

54:25

and this monk, the black Spot, who is like

54:28

his his like really the guy

54:30

who pushes Stalin out

54:32

of you know, what might be considered a normal

54:34

path in life and kind of on this revolutionary

54:36

course. Like he's clearly his head was leading

54:39

him there, but this is the guy that he's sort

54:41

of binds all of those

54:43

feelings of frustration up in. Right.

54:45

It's like, yeah, you go to college and

54:47

you read and learn,

54:49

and you like find these groups of people, but you don't

54:51

have Yeah. This sort of like uh

54:54

this you you like uniting figure.

54:57

Yeah, that pushes you yeah

55:00

farther, Yeah, abbasids the black

55:02

Spot. This like this this priest

55:04

kind of becomes the symbol of everything that's

55:06

wrong with society to Stalin. Yeah.

55:09

Uh and I'm gonna quote one more time from the book Young

55:11

Stalin about sort of the last fight they have in

55:14

the seminary. They sprinted

55:16

back into the seminary just in time to see the inspector

55:18

force open Stalin's trunk and find some forbidden

55:20

works. Abashidz grabbed them and

55:23

was triumphantly bearing his prize up the stairs when

55:25

one of the group charged and rammed the monk, almost

55:27

loosening his grip on the books, but black Spot

55:29

held on valiantly. The boys jumped on him

55:31

and knocked the volumes out of his hands. Stalin himself

55:33

ran up, seized the books and took to his heels.

55:36

He was banned from visiting town and Kelby

55:38

and his like the friend who had charged the priest, was expelled.

55:41

Yet ironically so so schoolwork seemed

55:43

to improve. He received very good fours

55:45

from most subjects in a five for logic. Even

55:47

now, he still enjoyed his history lessons. Indeed,

55:49

he so liked his history teacher, the only

55:51

seminary teacher he admired, that he later took the

55:54

trouble to save his life. Meanwhile, the

55:56

black Spot had lost control of Stalin, but could

55:58

not restrain his own obsessive pursuit of this malcontent.

56:01

They were getting closer to the breaking point, the monk

56:03

crept up on him and peaked at him, reading yet another forbidden

56:05

book. He then pounced, taking the book from

56:07

him, but Stalin simply wrenched it out of his hands,

56:09

to the amazement of the other boys. He then went

56:12

on reading it. Abshidze was shocked.

56:14

Don't you know who I am? He shouted. Stalin

56:16

rubbed his eyes and said, I see the black spot

56:18

and nothing else. He had crossed the line.

56:21

Yeah. Joseph was expelled in May of eighteen

56:23

ninety nine. The official cause

56:25

was non appearance at exams, but this is not

56:28

entirely accurate. For years, Joseph would

56:30

claimed that he had been expelled from Marxist propaganda.

56:32

His mother, however, claimed that he had been taken out of school

56:35

against his will by her when he caught pneumonia.

56:37

But the real cause seems to be more banel than

56:39

either of these. The black Spot raised the

56:41

tuition rates just high enough that Keke could

56:44

no longer afford to pay for Joseph to stay enrolled,

56:46

and this seems to be what forced him out of seminary.

56:50

But this was not a great tragedy

56:52

for young Stalin. He had long ago decided he

56:54

was never going to become a priest. According

56:56

to Sebastian Montfiore, black Spot

56:58

had perversely turned stal And into an atheist

57:00

Marxist and taught him exactly the oppressive tactics

57:03

surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life,

57:05

violation of feelings, and Stalin's own words

57:07

that he would recreate in his Soviet police

57:10

state. And that Cody

57:12

takes us up to Stalin's adulthood. What

57:15

a fun childhood, j

57:19

Stall baby, Yeah, a little

57:21

baby Joe doing crimes,

57:24

learning lessons, right,

57:27

having secret yeah, secret

57:31

teachers, priest fights, sworn enemy,

57:33

is a p yeah,

57:35

yeah, putting on his fight clothes.

57:38

But getting getting kidnapped

57:40

a couple of times, kidnapped

57:43

more times than any of the other students

57:45

we've talked or subjects we've talked about.

57:47

He really got kidnapped a lot.

