Behind the Bastards - The Childhood of Joseph Stalin

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Robert is joined by Cody Johnston to discuss the childhood of Stalin.FOOTNOTES: Stalin as a Theological Student The Finnish City Where Lenin Met Stalin Still Lives in Russia's Shadow On the Origin and Significance of the Name "Stalin" Stalin, from Child to Bolshevik Leader HOW STALIN BECAME STALINIST Stalin: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928  Young Stalin Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, Cody, the nice thing about felonies is that, oh shit, we're recording, aren't we?

The bad thing about felonies are terrible. Don't commit them. We started in the middle of our conversation about how felonies are bad and don't do crimes. Be straight, don't do crimes. Yeah, exactly. Avoid crimes and embrace heterosexuality, the motto of this podcast. That's what we were talking about. This is horrible, you guys. No, this is the best introduction yet, Sophie.

The introduction we planned that we're doing now is the best one yet. Speaking of not doing crimes, Cody, you know who was the best at not committing crimes? The best at not committing crimes. The best at not committing crimes. I mean, I was going to say Jesus, but that's not true at all. No, he committed so many crimes. That was Jesus' whole thing, his crimes. Huge crimeer.

Huge crimeer. Yeah. Watch him, he's a crimeer. I don't know, me? Joseph Viserianovich Stalin. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I introduce the show's name?

No. This is Behind the Bastards. Welcome to the Don't Do Crimes podcast. With Cody Johnston, my co-host for today. And today, every day in this podcast, we talk about a terrible person from history and reveal details from their past that the listeners do not know. And today, we're talking about the childhood of our old best friend, Jay Stahl. Joey.

Joey. Yeah, Joe Steele. Little Joey. Okay. Little Jo-bo-s-buzz. He's like his baby crimes. Some of them, yeah. Some baby crimes in here.

Okay, okay, okay, okay. Are you a fan of Joseph Stalin? I'm aware of Joseph Stalin. Okay, okay. Not a Stalin stan. Not a Stahl head, a stanning, a stanning, I guess. Yeah, a stanning, a stanning is what they call them, yeah. Joe Bro.

Joe Bro, there we go. Sophie's shaking her head, she does not like it. What do you know about Stalin's childhood? Not much, actually, about his childhood. That's good. That's good, because otherwise this episode would be disappointing. I know all about his baby crimes. All about his very tiny crimes.

Well, Cody, Joseph Viserianovitch, Jugosvili was born in 1878 in Gory, Georgia. And I will try to pronounce Jugosvili close to correct, but I won't. I won't. You're doing it. It won't happen. I believe in you. Gory was a very tiny town on the outskirts of the Russian Empire, sparsely populated and largely underdeveloped.

The area around Gory was beautiful. The Tsar's brother kept a palace there, but it was also remote. The future ruler of Russia would count himself lucky that he came up in Gory, though. See, in the wider Caucasus region, only one in 30 children were allowed to go to school because they just weren't that many schools. In Georgia, though, one in 15 children got to have an education. Hell yeah. This is because Gory had a large merchant population and a comparatively outsized amount

of development. The small town of 7,000 where Stalin grew up featured four schools, including a two-story church founded in 1818. In Gory, one in 10 boys attended school. See, this is the place to come up. All right. Yeah, yeah. He won the lottery.

Yeah. I mean, what is your ideal ratio of people to attend school? My ideal ratio is a one out of one, 10 out of 10, 30 out of 30, 50 out of 50. See, I think it should just be me. Out of all of them? Yeah. So, like, one out of billions, and it's you. Yeah, because all we really need is one podcaster and a lot of people to dig.

That's true. You don't need to go to school to dig. Who's teaching you, though, at this school, then? That is a mystery. Nobody knows. You just walk into a building and you walk out and you're educated? And I know where to tell people to dig, and that is the ideal society. So, you're just, like, a dig major?

Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, digging and philosophy. But you're not good enough to do the digging yourself. Well, there's plenty of diggers. Someone needs to tell them where to dig. Otherwise, you just have a bunch of random holes. Right, right.

You want either one big hole or, like, very coordinated holes. Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, and then I can tell people, now we eat, now we continue digging. And then they do it. Well, I sip daiquiris. Exactly. There should be one person. Yeah, which I've earned and learned how to make in school.

Yes. Which is taught by a mystery. Right. All right. Back to Stalin. Okay. Joseph's parents were Viserian Jugashvili and Ekaterina Galazi. They'd been married back in 1872 when Viserian was 22 and she was 17.

Now, Viserian went by Beso for regions that I'm sure make sense to Georgians. And Ekaterina went by Keke, which does kind of make sense to everybody. Beso was handsome, broad-shouldered, intelligent and industrious. He was a cobbler by trade and widely seen as the best bootmaker in town. Keke was gorgeous and charming and beloved by just about everybody in the town. They had conceived two children before Joseph's birth. Beso was, in his wife's words, almost mad with happiness when the first, Mikhail, was born in 1875. Tragically, he died two months later, driving Beso equally mad with grief.

He began to drink. But this was the 19th century and he didn't let something like a dead baby stop you from rolling the dice on another baby. The Jugashvili's had another son a year later. Georgie. Georgie? G-E-I-R-G-I. He died six months later, which, yeah, I'm not going to be able to pronounce all these.

G-E-I-R-G-I. G-E-I-R-G-I. Yeah. He died six months later, which, from an optimistic point of view, is a 300% improvement in his linguistic survival over the first kid. They're doing it. They're making progress. Do you think pointing that out to them would have made them less sad?

I really don't. I feel like maybe it would just remind them of the other child. When you look at this statistically, you're a way better parrot than you were before. Look at how much, oh, that's called learning. That's growth right there. That's growth right there. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

It's sort of like when you look at the number of people who die on my jet ski in just total numbers, it looks like I'm a bad jet ski pilot. But when you compare the number of people who've died on my jet ski in the last three years to the prior nine years, I'm a great jet ski pilot. I've improved immensely. See, exactly. That's how you look at statistics. That is how you look at statistics.

So when Joseph was born that December of 1878, his mom and his dad had reason to be less than enthusiastic about his chances of survival. So-so, as they called him, was weak, fragile, and thin. The second and third toes of his left foot were webbed. He would sit constantly, and he was always on the verge of death. And I don't normally say if only that baby had died, but this is Stalin. I don't say if only that baby had died. Two out of three, you were so close.

I thought third time was a charm. Oh, no. Before Joseph's birth, Bezos vowed, just let the child survive, and I'll crawl to Jerry on my knees with the child on my shoulders. But, of course, promises to God are the easiest ones to ignore. And once Joseph came out alive, Bezos sort of forgot about this. But then Joseph got sick, and Bezos assumed this was God being like, you made a promise, you're welching someone to murder your baby, because that's God.

That was a deal. That was a deal. That was the deal. So he and Keke walked to the church and donated a sheep to the priests. Now, unlike his older brothers, Stalin survived. And in the early years, the family thrived. Goree was a poor town, and most of the houses were made of mud. But Bezos' shoemaking business did well enough for him to hire apprentices,

and eventually 10 employees. For a while, the family lived well. Keke later recalled, our family happiness was limited. One of Bezos' apprentices later said, he lived better than anyone else of our profession. They always had butter in their house. Let's give you an idea of where things are for society at this point. He's got butter. Yeah, butter's good.

I get it. I get it. Yeah. Now, this would later be very embarrassing for adult Stalin, because communist heroes are not supposed to come from prosperous middle-class roots. They're not allowed to have butter. Yeah, they're not supposed to be butter havers. Yeah, you get fucking starved to death for having butter.

