From the Time of Troubles to the Present Day

Abstract

The son of the shoemaker Vissarion Djugashvili and the laundress Ekaterina Geladze was born in the village of Guri in Tiflis Province of the Russian Empire (no national republic, principality, or autonomous region existed at that time) in 1878. At about the time Iosif was ready for school, Emperor Alexander III of Russia approved a memorandum from the minister of public education barring entrance to the gymnasiums to "the children of servants, laundresses, and cooks" (18 June 1888). But "there are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm." Even future Bolsheviks. Hence in the same year, 1888, young Iosif was sent to the local seminary. Six years later he completed it. Then he went to study at the Tiflis Seminary for five years but never finished. He became a rebel, an agitator, an expropriator. In short, he became a revolutionary. Without benefit of any kinds of Cambridges, he became the "wisest, the most genius-like, the most everything, and so on."