Speaker 1: You know, Cody, the nice thing about felonies is that,
Speaker 1: oh ship, we're recording, aren't we. Uh. The bad thing
Speaker 1: about felonies, felonies are terrible. Don't commit them? Oh no,
Speaker 1: there the always started in the middle of our conversation
Speaker 1: about how felonies are bad and don't you don't do
Speaker 1: crimes straight, don't crimes? Yeah, exactly, avoid crimes and embrace
Speaker 1: head to resensuality. The motto of this podcast, Well, we
Speaker 1: were talking about that is what we were talking about.
Speaker 1: This is horrible, you guys. No, this is the best
Speaker 1: introduction yet, Sophie, The introduction we planned that we're doing
Speaker 1: now is the best one yet. Speaking of not doing crimes,
Speaker 1: you know who was the best at not committing crimes? Ah,
Speaker 1: the best at not committing crimes, the best at not
Speaker 1: committing crimes. I mean, I was gonna say Jesus, but
Speaker 1: that's the opposite. That's not true at all. He committed crime.
Speaker 1: That was Jesus whole thing. Huge crimer huge crimer um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: watch him, he's a crimer um. I don't know me,
Speaker 1: Joseph the Sarianovitch Stalin really yeah, yeah, yeah, we're where
Speaker 1: did I introduce the show's name. No, this is behind
Speaker 1: the bast Welcome to the Don't Do Crimes Podcast with
Speaker 1: Cody Johnston, my co host for Today and Today every day.
Speaker 1: In this podcast, we talk about a terrible person from
Speaker 1: history and revealed details from their past that the listeners
Speaker 1: do not know. And today we're talking about the childhood
Speaker 1: of our old best friend j Stall Joey, Joey Joe Steel,
Speaker 1: little Joey, okay, little joe bo s bus like his
Speaker 1: baby crimes, some of them, yeah, some baby crimes in here. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1: Are you a fan of Joseph Stalin. I'm aware of
Speaker 1: Joseph Stalin Okay, okay, not a Stalin stand not a
Speaker 1: Stalhead standing standing, Yeah, standing, standing is what they call him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a job bro, Joe Bro. There we go. Um, what
Speaker 1: do you know about Stalin's childhood? Not much actually about
Speaker 1: his childhood. That's good here because otherwise this episode would
Speaker 1: be disappointing. I know all about I know all about
Speaker 1: his baby crimes, all about his his very tiny crimes. Well, Cody,
Speaker 1: Joseph Vassarianovitch Juggas Veeley was born in eighteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: in Gory, Georgia, And I will try to pronounce Jugashvilley
Speaker 1: close to correct, but I won't, I won't, it won't happen.
Speaker 1: At the time, Gory was a very tiny town on
Speaker 1: the outskirts of the Russian Empire, sparsely popular, did and
Speaker 1: largely underdeveloped. The area around Gory was beautiful. The czar's
Speaker 1: brother kept a palace there, but it was also remote.
Speaker 1: The future ruler of Russia would count himself lucky that
Speaker 1: he came up in Gory, though see in the whier
Speaker 1: CAUCUSUS region, only one in thirty children were allowed to
Speaker 1: go to school because they just weren't that many schools
Speaker 1: in Georgia, though one in fifteen children got to have
Speaker 1: an education. Uh. This is because Gory had a large
Speaker 1: merchant population and comparently a comparatively outsized amount of development.
Speaker 1: The small town of seven thousand where Stalin grew up
Speaker 1: featured four schools, including a two story church founded in
Speaker 1: eighteen eighteen. In Gory, one in ten boys attended school.
Speaker 1: He's all right, yeah, yeah, he's won the lottery. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, what is what is your ideal ratio of
Speaker 1: of of people to attend school? My ideal ratio is
Speaker 1: a hunt. It's uh, one out of one ten out
Speaker 1: of ten. I think that should just be me and
Speaker 1: out of all of them. Yeah, so like one out
Speaker 1: of billions, it's you. Yeah, because all we really need
Speaker 1: is one podcaster and a lot of people to dig.
Speaker 1: That's true, to go to school to dig. Who's who's
Speaker 1: teaching you? Though? At this school? Then uh, that is
Speaker 1: a mystery. Nobody knows. You just walk into a building
Speaker 1: and you just walk out, and I know where to
Speaker 1: tell people to dig. And that is the ideal society.
Speaker 1: So you've you're just like a dig major. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: ok yeah, digging and uh philosophy, but you're not but
Speaker 1: you're not like good enough to do the digging yourself. Well,
Speaker 1: there's plenty of diggers. Someone needs to tell them where
Speaker 1: to dig. Otherwise you just have a bunch of random
Speaker 1: holes that's not gonna or like very coordinated holes. Yeah okay,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, And then I can tell people now we eat,
Speaker 1: now we continue digging, and then they do it. Well,
Speaker 1: I sip dacharies exactly one person, Yeah, which I've earned
Speaker 1: and learned how to make in school, which is taught
Speaker 1: by a mystery. All right, back to Stone. Joseph's parents
Speaker 1: were Vissarian, juggish, Villey and a Katarina Gelazi. They'd been
Speaker 1: married back in eighteen seventy two, when Vissarian was twenty
Speaker 1: two and she was seventeen. Now Vissarian went by Basso
Speaker 1: for regions that I'm sure makes sense to Georgians, and
Speaker 1: a Katerina went by Keke, which does kind of make
Speaker 1: sense to everybody. Uh. Beso was handsome, broad shouldered, intelligent
Speaker 1: and industrious. He was a cobbler by trade and widely
Speaker 1: seen as the best bootmaker in town. Keke was gorgeous
Speaker 1: and charming and beloved by just about everybody in the town.
Speaker 1: They had conceived two children before Joseph's birth. Bezo was,
Speaker 1: in his wife's words, almost mad with happiness when the first, Mikhail,
Speaker 1: was born in eighteen seventy five. Tragically, he died two
Speaker 1: months later, driving Basso equally mad with grief. He began
Speaker 1: to drink, but this was the nineteenth century, and he
Speaker 1: didn't let something like a dead baby stop you from
Speaker 1: rolling the dice on another baby. The Jugish Belis had
Speaker 1: another son a year later, Georgy geergy g e I
Speaker 1: R g I Uh. He died six months later, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be able to pronounce all these jeergy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He died six months later, which, from an optimistic point
Speaker 1: of view, is a three improvement in his linking of
Speaker 1: the first kid. They're doing it, they're making progress. Do
Speaker 1: you think pointing that out to them would have made
Speaker 1: them less set? I really don't. I feel like the
Speaker 1: other of the other child. You know, when you look
Speaker 1: at this statistically, you're a way better parent than you
Speaker 1: were before. Look at how much O. That's called learning.
Speaker 1: That's growth right there, that's growth right there. Don't worry
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, It's sort of like when you look
Speaker 1: at the number of people who die on my jet
Speaker 1: ski and just just total numbers, it looks like I'm
Speaker 1: a bad jet ski pilot. But when you compare the
Speaker 1: number of people who have died on my jet ski
Speaker 1: in the last three years to the prior nine years,
Speaker 1: I'm a great jet ski pilot. I've improved immensely. They're
Speaker 1: exactly That's that's how you look at that is how
Speaker 1: you look at statistics. So when Joseph was born that
Speaker 1: December in eight his mom and his dad had reason
Speaker 1: to be less than enthusiastic about his chances of survival.
Speaker 1: So so as they called him. Was weak, fragile, and thin.
Speaker 1: The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed.
Speaker 1: He was sit constantly, and he was always on the
Speaker 1: verge of death. And I don't normally say if only
Speaker 1: that baby had died, but this is Stalin died two
Speaker 1: out of three. You were so I thought the time
Speaker 1: was a charm. Oh No, before Joseph's birth, Baso it vowed,
Speaker 1: just let the child survive, and I'll crawl to Jerry
Speaker 1: on my knees with a child on my shoulders. But
Speaker 1: of course, promises to God are the easiest ones to ignore.
Speaker 1: And once Joseph came out alive, Baso sort of forgot
Speaker 1: about this. But then Joseph got sick, and Basso assumed
Speaker 1: this was God, being like, you made a promise, and
Speaker 1: now you're welching someone to murder your baby, because that's God.
Speaker 1: That was the deal. So he keke walked to the
Speaker 1: church and donated a sheep to the priests. Now, unlike
Speaker 1: his older brothers, Stalin survived, and in the early years
Speaker 1: the family thrived. Gorey was a poor town and most
Speaker 1: of the houses were made of mud, but bezos shoemaking
Speaker 1: business did well enough for him to hire apprintices and
Speaker 1: eventually ten employees. For a while, the family lived well.
Speaker 1: Kek later recalled our family happiness was limited. One of
Speaker 1: bezos apprentices later said he lived better than anyone else
Speaker 1: of our profession. They always had butter in their house.