You're a butter haver. Stalin's a judge. Yeah. Yeah. As an adult, he ruefully admitted, I'm not the son of a worker. My father had a shoe workshop, employing apprentices, an exploiter. We didn't live badly. And that was like, if only we'd lived badly.

Right. I wish I had harder times. But luckily for his future socialist credentials, his family happiness did not last long. Bezo had started drinking after his first son's death and continued drinking for the rest of his life. He made friends with a local Russian exile named Paka, who'd been basically forced to flee to Georgia for his connections to a group called the People's Will, a terrorist organization who'd repeatedly tried and eventually succeeded to murder the Tsar. Some of Joseph's earliest memories were made talking to Poka,

who liked Little Soso and bought him a canary. Like Bezo, Poka was a hardcore alcoholic. One winter he passed out in the snow and died, and Bezo had to go to one... Sorry. I thought I didn't know that he was really abrupt. Yeah, that's fucking life back then. Everybody knows someone who dies in the snow.

No, I know. It really sounded like you were like, here's like a fun little story about a time he got drunk, but then the story ended. Like all Stalin stories, in a miserable, miserable, unthinkable death. Yeah. Yeah.

So after his drinking buddy died, Bezo had to go to one of the local priests, Father Chuck Viani, to find a drinking buddy. As an adult, Stalin had a vivid memory of his dad and the priest stumbling home, singing out a tune. He recalled the priest saying, you're a good bloke, Bezo, even for a shoemaker. And his father responded, you're a priest, but what a priest.

I love you. All right. All right. So, OK. Good times in Georgia. Yeah, some characters. Some characters. Good times.

Now, Bezo was not a happy drunk, and as he descended more and more into drink, he became increasingly obsessed with local rumors about Joseph's parentage. See, Keke was close friends with a guy named Davry Chiwi, the chief of police. The town mayor later testified that Joseph was actually this guy's real son.

There were also rumors that a famous explorer who'd crossed through the town named Przhevalski had bedded Keke and produced Joseph. Some townsfolk declared that one of the town's few Jewish men was his real dad. But the most commonly cited potential father for Stalin was a guy named Yakov Ignatyshevili. Ignatyshevili was the wealthiest man in town,

a wine merchant and a great boxer. Keke worked in his household from time to time, and Ignatyshevili did take a deep liking to the family. He was named Joseph's godfather and later paid for his education. There's no way to know the truth, but we absolutely knew they were rumors. Some locals accused Keke of basically being a sex worker.

Even decades later, a reporter from the Washington Post who went to Gory and talked to some of the people old enough to have known Keke and Joseph found claims that young Stalin called his mother the prostitute when they had arguments. So we don't really know who Stalin's father was. Or if Keke was in fact a prostitute or if she was just really well liked.

That's just like a snotty thing for a kid to say. Yeah, and it's compounded by the fact that in Georgian culture, men were expected to have multiple mistresses. And everybody was just fucking all the time, which definitely makes it harder to know what was actually going on. What else are you going to do?

I'll tell you what else you're going to do later, because it's fun as hell. Yeah, Keke herself did little to downplay the rumors that she had been sleeping around a lot and Joseph could be anybody's kid. In her old age, she urged Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD, Stalin's secret belief. She urged his wife Nina to take illicit lovers

and basically insinuated that she'd done the same, saying, when I was young, I cleaned house for people and when I met a good looking boy, I didn't waste the opportunity. Who knows? I mean, there it is. Yeah. As an aside, Keke was quite a character.

The book Young Stalin by Sebastian Sebag Montfiore includes a number of bizarre anecdotes about her, usually based on her own recollections. And I'm going to read you one right now to give you a sense of this woman's personality. She managed to attract Soso with a flower at which point Keke jovially pulled out her breasts and showed them to the toddler, who ignored the flower and died for the breasts, but the drunken rukshin exile poka was spying on them and burst out laughing, so I buttoned up my dress. So this is like her playing with little baby Stalin as a kid. Playful.