57:50

Well, And I mean, you know, usually you

57:52

get kidnapped once and that's kind of that's

57:54

that's the one. Mm hmm. Good

57:56

ship. Yeah, Well, Cody has

57:59

changed your openny of our old buddy j Stall

58:01

at all. Um. I wouldn't

58:03

say it's changed. I would say it's

58:06

more robust. It's

58:08

some illuminations, Um,

58:11

yeah, what I mean, it's

58:14

sort of every step of the way, You're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

58:16

Okay, he took that way, he took

58:18

that with him, carried that with him for a long Yeah.

58:20

That that one stayed with him. Yeah, and

58:22

just sort of every action he took and every action taken

58:25

against it's like, yep, all right, there you go. That's

58:28

yeah, very eliminating. Cool

58:31

ship, cool ship. Well,

58:34

Cody, has this convinced

58:36

you to start your own Marxist utopia in

58:38

the steps of Russia? It convinced

58:40

me more. Yah, yeah,

58:42

Okay, we're gonna we're gonna fight days,

58:45

We're gonna get just going to be fighting fight

58:48

days and kidnapping children. I learned the

58:50

opposite lesson there that I've learned

58:52

that kidnapping is good, So it

58:54

is good. This has always been a pro kidnapping podcast.

58:57

That's okay. I didn't I didn't want it. I didn't want to presume.

58:59

So no, Sophie, we're sponsored

59:01

by the concept of kidnapping, right, I

59:03

mean, yeah, it's their number one sponsor

59:06

is the concept of kidnapp Promo

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code do it d

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point promo code kidnapping at the New

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dot Com.

59:24

Oh boy, Cody, you want to plug your plug doubles?

59:26

I can't wait and so I won't. I'll

59:28

do it now. Uh yeah, I got a show

59:30

called some More News. You can check it out on

59:33

YouTube. We got a Twitter, my personal

59:35

twitters Dr Mr Cody. We have

59:37

podcasts my cost Katie Stole, Even

59:39

more News. I've got another podcast

59:41

with my co host Katie Stole and my other

59:43

co host, Robert Evans, called Worst Year

59:46

Ever. Check out that sounds

59:49

it's pretty good. Um, it's terrible in terms

59:51

of the subject matter and the

59:53

time in which it's recorded. Um.

59:56

And yeah, our patreon dot com slash some more

59:58

News if you want to support that, and I don't. What's

1:00:00

up, guys, How are you doing? Hey?

1:00:04

Are you doing? The Democrats

1:00:06

are losing the impeachment vote as we

1:00:08

speak, because the Democrats are losers apparently.

1:00:12

Yeah, the Democrats. You know, what Joseph Stalin

1:00:14

wouldn't have done is taken no for an

1:00:17

answer from Congress. But that's not a

1:00:19

good thing. Yeah, yeah,

1:00:24

maybe not something that they should do. So by

1:00:26

the time this episode comes out on Thursday,

1:00:28

because the Senate's voting on Wednesday, big

1:00:31

old losers, a bunch of losers. Yeah,

1:00:33

they already lost the witness vote today.

1:00:35

Our only hope is that the coronavirus

1:00:38

makes it into a really nice DC steakhouse.

1:00:43

It thins up Congress a little bit. I feel

1:00:45

like the other things are going

1:00:47

to happen. Nope, that is

1:00:50

it. I feel like if that happens

1:00:52

and it's spread more and maybe maybe

1:00:54

it won't be contained to just a few members of Congress,

1:00:57

that we want to go away. Nope, nope,

1:00:59

all right, that's it. That

1:01:01

is the only hope, and your only

1:01:03

hope is to listen to more Behind the Bastards.

1:01:06

You can find us on the internet along with the sources

1:01:08

for this episode, Behind the Bastards dot com.

1:01:11

You can find me on Twitter at I right, okay, you can

1:01:13

find us on Twitter and Instagram at at bastards pod.

1:01:16

Um. You know that's the that's

1:01:18

the episode. Uh, Go go out

1:01:20

into the world and remember the most

1:01:22

important lesson of Joseph Stalin. Regularly

1:01:25

fistfight all of your neighbors. Then

1:01:28

catapult the cow. Yeah, catapult

1:01:30

the hell out of a cow. Wait,

1:01:34

wait, wait, I'm

1:01:38

so sorry listening