Speaker 1: Gives you an idea of like where things are for
Speaker 1: society at this point, he's got butter. But yeah. Now
Speaker 1: this would later be very embarrassing for adults Stalin because
Speaker 1: communist heroes are not supposed to come from prosperous middle
Speaker 1: class roots. Yeah, they're not supposed to be butter haers.
Speaker 1: You get fucking you get fucking starved to death for
Speaker 1: having butter. Yeah. As an adult, he ruefully admitted, I'm
Speaker 1: not the son of a worker. My father had a
Speaker 1: shoeworkshop up, employing apprentices and exploiter. We didn't live badly,
Speaker 1: and that was like, if only we'd lived badly, I wish,
Speaker 1: I wish it had harder times. But luckily for his
Speaker 1: future socialist credentials, his family happiness did not last long.
Speaker 1: Bezo had started drinking after his first son's death, and
Speaker 1: continued drinking for the rest of his life. He made
Speaker 1: friends with a local Russian exile named Paca, who'd been
Speaker 1: basically forced to flee to Georgia for his connections to
Speaker 1: a group called the People's Will, a terrorist organization who
Speaker 1: would repeatedly be tried and eventually succeeded to murder the Czar.
Speaker 1: Some of Joseph's earliest memories were made talking to PoCA,
Speaker 1: who liked Little So So and bought him a canary.
Speaker 1: Like Bezo, Poco was a hardcore alcoholic. One winter, he
Speaker 1: passed out on the snow and died, and Beaso had
Speaker 1: to go to one sright. I didn't know that. You
Speaker 1: was really abrupt. Yeah, that's fucking life back there. Everybody
Speaker 1: knows someone who dies in the snow. I know it's
Speaker 1: it's it really sounded like You're like, here's like a
Speaker 1: fun little story about a time he got drunk. But
Speaker 1: then the story ended, like all Stalin store in a miserable, miserable,
Speaker 1: unthinkable death. Yeah. Yeah, So after his drinking buddy died,
Speaker 1: Baso had to go to one of the local priests,
Speaker 1: father Chuck Fianni, to find a drinking buddy. As an adult,
Speaker 1: Stalin had a vivid memory of his dad and the
Speaker 1: priest stumbling home, singing out a tune. He recalled the priest, saying,
Speaker 1: you're a good bloke, Beso, even for a shoemaker, and
Speaker 1: his father responded, you're a priest, but what a priest?
Speaker 1: I love you all right, all right. So times in Georgia,
Speaker 1: some characters, some characters. Now, Bezo was not a happy drunk,
Speaker 1: and as he descended more and more to drink, he
Speaker 1: became increasingly obsessed with local rumors about Joseph's parentage. See
Speaker 1: Ke was close friends with a guy named dav Ri Chiwi,
Speaker 1: the chief of police. The town mayor later testified that
Speaker 1: Joseph was actually this guy's real son. There were also
Speaker 1: rumors that a famous explorer who had crossed through the
Speaker 1: town named Price Evolski had betted Keke and produced Joseph.
Speaker 1: Some townsfolk declared that one of the town's for you
Speaker 1: Jewish men was his real dad, But the most commonly
Speaker 1: sighted potential father for Stalin was a guy named Yakov Ignatashvili.
Speaker 1: Ignatashvili was the wealthiest man in town, a wine merchant
Speaker 1: and a great boxer. Kek worked in his household from
Speaker 1: time to time, and ignotish Villy did take a deep
Speaker 1: liking to the family. He was named Joseph's godfather and
Speaker 1: later paid for his education. There's no way to know
Speaker 1: the truth, but we absolutely knew they were rumors. Some
Speaker 1: locals accused KK of basically being a sex worker. Even
Speaker 1: decades later, a reporter from the Washington Post who went
Speaker 1: to Gory and talked to some of the people old
Speaker 1: enough to have known Kek and Joseph uh found claims
Speaker 1: that young Stalin called his mother the prostitute when they
Speaker 1: had arguments. So we don't really know, yeah, or if
Speaker 1: Kek was in fact a prostitute, or if she was
Speaker 1: just really well liked, like like a snotty thing for
Speaker 1: a kid to say. Yeah. And it's compounded by the
Speaker 1: fact that in Georgian culture, men were expected to have
Speaker 1: multiple mistresses, um, and like everybody was just fucking all
Speaker 1: the time, which definitely makes it harder to know what
Speaker 1: was actually going wrong. Right, Well, what else? What else
Speaker 1: are you gonna do? It's joy I'll tell you what
Speaker 1: else you're gonna do later, because it's fun as hell.
Speaker 1: Um Yeah. Keke herself did little to downplay the rumors
Speaker 1: that she had been sleeping around a lot, and Joseph
Speaker 1: could be anybody's kid. In her old age, she urged
Speaker 1: Labrinty Barrier that the head of the n k v
Speaker 1: D Stalin's like secret belief. She urged his wife Nina
Speaker 1: to take an illicit lovers and basically insinuated that she'd
Speaker 1: done the same, saying, when I was young, I cleaned
Speaker 1: house for people, and when I met a good looking boy,
Speaker 1: I didn't waste the opportunity. So who knows? Yeah, there
Speaker 1: it is. Yeah. As an aside, k was quite a character.
Speaker 1: The book Young Stalin by Sebastian sebag Montfior includes a
Speaker 1: number of bizarre anecdotes about her, usually based on her
Speaker 1: own recollections. And I'm gonna read you one right now
Speaker 1: to give you a sense of this woman's personality. Quote.
Speaker 1: She managed to attract so So with a flower, at
Speaker 1: which point keke jovially pulled out her breasts and showed
Speaker 1: them to the toddler, who ignored the flower and died
Speaker 1: for the breasts. But the drunk ruction exile Polka was
Speaker 1: spying on them and burst out laughing. So I buttoned
Speaker 1: up my dress. So this is like her playing with
Speaker 1: little Yeah, these are like the story she tells to
Speaker 1: everybody when her son is the ruler of Russia. She's
Speaker 1: she's a character, kek rules. Yeah yeah, all right, all right, yeah.
Speaker 1: So most historians seem to think that Basso was in
Speaker 1: fact Joseph's real father, but the rumors at least were real,
Speaker 1: and they drove an increasingly drunken Baso into regular rages.
Speaker 1: On one occasion, he came home wasted and threw Joseph
Speaker 1: on the ground so hard he pied blood for days.
Speaker 1: He would regularly charge home drunk, looking for young Stalin
Speaker 1: and screaming where is Keke's little bastard hiding under the bed?
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, yeah, less less whimsical. Yeah, things switched
Speaker 1: hard in old time e Georgia between whimsical and beating
Speaker 1: a child until he p's blood for a couple of days. Yep.
Speaker 1: One of young Stalin's schoolmates later recalled undeserved beatings made
Speaker 1: the boy as hard and heartless as the father himself,
Speaker 1: and this person came to believe that Bezo's abuses how
Speaker 1: Stalin learned to hate people. Stalin did, in fact, spend
Speaker 1: much of his early childhood hiding from his drunken father
Speaker 1: or watching his dad beat his mom. By the time
Speaker 1: he was five, his dad's business wasn't shambles, and Keke
Speaker 1: was increasingly supporting the family. She started to fight back,
Speaker 1: to punching her husband in retaliation for his violence. This
Speaker 1: eventually cowed Bezo, and by the time has Joseph was six,
Speaker 1: his father had fled the home. And this seems like
Speaker 1: the best case scenario, right, Like it's like the Lifetime movie,
Speaker 1: like she's abused, but then she learns to fight back
Speaker 1: and father leaves the house. Unfortunately, violence doesn't work that way. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And as one friend of the family later recalled, quote,
Speaker 1: his mother was head of the family now and the
Speaker 1: fist which had subdued his father was now applied to
Speaker 1: the upbringing of her son. She beat him unmercifully for disobedience.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of reality saying, yeah, if you learn
Speaker 1: to solve your problems with punching, maybe probably Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the tragedy of the fists. Bummer. Yeah, I came on
Speaker 1: here to have a good time, a good time learning
Speaker 1: about j Staalah apparently all right. Decades later, on his
Speaker 1: last visit home to see his mother in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: Dictator of All Russia Joseph Stalin asked his mother why
Speaker 1: she'd beaten him so much. She replied, it didn't do
Speaker 1: you any harm. But yeah, I shouldn't have said, kek
Speaker 1: rules like she's a character that if I sort of
Speaker 1: gesture to everything around yea, yeah, did you no harm? Yeah? Now,
Speaker 1: Stalin's biographers are very much sort of of multiple minds
Speaker 1: on this. Sebastian sebag Montfiori, who was certainly the most
Speaker 1: entertaining Staln biographer, draws a direct line between all this
Speaker 1: childhood abuse and Stalin's future violence. Um. And he also
Speaker 1: points out that Gory was a wild lea violent town
Speaker 1: in a pretty fun way. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: directly from the book Young Stalin Now. Gory was one
Speaker 1: of the last towns to practice the picturesque and savage
Speaker 1: custom of free for all town brawls with special rules
Speaker 1: but no holds barred violence. The boozing, praying, and fighting
Speaker 1: were all interconnected with drunken priests acting as referees. The
Speaker 1: saloon bars of Gory were incorrigible stews of violence and crime,
Speaker 1: town brawls, wrestling tournaments, and schoolboy gang warfare, where the
Speaker 1: free Grelli fighting traditions at festivals Christmas and Shrove Tide.