Yeah, these are like the stories she tells to everybody when her son is the ruler of Russia. Right, right, right. She's a character. Keke kind of rules. Yeah, yeah, all right, all right. Yeah, so most historians seem to think that Bezo was in fact Joseph's real father, but the rumors at least were real and they drove an increasingly drunken Bezo into regular rages. On one occasion he came home, wasted, and threw Joseph on the ground so hard he peed blood for days.

Jesus. He would regularly charge home drunk looking for young Stalin and screaming, where is Keke's little bastard hiding under the bed? So, yeah. Yeah. Less fun character. Less whimsical. Yeah, things switch hard in old time in Georgia between whimsical and beating a child until he pees blood.

Yeah, for a couple of days. Yeah. One of young Stalin's schoolmates later recalled, undeserved beatings made the boy as hard and heartless as the father himself. And this person came to believe that Bezo's abuse is how Stalin learned to hate people. Stalin did in fact spend much of his early childhood hiding from his drunken father or watching his dad beat his mom. By the time he was five, his dad's business was in shambles and Keke was increasingly supporting the family.

She started to fight back too, punching her husband in retaliation for his violence. This eventually cowed Bezo and by the time his Joseph was six, his father had fled the home. And this seems like the best case scenario, right? Yeah. It's like the Lifetime movie, like she's abused but then she learns to fight back and kicks him out, he leaves the house. Unfortunately, violence doesn't work that way. Yeah.

And as one friend of the family later recalled, quote, his mother was head of the family now and the fist which had subdued his father was now applied to the upbringing of her son. She beat him unmercifully for disobedience. So that's kind of the reality. So a cycle of violence you're saying. Yeah. If you learn to solve your problems with punching,

maybe you'll solve all your problems with punching. Yeah. It's the tragedy of the fists. Bummer. Yeah, I came on here to have a good time, Robert. A good time learning about Jay Stahl. Yeah. Apparently.

All right. Decades later, on his last visit home to see his mother in the 1930s, dictator of all Russia, Joseph Stalin asked his mother why she'd beaten him so much. She replied, it didn't do you any harm. But uh... Yeah, I shouldn't have said Keke rules. She's a character though. She's just gestured to everything around us.

Yeah. Yeah. Did you know harm? Okay. Yeah. Now, Stalin's biographers are very much sort of multiple minds on this. Sebastian Sebagmont Fiore, who's certainly the most entertaining Stalin biographer, draws a direct line between all this childhood abuse and Stalin's future violence.

And he also points out that Gory was a wildly violent town in a pretty fun way. And I'm going to quote directly from the book Young Stalin Now. Gory was one of the last towns to practice the picturesque and savage custom of free-for-all town brawls with special rules but no holds barred violence. The boozing, praying, and fighting were all interconnected, with drunken priests acting as referees. The saloon bars of Gory were incorrigible stews of violence and crime. Town brawls, wrestling tournaments, and schoolboy gang warfare

were the free Gorelli fighting traditions. At festivals Christmas and Shrove Tide before Lent, both quarters fielded a parade led by transvestites or actors writing as carnival kings on camels and donkeys, surrounded by pipe players and singers in fancy dress. At the Kenoba Carnival to celebrate Georgia's 1634 victory over Persia, one actor played the Georgian Tsar, another the Persian Shah, who was soon pelted with fruit than doused in water.

The males in each family, from children upwards, also paraded, drinking wine and singing until night fell when the real fun began. This assault of free boxing, the sport of Crevy, was a mass duel with rules. Voice of Three wrestled other three-year-olds, then children fought together, then teenagers and finally the men threw themselves into an incredible battle, by which time the town was completely out of control, a state that lasted into the following day, even at school, where classes fought classes, shops were often pillaged.

What the f- Isn't that fucking awesome? That's wild. That's so cool. That's the only town that does- No, it's not the only town, it was one of the last ones, but that used to be super common in big chunks of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. This is the alternative to sex you mentioned, right?