Speaker 1: Before Lent, both quarters fielded a parade led by transvestites.
Speaker 1: Are actors writing as carnival kings on camels and donkeys,
Speaker 1: surrounded by pipe players and singers and fancy dress. At
Speaker 1: the Kenoba Carnival to celebrate Georgia's sixteen thirty four victory
Speaker 1: over Persia, one actor played the Georgians are another the
Speaker 1: Persian Shaw, who was soon pelted with fruit than doused
Speaker 1: in water. The males in each family, from children upwards
Speaker 1: also paraded, drinking wine and singing until night fell, when
Speaker 1: the real fund began. This assault of free boxing. The
Speaker 1: sport of Creavy was a mass duel with rules. Voice
Speaker 1: of three wrestled other three year olds, Then children fought together,
Speaker 1: then teenagers, and finally the men threw themselves into an
Speaker 1: incredible battle, by which time the town was completely out
Speaker 1: of control, a state that lasted into the following day.
Speaker 1: Even at school, where classes fought, classes shops were often pillaged.
Speaker 1: Isn't that since that's wild, That's that's so cool, That's like,
Speaker 1: that's the only town that does what. No, it's not
Speaker 1: the only town. It was one of the last ones
Speaker 1: that used to be super common in big chunks of
Speaker 1: like Eastern Europe and the Caucuses. This is the alternative
Speaker 1: to sex you mentioned, right, Yeah, this everybody beat the
Speaker 1: ship out of each other. The day where we all
Speaker 1: fight believable. Let's all get wasted and just ruin each
Speaker 1: other in the middle of the street. The priests will
Speaker 1: be refereaced. Fight club town amazing. Everybody's drunk, everybody's punching
Speaker 1: each other. It just it sounds like the best time.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's like that's your dream. That's like an
Speaker 1: amusement park. Yeah, it's like the good purge, Like instead
Speaker 1: of it being like abusive, it's a way for the
Speaker 1: whole town to celebrate by just wailing on each other.
Speaker 1: Like I wish we still did that. Hey you can dream.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're in America, you can do whatever you Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could make this the new holiday that could get
Speaker 1: rid of our partisan divide. Nationalist fight day. Yeah, bring
Speaker 1: them together to beat the ship exactly. Everyone will feel
Speaker 1: a little bit better and a little bit worse. Mm hmm. God,
Speaker 1: what a great thing that would be. If we had
Speaker 1: universal healthcare there it is, or or legal street drinking.
Speaker 1: But you need one of the two. Yeah. So for
Speaker 1: so first term universe healthcare and then second term is like, well,
Speaker 1: now we got to fight each other. Yeah, now we
Speaker 1: have to fight now that we know we'll be taken
Speaker 1: care of now we can we have to get our
Speaker 1: money's worth from this fucking health care exactly. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I mean I wish we did that just as a
Speaker 1: podcasting team. Like it's a like a like a team
Speaker 1: building retreat. Yeah, like we all fight in a pit
Speaker 1: and Sophie gets really drunk and dressed as a priest
Speaker 1: and referees. Yeah, it's a good plan, Sophie, were doing this.
Speaker 1: You've got a new job. This is how we're celebrating
Speaker 1: Shrove Tide when we figure out when Shrove Tide is.
Speaker 1: We're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: do some trust falls. But then we're gonna be each
Speaker 1: other fights. O. Katie is going to be in the
Speaker 1: pit with everybody. We're all gonna be. It's gonna she's
Speaker 1: got good reach. It's going to be quite a fist fight. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: you're gonna have to change your attitude because you're you're
Speaker 1: gonna be You're gonna be the referee. And the priest.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, she's turning around, she's turning it. I'm
Speaker 1: just trying to picture that out. It's all about the
Speaker 1: outfit and then everybody. It sounds like a little black
Speaker 1: and white, you know, from the blood. I bet we
Speaker 1: could get a lot of businesses to support, like a
Speaker 1: national fist Fight Day. Yeah, yeah, like just like we'll
Speaker 1: put your name on our jerseys and yeah, I hate
Speaker 1: this continue okay, yeah, okay, it's easy. It's easy to
Speaker 1: draw a direct line between the gigantic town wide beat
Speaker 1: downs that Joseph uh Like participated in as a small
Speaker 1: child and the terrific violence that he unleashed as the
Speaker 1: Red CSAR of the U s SR. Citation. Well, there's
Speaker 1: actually a lot of disagreement about this. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of disagreement about another. Stalin. Historian Stephen Cottkin cautions against
Speaker 1: that kind of thinking in his biography Stalin quote, a
Speaker 1: sizeable chunk of humanity was beaten by one or more parents.
Speaker 1: Nor did Gorey suffer from an especially violent Oriental culture.
Speaker 1: Of these town wide fist fights, cat Can notes such
Speaker 1: uh festive violence, mad cap bear fists followed by sloppy embraces,
Speaker 1: was typical of the Russian Empire, from Ukrainian market towns
Speaker 1: to Siberian villages. Gorey did not stand it out in
Speaker 1: the least. So basically everybody is doing this like it's
Speaker 1: weird to be like to focus on how this affected
Speaker 1: Stalin's rule when it was like this was just the norm. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: So well, two things I guess I take away from
Speaker 1: that is one is that we should definitely do this now,
Speaker 1: because we should definitely. If they're arguing that it didn't
Speaker 1: affect him, then it won't affect us and we should
Speaker 1: do it. Um, absolutely, But nobody's arguing with that, right.
Speaker 1: But also, um, most of those people who experienced that
Speaker 1: didn't become dictators, so there's not really like a control group,
Speaker 1: I guess. Yeah, I guess the point is that like
Speaker 1: the violent the kind of violence unleashed under Stalin was new, um,
Speaker 1: but every generation of Russian ruler prior to Stalin had
Speaker 1: kind of grown up in the same or yeah, and
Speaker 1: so like the like, so it's weird to be like
Speaker 1: suddenly it it mattered, right, like obviously, like everything that
Speaker 1: happened to Stalin matter because he wound up with like
Speaker 1: this kind of like incredible power. It's weird to focus
Speaker 1: just on this thing that was a factor in all
Speaker 1: of these other people's lives who didn't do that right.
Speaker 1: It's more just like, well, this is uh not the reason,
Speaker 1: but it is an element of you know what led him? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, we're gonna talk more about um joy Stall
Speaker 1: and what made him into the man he became. But first,
Speaker 1: you know what, Stalin would have loved Cody as a
Speaker 1: committed communist. Um, I was gonna say, beating people. If
Speaker 1: there's one thing communists love, it's capitalism. Yep, we go
Speaker 1: Stone sending out a lot of promo codes. Oh, Stalin
Speaker 1: loved promo. If you needed to know where to buy
Speaker 1: a mattress, Joseph Stalin was the guy to ask. I
Speaker 1: believe that. Yeah, that's why they call them Casper's because
Speaker 1: of all the go oh we shouldn't make that joke.
Speaker 1: Had break time, Yeah, we're back. We were talking about
Speaker 1: the cargo cult of masculinity. Uh, and how all those
Speaker 1: weird Daily Wire Ben Shapiro guys love to pose with
Speaker 1: cigars and other like totems of masculinity without actually doing
Speaker 1: anything that might be considered brave or courageous, and you know,
Speaker 1: it's frustrating and annoying and deeply irritating. But it might
Speaker 1: be why this right wing power grab has been such
Speaker 1: like a slow creep, rather than the kind of things
Speaker 1: we see people like Stalin carry out, people like Hitler
Speaker 1: carry out, people who, while they were gigantic pieces of ship,
Speaker 1: grew up being very accustomed to immediate and terrible violence,
Speaker 1: and they were very hard pussyfoot around. Yeah, as opposed
Speaker 1: to be all these like uh ivylie ivy league dorks
Speaker 1: do with their leather chairs and cigars, talking about how
Speaker 1: it's a republic not a demaocracy and nobody needs to
Speaker 1: really vote and yeah, but but doing it dressing it
Speaker 1: up so it doesn't sound like they're saying we should
Speaker 1: have fascism. Anyway, Let's go back to the good old
Speaker 1: fashioned clean living of Joseph Stalin. Yeah, it's probably unfair
Speaker 1: to say that historians focused too much on the darker
Speaker 1: aspects of Stalin's upbringing, because you've got this guy who
Speaker 1: killed millions of people. So let's talk about he was
Speaker 1: beaten as a kid, who his town had all these
Speaker 1: gigantic drunken fights, how he was impoverished and abused um.