Yeah, everybody beat the shit out of each other. It's the day where we all fight. Let's all get wasted and just ruin each other in the middle of the street. The priests will be referees. Yeah, purged fight club town, amazing. Everybody's drunk, everybody's punching each other, it sounds like the best time. I mean, that's your dream, that's like an amusement park. Yeah, it's like the good purge, instead of it being abusive,

it's a way for the whole town to celebrate by just wailing on each other. I wish we still did that. Hey, you can dream. You're in America, you can do whatever you want. Yeah, we could make this the new holiday, that could get rid of our partisan divide. I think it will bring people together. National fist fight day, yeah.

It will bring them together to beat the shit out of each other. Exactly, everyone will feel a little bit better and a little bit worse. God, what a great thing that would be if we had universal health care. There it is. Or legal street drinking, but you need one of the two. Yeah, so first term universal health care, and then second term is like, well, now we gotta fight each other. Yeah, now we have to fight each other.

Now that we know what we'll be taking care of, now we can get the real shit. We gotta get our money's worth from this fucking health care shit. Exactly. Oh my God. I mean, I wish we did that just as a podcasting team. Like a team building retreat? Yeah, like we all fight in a pit, and Sophie gets really drunk and dressed as a priest in referees.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What? It's a good plan. Sophie, we're doing this. You've got a new job. This is how we're celebrating Shrove Tide, when we figure out when Shrove Tide is. Yeah, we're gonna figure it out, and we're gonna do some trust falls,

but then we're gonna be each other up. We miss Katie. Trust fights. Oh, Katie's gonna be in the pit with everybody. We're all in the pit. She's got good reach, it's gonna be quite a fist fight. Yeah. Well, you're gonna have to change your attitude,

because you're gonna be the referee and the priest. Oh. Yeah. Yeah, she's turning around. She's turning around on it. I'm just trying to picture that outfit. Yeah. It's all about the outfit, and then everybody.

Sounds like a lot of black and white, you know? Yeah, and a lot of red from the blood, you see. I bet we could get a lot of businesses to support, like, a national fist fight day. Yeah, yeah. Just like, we'll put your name on our jerseys, and... Yeah. I hate this, continue.

Okay. Yeah, okay. Katie? It's easy to draw a direct line between the gigantic town-wide beatdowns that Joseph... What? ...participated in as a small child, and the terrific violence that he unleashed

as the red czar of the USSR. Citation needed, Robert. I mean, come on. Well, there's actually a lot of disagreement about this. There's a lot of disagreement about this. All right. Another Stalin historian, Stephen Kotkin, cautions against that kind of thinking in his biography,

Stalin. Quote, a sizable chunk of humanity was beaten by one or more parents, or did Gory suffer from an especially violent Oriental culture? Of these town-wide fist fights, Kotkin notes, such festive violence, madcap barefists followed by sloppy embraces, was typical

of the Russian Empire, from Ukrainian market towns to Siberian villages. Gory did not stand out in the least. So, basically, everybody is doing this. Like, it's weird to be like, to focus on how this affected Stalin's rule, and it was like, this was just the norm. Yeah.

So, well, two things I guess I take away from that is, one is that we should definitely do this now, because if they're arguing that it didn't affect him, then it won't affect us, and we should do it. Absolutely. Nobody's arguing with that. Right. But also, most of those people who experienced that

didn't become dictators, so there's not really like a control group, I guess. Yeah, I guess the point is that like, the violent, the kind of violence unleashed under Stalin was new, but every generation of Russian ruler prior to Stalin had kind of grown up in the same violent culture. Experienced that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and so like, so it's weird to be like, suddenly it mattered. Right, right, right. Like, obviously like, everything that happened to Stalin mattered, because he wound up with like, this kind of like, incredible power. Right, right. But it's weird to focus just on this thing

that was a factor in all of these other people's lives who didn't do that. Right, it's more just like, well, this is... Yeah. Not the reason, but it is an element of, you know, what led him, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And we're gonna talk more about

Joey Stahl and what made him into the man he became. But first, you know what Stalin would have loved, Cody, as a committed communist? I was gonna say, beating shit out of people. Products and services, Cody. No, okay, okay, okay. If there's one thing communists love, it's capitalism.