Speaker 1: But Joseph actually had like focusing on all that stuff.
Speaker 1: It's real, it's important, it's a factor in what he
Speaker 1: grew up to be. But it's also important to note
Speaker 1: that Joseph had, all things considered a pretty happy childhood
Speaker 1: considering the time he grew up in the place that
Speaker 1: he grew up, and he said so repeatedly as an adult.
Speaker 1: Even the fact that his father's business collapse when he
Speaker 1: was ten and impoverished his family wasn't hugely traumatic, he
Speaker 1: later joked. He became a proletarian, so his ruin was
Speaker 1: my advantage. The same year his father left, Joseph caught
Speaker 1: smallpox when an epidemic swept through town, killing six of
Speaker 1: his godfather's children. Young Stalin survived, perhaps thanks to a
Speaker 1: faith healer and his His mother took him to in desperation,
Speaker 1: but his face was horribly scarred, and the other children
Speaker 1: nicknamed him POxy. Luckily, Joseph and Keke had a wide
Speaker 1: circle of family friends who absolutely adored young Stalin. They
Speaker 1: paid the family's medical bills and helped secure Joseph admission
Speaker 1: into the very best of local schools. So he has
Speaker 1: all these traumas, but he's also hugely supported by this
Speaker 1: community that thinks he's brilliant and loves him from a
Speaker 1: very early age. He never feels like he's alone. He's
Speaker 1: unsupported as a community of support, a community who like
Speaker 1: is willing to sacrifice for him, which is not emphasized enough,
Speaker 1: like and people talking about his upbringing like this is
Speaker 1: as much of a factor as him getting hit by
Speaker 1: his mom and stuff. Yeah, because I mean we all
Speaker 1: want we want to supportive community for our children. Yeah. Now, um,
Speaker 1: These wide circle of family friends also helped secure Joseph
Speaker 1: admission into the very best of the schools in Gory,
Speaker 1: which is not that he knew did a whole lot
Speaker 1: of help. He needed the money, but he was brilliant
Speaker 1: as a child, and when he sat the examination he
Speaker 1: did so well that the school started him off in
Speaker 1: the second grade immediately. So he just skipped the first
Speaker 1: grade because he was such like an autodidact so learned already.
Speaker 1: Uh didn't have much money, but Joseph's wealthy godfather ensured
Speaker 1: he showed up to that first day of school in style.
Speaker 1: One of his classmates later recalled, I saw among the
Speaker 1: school children an unknown boy wearing a large formal Georgian
Speaker 1: coat down to his knees, new boots with high legs,
Speaker 1: a tight, wide leather belt, and a black peak cap
Speaker 1: with lacquer advisors shining in the sun. This very short person,
Speaker 1: quite thin, was wearing tight trousers and boots and a
Speaker 1: pleated shirt with a scarf and a red Chintz school bag.
Speaker 1: No one else dressed like that in the whole class,
Speaker 1: the whole school. School boys surrounded him in fascination. So
Speaker 1: he is hipster, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, dressing for I
Speaker 1: guess attention well, but also like being dressed by these
Speaker 1: adults who adore him for attention because they think he's special. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're willing to lie. They want to present, they
Speaker 1: want to present, present their special boy to the world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And as the strangest boy in school, Joseph was obviously
Speaker 1: a target for bullies, but he gave as good as
Speaker 1: he got. The town priest, father shark Viani, claimed there
Speaker 1: was hardly a day when someone had not beaten him up,
Speaker 1: sent him home crying, or when he hadn't beaten up
Speaker 1: someone else. So he is always fighting as a boy,
Speaker 1: which is normal and like in Georgia at this point, right,
Speaker 1: he would have been a weird from the fight down,
Speaker 1: he said, he's from the fight down where we show
Speaker 1: our love through fist punch. Yeah, yeah, um and yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean as soon as you you bring attention to
Speaker 1: yourself at that age, you're like, all right, I'm a
Speaker 1: target now, and yeah, I'm a target now, and that's
Speaker 1: just gonna make me into a tough son of a bit,
Speaker 1: which he objectively was. One time he fought with his
Speaker 1: friend Aramis Velley in the playground. The fight wound up
Speaker 1: as a draw, but when Aramish Velly turned around, Stalin
Speaker 1: leapt on him from behind and tackled him to the grass.
Speaker 1: He was famous for fighting dirty and was regularly beaten
Speaker 1: within an inch of his life. As a result. Young
Speaker 1: Stalin developed a habit of changing out of his fancy
Speaker 1: clothing with its tall white collars after bidding his mother
Speaker 1: farewell in the morning. It was the only way to
Speaker 1: stop it from being stained with his and other children's blood.
Speaker 1: So this is yeah, this was a goal for him.
Speaker 1: He was like, this is my plan. I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: the ship kicked out of me, or I'm gonna kick
Speaker 1: the ship out of someone else, And I really don't
Speaker 1: care which because it is a day of the week.
Speaker 1: It is a day of the week, and I am eleven.
Speaker 1: It's a little kid. He's a time to go get
Speaker 1: covered in blood like I do every single day, taking
Speaker 1: out his fancy clothes, putting on his fighting outfit. Again,
Speaker 1: I believe all children should be raised this way. Um,
Speaker 1: this is clear, like kids in all towns that lack
Speaker 1: sufficient Internet access. The children of Gory divided up into
Speaker 1: rival street gangs based on neighborhood. These gangs battled regularly
Speaker 1: with each other, but they also played, and there was
Speaker 1: an odd kind of equality in the streets. Stalin played
Speaker 1: and fought, but the children of princes in generals, He
Speaker 1: and his friends would wander off into the wood with knives, bows,
Speaker 1: and slingshot to damage whatever they came across one just
Speaker 1: like on a mission to damage. Here's your weapons, boys,
Speaker 1: things destroy time. Okay, yeah, boys, this is what you do.
Speaker 1: Gonna go destroy something. One favorite target was the apple
Speaker 1: orchard of a local prince, and George is filled with princes.
Speaker 1: Like prince means like special, like fancy boy thing there
Speaker 1: there's like you're like you're definitely like of a higher
Speaker 1: class than other people, but like everywhere's littered with princes.
Speaker 1: They're filthy with them. So one of their favorite targets
Speaker 1: was the apple orchard of a local prince. One time,
Speaker 1: young Stalin set this orchard on fire, and we don't
Speaker 1: really know why the property. He just liked doing it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know again, it was a day of the week.
Speaker 1: It was the day of the week, and just another
Speaker 1: reason I deeply identify I with Joseph. Still, he hadn't
Speaker 1: getting into a big enough fight. He definitely got into
Speaker 1: a fight earlier that day. Yeah, but it wasn't it
Speaker 1: wasn't enough. So we had to start a fire, which
Speaker 1: is essentially a fight with the land exactly. Yeah, man
Speaker 1: versus nature today. Yeah, I'm gonna quote again from Sebastian
Speaker 1: sebag Montfjor's Young Stalin quote. So So was very naughty.
Speaker 1: His younger friend Georgie recalls through the streets. He loved
Speaker 1: his catapult and homemade bowl. Once a herdsman was bringing
Speaker 1: his herd home when so So jumped out and catapulted
Speaker 1: a cow in the head. The ox went crazy, the
Speaker 1: herd stampeded, and the herdsman chase so So, who disappeared.
Speaker 1: Already elusive, he used to slip through my hands like
Speaker 1: a fish, wrote another school friend, and it was no
Speaker 1: use trying to catch him. So So once terrorized a
Speaker 1: shopkeeper by igniting some explosive cartridges to the straightest shop.
Speaker 1: His mother had to hear a lot of cursing about
Speaker 1: her son, her son, the terrorists. Like the terrorists just
Speaker 1: blowing up things as a small ship. Believable, I mean believable,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's amazing. Terrorists, little fancy little prince boots
Speaker 1: just going out starting fires, little lord fauntleroy suits blowing
Speaker 1: up businesses with explosives. On another occasion, so So shoved
Speaker 1: a young child into a fast moving river and almost
Speaker 1: drowned him. When the boy complained, young Stalin shrugged and said,
Speaker 1: in essence, will you figure out how to swim? Didn't you? Dang?
Speaker 1: That is that is some abusive ship. Ah, he's the best.