Alright, okay. Yup. There we go. Yeah, Stalin sent out a lot of promo codes. Oh, Stalin loved promo codes. He loved promo codes. If you needed to know where to buy a mattress, Joseph Stalin was the guy to ask.

I believe that. Yeah. That's why they call them caspers, because of all the go... Oh, we shouldn't make that joke, huh? Add break time. Yeah. During the summer of 2020,

some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes,

you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science

in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow

to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space

with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left sending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! We were talking about the cargo cult of masculinity and how all those weird daily wire Ben Shapiro guys love to pose with cigars and other totems of masculinity

without actually doing anything that might be considered brave or courageous. It's frustrating and annoying and deeply irritating, but it might be why this right-wing power grab has been such like a slow creep rather than the kind of things we see. People like Stalin carry out,

people like Hitler carry out. People who, while they were gigantic pieces of shit, grew up being very accustomed to immediate and terrible violence. Right, they were very hardened. Pussyfoot around. Yeah.

As opposed to all these Ivy League dorks in their leather chairs. Ivy League dorks with their leather chairs and cigars talking about how it's a republic, not a democracy, and nobody needs to really vote. But dressing it up

so it doesn't sound like they're saying we should have fascism. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, let's go back to the good old-fashioned clean living of Joseph Stalin. Heck yeah. It's probably fair to say

that historians focus too much on the darker aspects of Stalin's upbringing because you've got this guy who killed millions of people. So let's talk about he was beaten as a kid, how his town had all these gigantic drunken fights, how he was impoverished and abused. But Joseph actually had,

like focusing on all that stuff, it's real, it's important, it's a factor in what he grew up to be. But it's also important to note that Joseph had all things considered a pretty happy childhood, considering the time he grew up and the place that he grew up. And he said so repeatedly as an adult.

Even the fact that his father's business collapsed when he was 10 and impoverished his family wasn't hugely traumatic. He later joked he became a proletarian so his ruin was my advantage. The same year his father left, Joseph caught smallpox when an epidemic swept through town,

killing six of his godfather's children. Young Stalin survived, perhaps thanks to a faith healer, and his mother took him to in desperation. But his face was horribly scarred and the other children nicknamed him Poxy. Luckily, Joseph and Keke had a wide circle of family friends who absolutely adored young Stalin.

They paid the family's medical bills and helped secure Joseph's admission into the very best of local schools. So he has all these traumas, but he's also hugely supported by this community that thinks he's brilliant and loves him from a very early age. He never feels like he's alone.

He's unsupported. Yeah, he's not isolated at all. He's got a community of support. A community who is willing to sacrifice for him, which is not emphasized enough in people talking about his upbringing. This is as much of a factor as him getting hit by his mom and stuff.

Yeah, because that's what we all want. We want a supportive community for our children. Yeah. Now, these wide circle of family friends also help secure Joseph admission into the very best of the schools in Gory, which is not that he needed a whole lot of help. He needed the money,

but he was brilliant as a child. And when he sat the examination, it was so well that the school started him off in the second grade immediately. So he just skipped the first grade because he was such like an autodidact. So learned already. Keke didn't have much money,

but Joseph's wealthy godfather ensured he showed up to that first day of school in style. One of his classmates later recalled, I saw among the school children an unknown boy wearing a large formal Georgian coat down to his knees, new boots with high legs, a tight wide leather belt,

and a black peak cap with lacquered visors shining in the sun. This very short person, quite thin, was wearing tight trousers and boots and a pleated shirt with a scarf and a red shins school bag. No one else dressed like that in the whole class, the whole school. School boys surrounded him in fascination. So he is kind of a hipster.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Dressing for, I guess, attention. Well, but also like being dressed by these adults who adore him for attention because they think he's special. Right. And willing to like, yeah. They want to present their special boy to the world.