Speaker 1: It's called it's called tough love. It's not all right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but Stalin was also known to be a steadfast friend
Speaker 1: much larger boys, without a second thought to defend one
Speaker 1: of his friends. One of these friends later wrote that
Speaker 1: Stalin reserved most of his rage and violence for quote
Speaker 1: people who vote through greater age or strength dominated because
Speaker 1: they seem like his father. He developed a vengeful feeling
Speaker 1: against everyone positioned above himself. So he for for the people,
Speaker 1: fighting for the people. He's taking out, he's taking out
Speaker 1: the bullies. And I think that might be a better
Speaker 1: sort of source of kind of some of his early
Speaker 1: like this idea, like he has this domineering father and
Speaker 1: then this dominating mother, and it inculpates him in this
Speaker 1: like inability to have anyone in charge. Yeah. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're gonna resist any kind of authority and anything is yeah,
Speaker 1: being a bully, and so you're gonna but he desperately
Speaker 1: needs to have authority over his friends, like over the
Speaker 1: people around him, Like and he'll he'll fucking take a
Speaker 1: bullet for you if you will do whatever he's so, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you'll be But if you resist him at all,
Speaker 1: he's going to light an orchard on fire because in
Speaker 1: the water. Yeah, because then you're the bully by saying no,
Speaker 1: thank you, says Joseph had a pathological need to be
Speaker 1: in charge, and his friendship was definitely contingent upon being
Speaker 1: the unquestioned leader of any group. He found himself in
Speaker 1: his buddy Aramash Veeley wrote that he quote could be
Speaker 1: a good friend so long as one bowed to his
Speaker 1: dictatorial will. When one of his friends stole communion bread
Speaker 1: and another boy ratted him out, Joseph quote cursed his life,
Speaker 1: called him an informer, a spy, made him hated by
Speaker 1: the other boys, and then he beat him black and blue.
Speaker 1: On March thirteenth one, when Joseph was three, the Emperor
Speaker 1: Alexander the Second had been assassinated by members of the
Speaker 1: people's will the a giant comical bombs thrown into his carriage.
Speaker 1: His successor, Alexander the Third, head crackdown on descent for
Speaker 1: some reason. This included banning the Georgian language from being
Speaker 1: taught in schools and so By the time so So
Speaker 1: was in school, he and his students were required to read, write,
Speaker 1: and speak in Russian. Slipping up and speaking in his
Speaker 1: native tongue was punishable by Quote having to stand in
Speaker 1: a corner or holding a long piece of wood for
Speaker 1: a whole morning, or being locked in a detention cell
Speaker 1: without food or water and in complete darkness until late evening.
Speaker 1: So yeah, good times, teacher, Make those kids hold a
Speaker 1: piece of wood for a whole morning. Learning is good
Speaker 1: m M. The most despised teacher in the school was
Speaker 1: a man named Lavrov. He was a Russian and who
Speaker 1: nursed a violent hatred of Georgian culture. He made young
Speaker 1: Joseph the best student in class his assistant a job
Speaker 1: that mainly involved having Joseph inform on any students speaking
Speaker 1: in Georgian. Now, young Stalin had zero issue informing on
Speaker 1: other kids, as we'll see, but he was a proud
Speaker 1: Georgian and he was not willing to put up with
Speaker 1: basically clamping down on his ancestral language. So he gathered
Speaker 1: up a small gang of eighteen year old students in
Speaker 1: ambushed Lavrov in an empty classroom. Stalin promised to murder
Speaker 1: his teacher if he continued to punish kids for speaking
Speaker 1: Jordan's which is a nice similarity between him and uh
Speaker 1: fucking Saddam Hussein, Like they both threatened to murder one
Speaker 1: of their educational leaders at one point at while they
Speaker 1: were school. Yeah, that's an interesting parallel right there. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, Saddam was a big fan of
Speaker 1: j stal So it's a bold evolutionary It's like one
Speaker 1: of those yeah, those uh late eighties movies where you
Speaker 1: take over the school, no more homework, No more homework,
Speaker 1: but like you murder the teacher instead, Yeah, you have
Speaker 1: teenagers kill your teacher for you, just like in I
Speaker 1: want to say, Revenge of the Nerds. Know that was
Speaker 1: just a rape movie. Yeah, yeah, different. Yeah. Lavrov backed
Speaker 1: down in the face of these threats because, yeah, because
Speaker 1: he didn't want to get murdered. Now it would not
Speaker 1: be accurate to view Stalin as just some hard nosed
Speaker 1: child gangster. He also loved many of his teachers and
Speaker 1: was beloved by them. His favorite was the singing teacher Simon.
Speaker 1: Simon wrote that young Stalin had a beautiful, sweet, high
Speaker 1: voice and was always his first choice for solos. He
Speaker 1: also noted that so So had a gift for working
Speaker 1: a crowd and performing. In fact, he was so good
Speaker 1: at this that he started up a side business as
Speaker 1: a wedding singer. What yeah, young Stalin just burning down
Speaker 1: vineyards orchards of constant fistfights and and a wedding singer.
Speaker 1: Complicated guy, you know, yeah, Simon recalled. People would turn
Speaker 1: up just to watch him sing, saying, let's go see
Speaker 1: how the Jugishvili voy amazes everyone with that voice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Joseph was also a gifted painter and actor, and even
Speaker 1: a comedian. All of his classmates agreed he was something
Speaker 1: of a prodigy, talented it just about everything he tried.
Speaker 1: This was not easy for him. Young Stalin spent all
Speaker 1: of his spare time reading and constantly had his nose
Speaker 1: in a book. He would walk around town with books
Speaker 1: shoved into the belt of his trousers. He was the
Speaker 1: very top of the class and never skipped school or
Speaker 1: showed up late. But so So was also a good
Speaker 1: tutor and volunteered hours of his time to help worse
Speaker 1: students in class with their studies. He happily volunteered to
Speaker 1: inform on his classmates too, whenever they were late to
Speaker 1: class or cheated on tests. He was nicknamed the Gendarme,
Speaker 1: which means his classmates all basically called him a cop.
Speaker 1: So Yeah, Yeah, Bezo. His father was impoverished and frequently
Speaker 1: out of work by the time Joseph was an adolescent,
Speaker 1: and normally he was happy to let kek take the boy,
Speaker 1: but from time to time he'd be seized by a
Speaker 1: drunken impulse to kidnap his son and take charge of him.
Speaker 1: At one point, according to KK, Bezo burst into the
Speaker 1: school drunkenly to grab so So by force. After this,
Speaker 1: Joseph had to be smuggled into class every day under
Speaker 1: the coats of his uncle's key, claimed that everyone in
Speaker 1: town helped to hide him, lying to Bezo that he'd
Speaker 1: switch schools. Jeez, this this is a complicated young boy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff going on with this kid. It
Speaker 1: is a a full childhood. He's gonna he's gonna get
Speaker 1: smuggled in and then also find a place to change
Speaker 1: into his fighting clothes after he gets smuggled him so.
Speaker 1: Stalin's early childhood was complex and multifaceted, filled with abuse
Speaker 1: and trauma, but also love and an incredibly supportive community.
Speaker 1: None of the ship Bezo put him through stopped Stalin
Speaker 1: from consistently excelling academically. In fact, the only thing that
Speaker 1: made him miss school for any length of time was
Speaker 1: his apparently magnetic attraction to being run over by carriages.
Speaker 1: You take me on a wild ride here, Robert, what
Speaker 1: do you I don't know. I don't even know why.
Speaker 1: I'm surprised at this point. That was a sentence that
Speaker 1: you said out loud to me about a person. You
Speaker 1: cannot stop, young Stalin from getting hit by fucking carriages.
Speaker 1: You know I wouldn't want to. I'm gonna quote again
Speaker 1: from young Stalin. The boys enjoyed playing chicken grabbing the
Speaker 1: axles of galloping carriages. Perhaps this was how Stalin was
Speaker 1: hurt once again. The poor mother was mad with fear,
Speaker 1: but the doctors treated him for free or ignot aged.
Speaker 1: Villy was quietly paying the bills, her son said later
Speaker 1: also called in the village quack, who doubled as the
Speaker 1: local barber. The accident gave him yet another reason. On
Speaker 1: top of his web foot pock marks and rumors of
Speaker 1: bastardy for vigilance and inferiority for being different. It permanently
Speaker 1: damaged his left arm, which means he could never be
Speaker 1: the bow ideal of the Georgian warrior. He later said
Speaker 1: it prevented him from dancing properly, but he still managed
Speaker 1: to fight. Yeah, he did. So he gets hit by
Speaker 1: a carriage playing chicken with his friends, fox up his arm. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: Joseph did not want to be a shoemaker, which is
Speaker 1: what his dad wanted him to probably yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So after his dad kidnapped him, he returned home and
Speaker 1: went back to school um and the pre Cintifla Yeah
Speaker 1: so yeah, sorry. So his dad kidnaps him um at
Speaker 1: a couple of different points. At one point like takes
Speaker 1: him into like the town to go like learn to
Speaker 1: be a shoemaker. Um and basically Keck has to go
Speaker 1: to like the pre Cintiflis and force um them to
Speaker 1: like make his dad give their son back to her
Speaker 1: Um and so So continues his studies until eighteen ninety.
Speaker 1: Went on a school trip with the choir. He's hit
Speaker 1: by another runaway carriage. Um. Yeah. The twelve year old
Speaker 1: Stalin's legs were shattered by the wooden wheels and he
Speaker 1: was taken to Tiflis again and spent months out of
Speaker 1: school recovering. His legs were so damaged that for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life he walked with an awkward sideways gate.
Speaker 1: From this, he acquired his second nickname, crimped. So people
Speaker 1: call him pockmarked and crippled basically and a cop. Yeah,
Speaker 1: three nicknames. He was brought to Tifflis, the nearby city,
Speaker 1: to recover. Now by this point, so So had moved
Speaker 1: there to work in a shoe factory, and once he
Speaker 1: learned his son was in town, he waited outside the
Speaker 1: hospital and yet again kidnapped Stalin and hit him from
Speaker 1: his mother. His kid gets kidnapped many times as he
Speaker 1: gets hit by wide range of fun activity. Again, he's
Speaker 1: like twelve at this point of course. Yeah yeah, this
Speaker 1: is like right after he got a bunch of eighteen
Speaker 1: year olds to threaten to murder his teacher. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Beso forcibly enrolled his son as an apprentice at the
Speaker 1: shoe factory where he worked. When Keke tried to take
Speaker 1: Joseph back, he screamed at her. Beso screamed at her,
Speaker 1: you want my son to be a bishop, over my
Speaker 1: dead body. He'll be educated. I'm a shoemaker and my
Speaker 1: son will be one two. Keke did not take this
Speaker 1: lying down eight hundreds. Georgia was, you know, pretty obviously
Speaker 1: a very patriarchal place. Fathers tended to get their way,
Speaker 1: but that did not happen in this case. Biographer Stephen
Speaker 1: Cotkin writes, Kek brooked no compromise. She rejected the Tiffless
Speaker 1: church's authorities proposed solutions that social be allowed to sing
Speaker 1: in their Tiffless school choir or remaining with his father.
Speaker 1: She accepted nothing less than so So's return to gory
Speaker 1: for the start of the next school year in September
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety. Her triumph over her husband in a deeply
Speaker 1: patriarchal society was reported by family friends who took the
Speaker 1: woman's side, and by the boy himself in the parental
Speaker 1: tug of war between becoming a priest or a cobbler,
Speaker 1: so so preferred school and therefore his mother. So it's
Speaker 1: like a really strange thing that she gets her way
Speaker 1: in this, Stalin gets his way in this. It's kind
Speaker 1: of tells you what sort of person she was. Interesting that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: if the if society, uh, like that's an issue, and
Speaker 1: if the dad got his way, then uh, things would
Speaker 1: have turned out way differently. They might have, they might
Speaker 1: have might have might have might have. Uh. Stalin's months
Speaker 1: of absence from school seemed to have no impact on
Speaker 1: his grades. He caught up instantly and was right back
Speaker 1: to being at the top of his class, but his
Speaker 1: behavior was notably different. After his second kidnapping from his father, Yeah,
Speaker 1: well weird, how weird How that has an impact? He
Speaker 1: started facing regular punishment from his teachers, and he organized
Speaker 1: his first protest against a school inspector named Butterski, who
Speaker 1: viciously punished students for using Georgian Stalin organized a protest, which,
Speaker 1: fueled by his rhetoric, almost turned into a riot, and
Speaker 1: this is his first like mass demonstration with Stalin organizes.
Speaker 1: In eighteen ninety two, when Joseph was fourteen, a group
Speaker 1: of three peasant bandits were captured by the police and
Speaker 1: sentenced to die by hanging. Because it was the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the school's teachers decided the right thing to do was
Speaker 1: to take their young students out to go watch several
Speaker 1: strangers die horrifically. Some biographers suspect again that this brutality
Speaker 1: had a deep impact on Stalin's future violence, but this
Speaker 1: misses the point. The condemned men had stolen a cow
Speaker 1: and killed a policeman. They'd spent months living in the forest,
Speaker 1: attacking rich people and handing out food to other peasants.
Speaker 1: They were basically Georgian Robin Hood's, only not very good
Speaker 1: at it. Stalin and his friends sympathized with the bandits,
Speaker 1: and they felt it was wrong for the priests who
Speaker 1: taught them thou shalt not kill, to participate in gleefully
Speaker 1: sanctioned state murder. Yeah, I mean yeah, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: so Stalin winds up like very sympathetic with these revolutionaries
Speaker 1: and kind of recognizing gradually that the like, the order
Speaker 1: of his society is fucked up, um partly as a
Speaker 1: result of this. Like, it doesn't seem like he gains
Speaker 1: like a blood thirst for execution from this this, Right,
Speaker 1: it's more of a view of society and less unlike
Speaker 1: what to do about it? Yeah, now, Cody, you know
Speaker 1: what won't execute peasants for stealing a cow and killing
Speaker 1: a cop. I do know. It's products. It's products, and
Speaker 1: it's products and services. That's right. That's right. All of
Speaker 1: the products and services in this are firmly pro cow stealing.
Speaker 1: And can we say that so for orchard definitely pro
Speaker 1: orchard fires. Yeah, so lightning orchard on fire and buy
Speaker 1: some of these products. We're back. So. Stalin loved to
Speaker 1: read Big, Big Bookworm as a kid, and one of
Speaker 1: his favorite books as a teenager was Darwin's The Origin
Speaker 1: of Species. He fell madly in love with the book,
Speaker 1: and he pushed on all of his friends. Darwin's theories
Speaker 1: seemed to have helped pushed the young Joseph, whose mother
Speaker 1: desperately wanted him to be a priest into atheism. One
Speaker 1: of his friends, Grisha, later recalled a day when he
Speaker 1: and Stalin lay on the grass talking about the injustice
Speaker 1: of poverty. He claims, young Stalin suddenly said, God's not unjust.
Speaker 1: He doesn't actually exist. We've been deceived. If God existed,
Speaker 1: he'd have made the world more just. When Grisha pressed
Speaker 1: him on this, he referred his friend to Charles Darwin.
Speaker 1: The revelation did not immediately stop Stalin from pursuing a
Speaker 1: career in the clergy, though, for a young brilliant boy
Speaker 1: in a town like Gory, the seminary was basically the
Speaker 1: only way to ever actually build a future or get
Speaker 1: an education Asian. So when he was fifteen years old,
Speaker 1: Stalin took the entrance exams for the Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis, Georgia.
Speaker 1: This was an extremely prestigious institution, and Keke had to
Speaker 1: once again polls strings and colin favors from friends to
Speaker 1: get Stalin in. Even with his exceptional grades, the Spiritual
Speaker 1: Seminary was not cheap, and Stalin was by far the
Speaker 1: poorest child in the school. Keke had to work her
Speaker 1: fingers to the bone in order to pay for his schooling,
Speaker 1: but to her it was worth it to give ric
Speaker 1: Son a chance to become a bishop. Now. The seminary
Speaker 1: enforced a brutal schedule for its students, so So was
Speaker 1: expected to wake up at seven am, attend a prayer
Speaker 1: session before an active breakfast, and then attend classes and
Speaker 1: prayers until ten pm. The schedule was only broken up
Speaker 1: by luncheon, dinner, and an hour and a half in
Speaker 1: the late afternoon, where he was free to go about
Speaker 1: in the city. Despite or perhaps because of this discipline,
Speaker 1: the seminary in Tifflis had a tendency to breed rebels.