Yeah. And as the strangest boy in school, Joseph was obviously a target for bullies, but he gave as good as he got. The town priest, Father Czarkviani, claimed there was hardly a day when someone had not beaten him up, sent him home crying, or when he hadn't beaten up someone else.

So he is always fighting as a boy, which is normal in Georgia at this point in time. Right, right. I mean, he's from the fight town. He's from the fight town where we show our love through fist punches. Exactly, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, as soon as you bring attention

to yourself at that age, you're like, all right, I'm a target now. And this is how it's going to be. Yeah, I'm a target now, and that's just going to make me into a tough son of a bitch. Yeah. Which he objectively was. One time he fought with his friend,

Iramashvili, in the playground. The fight wound up as a draw, but when Iramashvili turned around, Stalin leapt on him from behind and tackled him to the grass. He was famous for fighting dirty and was regularly beaten within an inch of his life as a result.

Young Stalin developed a habit of changing out of his fancy clothing with its tall white collars after bidding his mother farewell in the morning. It was the only way to stop it from being stained with his and other children's blood. So this is, yeah, this was a goal for him. He was like, this is my plan. I'm going to get the shit kicked out of me,

or I'm going to kick the shit out of someone else, and I really don't care which. Right, because it is a day of the week. It is a day of the week, and I am 11. Yeah, right, he's like his little kid. He's like a little kid, and he's a time to go get covered in blood.

Yeah. Like I do every single day. Taking off his fancy clothes, putting on his fighting outfit. Again, I believe all children should be raised this way. This is convincing. Yes, you've made that clear. Like kids in all towns that lack sufficient internet access, the children of Gory divided up into rival street gangs

based on neighborhood. These gangs battled regularly with each other, but they also played, and there was an odd kind of equality in the streets. Stalin played and fought with the children of princes and generals. He and his friends would wander off into the woods with knives, bows, and slingshot to damage whatever they came across.

Just like on a mission to damage. Here's your weapons, boys. Go damage something. Go into the woods and hurt things. Hurt and destroy time, okay. Yeah, boys, this is what you do. Thank you, Papa. Gonna go destroy something.

One favorite target was the apple orchard of a local prince, and George is filled with princes, like prince means special fancy boy thing. You're definitely of a higher class than other people, but everywhere's littered with princes. They're filthy with them. So one of their favorite targets was the apple orchard of a local prince.

One time, young Stalin set this orchard on fire, and we don't really know why. He just liked doing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, it was a day of the week. And just another reason I deeply identify with Joseph Stalin. Yeah, he hadn't gotten into a big enough fight. He definitely got into a fight earlier that day.

Yeah. But it wasn't enough, so we had to start a fire. Which is essentially a fight with the land. Exactly, yeah. Man versus nature today. Yeah. I'm gonna quote again from Sebastian Sebagmont Fiori's young Stalin. Quote,

Soso was very naughty. His younger friend Georgie recalls, always running through the streets. He loved his catapult and homemade bowl. Once a herdsman was bringing his herd home, when Soso jumped out and catapulted a cow in the head. The ox went crazy, the herd stampeded, and the herdsman chased Soso, who disappeared.

Already elusive. He used to slip through my hands like a fish, wrote another school friend, and it was no use trying to catch him. Soso once terrorized a shopkeeper by igniting some explosive cartridges to destroy the shop. His mother had to hear a lot of cursing about her son.

Yeah, her son the terrorist. Son the terrorist. Jesus. Just blowing up things as a small child? Unbelievable. I mean, believable, but... Yeah, it's amazing. I don't have any recations.