Speaker 1: A huge number of the Bolshevik rebels who overthrew the
Speaker 1: Czar's empire came from this specific seminary in Georgia. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like a school for revolutionaries. Unwittingly, yeah uh.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty five, a little before Stalin went there,
Speaker 1: a student had beaten up one of his teachers for
Speaker 1: saying Georgian was a dog's language. The next year, that
Speaker 1: same rector was murdered with a sword. So yeah, the
Speaker 1: Saint your Daddy's grand escalation. Yeah yeah. There were constant
Speaker 1: student strikes in protests, and years later another Bolshevik would
Speaker 1: claim no secular school produced as many atheists as the
Speaker 1: Tiffless Seminary. Outside of class hours, Stalin drank and probably
Speaker 1: carried on a handful of romantic liaisons. There are even
Speaker 1: semi credible rumors that he may have fathered a child
Speaker 1: during this time. But the bulk of his time was
Speaker 1: spent writing poetry. He contributed several of his poems to
Speaker 1: a local newspaper, and they were good enough that Ilia
Speaker 1: Chop Chattavis. I'm not going to pronounce that right. The
Speaker 1: greatest poet in Georgia met directly with Stalin. He ordered
Speaker 1: the magazine to publish five of Stalin's poems and called
Speaker 1: him the young man with the burning eyes. Poetry was
Speaker 1: huge in Georgia at the time in a way that
Speaker 1: we really can't under stand, and poets were some of
Speaker 1: the land's greatest heroes. And Stalin actually becomes famous for
Speaker 1: his poetry while he's still a teenager. Um. He wrote
Speaker 1: it under the pseudonym Socello. But he was extremely popular
Speaker 1: and and famous as a poet before he was ever
Speaker 1: famous as a revolutionary, and his work is actually still
Speaker 1: praised as quite good today. Um, it's like one of
Speaker 1: those things you have a lot of stories of, like
Speaker 1: bad artists who become dictators. Install is the opposite, Like
Speaker 1: every artistic endeavor he took part, and he was really
Speaker 1: good at yeah, he was really talented in general at yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And some of the poems he wrote hold a few
Speaker 1: hints about the man that he became. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from young Stalin again. So Solo's next poem, A
Speaker 1: Crazed Ode to the Moon, reveals more of the poet.
Speaker 1: A violent, tragically depressed outcast in a world of glaciers
Speaker 1: and divine providence is drawn to the sacred moonlight. And
Speaker 1: his third poem, Stalin explores the contrast between violence and
Speaker 1: man and nature and the gentleness of birds, music and singers.
Speaker 1: The fourth is the most revealing. Stalin imagines a prophet
Speaker 1: not honored in his own country, a wandering poet poisoned
Speaker 1: by his own people. Now seventeen, stolen already envisions a
Speaker 1: paranoiac world where great profits could only expect conspiracy and murder.
Speaker 1: So he's a little little kind of kind of goth Yeah, yeah, conflicts.
Speaker 1: He's very successful and his later like the bank robbery,
Speaker 1: that's one of his first famous actions. Part of why
Speaker 1: he's able to carry it out is that, like one
Speaker 1: of the guards that he relies on for inside information
Speaker 1: is a huge fan of his poems. Um yeah, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's yeah. But he doesn't keep it up for very long.
Speaker 1: After like a year or so of incredible success, Joseph
Speaker 1: stops writing poetry. Um. And he later explains, I lost
Speaker 1: interest in writing poetry because it requires one's entire attention
Speaker 1: a hell of a lot of patients, and in those
Speaker 1: days I was like quicksilver. Just he just gets bored
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah, he's got too much running through his brain. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because yeah, many fist fights to get in right. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, you need like quiet reflection and uh peace,
Speaker 1: And he's not got a lot of peace inside him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is not the guy he is. It is likely
Speaker 1: that Stalin's interest in writing poems was overwritten by a
Speaker 1: new interest in revolutionary socialist literature. The seminary had a
Speaker 1: small group of rebellious students who would gather together at
Speaker 1: night and read forbidden works of political theory, eventually graduating
Speaker 1: to heavy hitters like the Communist Manifesto. Stalin and his
Speaker 1: friends joined a local club for reading illegal books the
Speaker 1: Cheap Library, which basically worked as a book sharing program.
Speaker 1: They also bought books from the local store, and Stalin
Speaker 1: would regularly steal books too, joking to his friends that
Speaker 1: he had expropriated them for the revolution. They would wait
Speaker 1: until lights out to read when the priests were all asleep.
Speaker 1: Most nights, so So would stay up until the wee
Speaker 1: hours of the morning, sacrificing most of a night's sleep
Speaker 1: for the chance to read a legal literature. He was
Speaker 1: caught several times, usually reading books by Victor Hugo. His
Speaker 1: favorite book was The Patricide by Alexander Kezbeggie, which featured
Speaker 1: a bandit hero named Koba. Coba was a Georgian partisan,
Speaker 1: basically a terrorist, fighting for liberation from Russia. Young Stalin
Speaker 1: fell in love with Coba. One of his friends recalled Coba,
Speaker 1: became so So's god and gave his life meeting. He
Speaker 1: wished to become Coba. He called himself Coba and insisted
Speaker 1: we call him that. His face shown with pride and
Speaker 1: pleasure when we called him Coba. The name meant a
Speaker 1: lot to Stalin. The vengeance of the Caucasus Mountain people's
Speaker 1: the ruthlessness of the bandit, the obsession with loyalty and betrayal,
Speaker 1: and the sacrifice of person and family for a cause.
Speaker 1: It was a name he already loved his substitute father.
Speaker 1: Years later, Stalin would adopt the named coba Is one
Speaker 1: of his revolutionary pseudonyms. So he's basically like, he gets
Speaker 1: super into fucking fan fiction. Yeah, he's a big old
Speaker 1: fan boy dork, like they all are, like Hitler with
Speaker 1: his cowboy novels. Yeah, it's all the same, like gamers
Speaker 1: who become Nazis and wrongly sort of like fetishize. I
Speaker 1: don't know, the god Emperor from Warhammer. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: this train in authoritarian personality, like every personality. I guess
Speaker 1: we all are vulnerable to it. Everybody picks a cool
Speaker 1: person from history or fiction, Like, yeah, everyone wants to
Speaker 1: be the special boy does the special Everybody wants to
Speaker 1: be the special boy who does the special thing. It
Speaker 1: is a powerful human needs. By the late eighteen nineties,
Speaker 1: uh Stalin had gone from romantic poet to Marxist fanatic.
Speaker 1: His reading had convinced him that quote the revolutionary proletariat
Speaker 1: alone is destined by history to liberate mankind and bring
Speaker 1: the world happiness. This apothesis, he believed would require trial
Speaker 1: and suffering and change, but would ultimately result in scientifically
Speaker 1: proven socialism. After a couple of years of diligent reading,
Speaker 1: Joseph got frustrated by the fact that all his group
Speaker 1: did was read. Though. He complained to the leader of
Speaker 1: the reading circle, a guy named DevD Aarni, and insisted
Speaker 1: that the group get involved in something real, something violent.
Speaker 1: DevD Aarreini refused, and Stalin broke off to make his
Speaker 1: own study group dedicated to fucking ship up as well
Speaker 1: as reading. The first outlet for his youthful rage would
Speaker 1: be a particularly aggressive seminary priest nicknamed black Spot for
Speaker 1: a hideous mole on his head. And eighteen ninety seven,
Speaker 1: Stalin had been caught thirteen times reading band books, and
Speaker 1: as a result, black Spot launched a crusade to break
Speaker 1: up these secret reading circles. He would search the boy's
Speaker 1: foot lockers and dirty laundry. Over the months, he grew
Speaker 1: obsessed with catching Stalin. And I'm gonna quote again from
Speaker 1: young Stalin. At prayers, the boys had the Bible open
Speaker 1: on their desks and read marks are plucking off the
Speaker 1: sage of Russian Marxism on their knees. In the courtyard
Speaker 1: started a huge pile of firewood in which Stalin and
Speaker 1: Iramushvili would hide the band works in where they would
Speaker 1: sit and read them. Abashidze whose black Spot, waited for
Speaker 1: this and then sprang out to catch them, but they
Speaker 1: managed to drop the books into the logs. We were
Speaker 1: locked up in the detention cell at once, sitting late
Speaker 1: into the evening and darkness without food. But hunger made
Speaker 1: us rebellious, so he banged on the doors until the
Speaker 1: monk brought us something to eat. Stalin grew his hair
Speaker 1: out long as an active protest, deliberately targeting black Spot.
Speaker 1: When the priest demanded he cut it, Stalin thumbed his
Speaker 1: nose at the man. This prompted the priest to crack
Speaker 1: down harder, and one night he finally succeeded in catching
Speaker 1: their reading circle in the act writing filthy jokes in
Speaker 1: a notebook. The priests leapt into the room and grabbed
Speaker 1: the journal out of stalin His hand, and young Stalin
Speaker 1: refused to give it up, and they wound up fighting
Speaker 1: over the book. The priest won black Spot March. Stalin
Speaker 1: back to his room and forced the boys to soak
Speaker 1: their journal with wax and then lighted on fire. After this,
Speaker 1: he continued stalking Stalin, catching him again a few nights later,
Speaker 1: reading forbidden books. This was enough to get a letter
Speaker 1: sent home to Keke, who rode to Tiflis immediately to
Speaker 1: talk with her son. They had what Josepher called is
Speaker 1: their first argument over this. At one point Keke told him,
Speaker 1: my son, you're my only child. Don't kill me. How
Speaker 1: will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas the second
Speaker 1: leave that to those who have brothers and sisters. Hurt
Speaker 1: by his mother's pain and fear, Joseph shared her that
Speaker 1: he was not a rebel. Keke called this his first lie. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. Joseph's behavior continued to degrade, and his grades
Speaker 1: finally slipped to He was still one of the best
Speaker 1: students at the seminary, but was no longer at the
Speaker 1: top of the class. Seminary journals note that he declared
Speaker 1: himself an atheist, refused to pray, talked in class, and
Speaker 1: would not take his hat off as a sign of
Speaker 1: respect to the monks. He received eleven warnings in the
Speaker 1: space of a few days which prompted black Spot and
Speaker 1: his fellow priests to search his possessions. Um. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's he's he's uh you could say, acting out at
Speaker 1: this point. Yeah. I mean he's being radicalized. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: he's been radicalized and he's acting out. Yeah. Um so uh,
Speaker 1: this all kind of comes to a head, um with
Speaker 1: you know, sort of a fight between Stalin and this monk,
Speaker 1: the black Spot, who is like his his like really
Speaker 1: the guy who pushes Stalin out of you know, what
Speaker 1: might be considered a normal path in life and kind
Speaker 1: of on this revolutionary course. Like he's clearly his head
Speaker 1: was leading him there, but this is the guy that
Speaker 1: he's sort of binds all of those feelings of frustration
Speaker 1: up in. Right. It's like, yeah, you go to college
Speaker 1: and you read and learn, and you like find these
Speaker 1: groups of people, but you don't have Yeah. This sort
Speaker 1: of like uh this you you like uniting figure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that pushes you yeah farther, Yeah, abbasids the black Spot.
Speaker 1: This like this this priest kind of becomes the symbol
Speaker 1: of everything that's wrong with society to Stalin. Yeah. Uh
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote one more time from the book
Speaker 1: Young Stalin about sort of the last fight they have
Speaker 1: in the seminary. They sprinted back into the seminary just
Speaker 1: in time to see the inspector force open Stalin's trunk
Speaker 1: and find some forbidden works. Abashidz grabbed them and was
Speaker 1: triumphantly bearing his prize up the stairs when one of
Speaker 1: the group charged and rammed the monk, almost loosening his
Speaker 1: grip on the books, but black Spot held on valiantly.
Speaker 1: The boys jumped on him and knocked the volumes out
Speaker 1: of his hands. Stalin himself ran up, seized the books
Speaker 1: and took to his heels. He was banned from visiting
Speaker 1: town and Kelby and his like the friend who had
Speaker 1: charged the priest, was expelled. Yet ironically so so schoolwork
Speaker 1: seemed to improve. He received very good fours from most
Speaker 1: subjects in a five for logic. Even now, he still
Speaker 1: enjoyed his history lessons. Indeed, he so liked his history teacher,
Speaker 1: the only seminary teacher he admired, that he later took
Speaker 1: the trouble to save his life. Meanwhile, the black Spot
Speaker 1: had lost control of Stalin, but could not restrain his
Speaker 1: own obsessive pursuit of this malcontent. They were getting closer
Speaker 1: to the breaking point, the monk crept up on him
Speaker 1: and peaked at him, reading yet another forbidden book. He
Speaker 1: then pounced, taking the book from him, but Stalin simply
Speaker 1: wrenched it out of his hands, to the amazement of
Speaker 1: the other boys. He then went on reading it. Abshidze
Speaker 1: was shocked. Don't you know who I am? He shouted.
Speaker 1: Stalin rubbed his eyes and said, I see the black
Speaker 1: spot and nothing else. He had crossed the line. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Joseph was expelled in May of eighteen ninety nine. The
Speaker 1: official cause was non appearance at exams, but this is
Speaker 1: not entirely accurate. For years, Joseph would claimed that he
Speaker 1: had been expelled from Marxist propaganda. His mother, however, claimed
Speaker 1: that he had been taken out of school against his
Speaker 1: will by her when he caught pneumonia. But the real
Speaker 1: cause seems to be more banel than either of these.
Speaker 1: The black Spot raised the tuition rates just high enough
Speaker 1: that Keke could no longer afford to pay for Joseph
Speaker 1: to stay enrolled, and this seems to be what forced
Speaker 1: him out of seminary. But this was not a great
Speaker 1: tragedy for young Stalin. He had long ago decided he
Speaker 1: was never going to become a priest. According to Sebastian Montfiore,
Speaker 1: black Spot had perversely turned stal And into an atheist
Speaker 1: Marxist and taught him exactly the oppressive tactics surveillance, spying,
Speaker 1: invasion of inner life, violation of feelings, and Stalin's own
Speaker 1: words that he would recreate in his Soviet police state.
Speaker 1: And that Cody takes us up to Stalin's adulthood. What
Speaker 1: a fun childhood, j Stall baby, Yeah, a little baby
Speaker 1: Joe doing crimes, learning lessons, right, having secret yeah, secret teachers,
Speaker 1: priest fights, sworn enemy, is a p yeah, yeah, putting
Speaker 1: on his fight clothes. But getting getting kidnapped a couple
Speaker 1: of times, kidnapped more times than any of the other
Speaker 1: students we've talked or subjects we've talked about. He really
Speaker 1: got kidnapped a lot. Well, And I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: usually you get kidnapped once and that's kind of that's
Speaker 1: that's the one. Mm hmm. Good ship. Yeah, Well, Cody
Speaker 1: has changed your openny of our old buddy j Stall
Speaker 1: at all. Um. I wouldn't say it's changed. I would
Speaker 1: say it's more robust. It's some illuminations, Um, yeah, what
Speaker 1: I mean, it's sort of every step of the way,
Speaker 1: You're like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, he took
Speaker 1: that way, he took that with him, carried that with
Speaker 1: him for a long Yeah. That that one stayed with him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and just sort of every action he took and every
Speaker 1: action taken against it's like, yep, all right, there you go.
Speaker 1: That's yeah, very eliminating. Cool ship, cool ship. Well, Cody,
Speaker 1: has this convinced you to start your own Marxist utopia
Speaker 1: in the steps of Russia? It convinced me more. Yah, yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna we're gonna fight days, We're gonna get just
Speaker 1: going to be fighting fight days and kidnapping children. I
Speaker 1: learned the opposite lesson there that I've learned that kidnapping
Speaker 1: is good, So it is good. This has always been
Speaker 1: a pro kidnapping podcast. That's okay. I didn't I didn't
Speaker 1: want it. I didn't want to presume. So no, Sophie,
Speaker 1: we're sponsored by the concept of kidnapping, right, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's their number one sponsor is the concept of kidnapp
Speaker 1: Promo code do it d o I TA point point
Speaker 1: promo code kidnapping at the New app Kidnapper with no
Speaker 1: e Take the Children dot Com, Take the Children dot Com.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, Cody, you want to plug your plug doubles?
Speaker 1: I can't wait and so I won't. I'll do it now.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I got a show called some More News.
Speaker 1: You can check it out on YouTube. We got a Twitter,
Speaker 1: my personal twitters Dr Mr Cody. We have podcasts my
Speaker 1: cost Katie Stole, Even more News. I've got another podcast
Speaker 1: with my co host Katie Stole and my other co host,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans, called Worst Year Ever. Check out that sounds
Speaker 1: it's pretty good. Um, it's terrible in terms of the
Speaker 1: subject matter and the time in which it's recorded. Um.
Speaker 1: And yeah, our patreon dot com slash some more News
Speaker 1: if you want to support that, and I don't. What's up, guys,
Speaker 1: How are you doing? Hey? Are you doing? The Democrats
Speaker 1: are losing the impeachment vote as we speak, because the
Speaker 1: Democrats are losers apparently. Yeah, the Democrats. You know, what
Speaker 1: Joseph Stalin wouldn't have done is taken no for an
Speaker 1: answer from Congress. But that's not a good thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe not something that they should do. So by the
Speaker 1: time this episode comes out on Thursday, because the Senate's
Speaker 1: voting on Wednesday, big old losers, a bunch of losers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they already lost the witness vote today. Our only hope
Speaker 1: is that the coronavirus makes it into a really nice
Speaker 1: DC steakhouse. It thins up Congress a little bit. I
Speaker 1: feel like the other things are going to happen. Nope,
Speaker 1: that is it. I feel like if that happens and
Speaker 1: it's spread more and maybe maybe it won't be contained
Speaker 1: to just a few members of Congress, that we want
Speaker 1: to go away. Nope, nope, all right, that's it. That
Speaker 1: is the only hope, and your only hope is to
Speaker 1: listen to more Behind the Bastards. You can find us
Speaker 1: on the internet along with the sources for this episode,
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards dot com. You can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at I right, okay, you can find us on
Speaker 1: Twitter and Instagram at at bastards pod. Um. You know
Speaker 1: that's the that's the episode. Uh, Go go out into
Speaker 1: the world and remember the most important lesson of Joseph Stalin.
Speaker 1: Regularly fistfight all of your neighbors. Then catapult the cow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: catapult the hell out of a cow. Wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry listening