He's a little fancy terrorist. He's a little fancy terrorist. His old prince boots just going out, starting fires. Little Lord fontleroy suits and just blowing up businesses with explosives. On another occasion, Soso shoved a young child into a fast-moving river and almost drowned him.

When the boy complained, young Stalin shrugged and said, in essence, well, you figured out how to swim, didn't you? Dang. That is... that is some abusive shit. Oh, he's the best life. It's called tough love.

It's not... Yeah. But Stalin was also known to be a steadfast friend. Willing to fight much larger boys without a second thought to defend one of his friends. One of these friends later wrote that Stalin reserved most of his rage and violence for, quote,

people who, through greater age or strength, dominated others because they seemed like his father. He developed a vengeful feeling against everyone positioned above himself. So, he's fighting for the people. Yeah. He's taking out the bullies. And I think that might be a better

sort of source of kind of some of his early... like this idea, like he has this domineering father and this domineering mother and it inculcates him in this inability to have anyone in charge of him. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you're going to resist any kind of authority and do anything as, yeah, being a bully. But he desperately needs to have authority

over his friends, over the people around him. And he'll fucking take a bullet for you if you will do whatever he says. Yeah, if you'll be. But if you resist him at all, he's going to light an orchard on fire in the water, yeah. Because then you're the bully.

By saying, no, thank you to whatever he says. Joseph had a pathological need to be in charge and his friendship was definitely contingent upon being the unquestioned leader of any group he found himself in. His buddy Iramashvili wrote that he, quote, could be a good friend so long as one bowed to his dictatorial will.

When one of his friends stole communion bread and another boy ratted him out, Joseph, quote, cursed his life, called him an informer, a spy, made him hated by the other boys and then he beat him black and blue. Yeah. On March 13th, 1881, when Joseph was three,

the emperor Alexander II had been assassinated by members of the people's will via giant comical bombs thrown into his carriage. His successor, Alexander III, had cracked down on dissent. For some reason, this included banning the Georgian language from being taught in schools. And so by the time Soso was in school,

he and his students were required to read, write, and speak in Russian. Slipping up and speaking in his native tongue was punishable by, quote, having to stand in a corner or holding a long piece of wood for a whole morning or being locked in a detention cell without food or water

and in complete darkness until late evening. I love school. Yeah. Good times. Teacher, make those kids hold a piece of wood for a whole morning. Learning is good. Mm-hmm. The most despised teacher in the school

was a man named Lavrov. He was a Russian and he nursed a violent hatred of Georgian culture. He made young Joseph, the best student in class, his assistant, a job that mainly involved having Joseph inform on any students speaking in Georgian. Now, young Stalin had zero issue informing on other kids,

as we'll see, but he was a proud Georgian and he was not willing to put up with basically clamping down on his ancestral language. So he gathered up a small gang of 18-year-old students and ambushed Lavrov in an empty classroom. Stalin promised to murder his teacher if he continued to punish kids for speaking Georgian.

What? Oh, okay. Which is a nice similarity between him and fucking Saddam Hussein. They both threatened to murder one of their educational leaders at one point while they were school children. Yeah, yeah. That's an interesting parallel right there. Well, I mean, you know,

Saddam was a big fan of Jaystall, so... Mm-hmm. That's a bold, revolutionary, leading the, it's like one of those, yeah, those late 80s movies where you take over the school. No more homework. No more homework. But, like, you murder the teacher instead.

Yeah, you have teenagers kill your teacher for you. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Just like in, I want to say, revenge of the nerds. No, that was just a rapey movie. Yeah, yeah, different kind of bed. Yeah, Lavrov backed down in the face of these threats. Because you didn't want to get murdered. Yeah, because you didn't want to get murdered.

Now, it would not be accurate to view Stalin as just some hard-nosed child gangster. He also loved many of his teachers and was beloved by them. His favorite was the singing teacher Simon. Simon wrote that young Stalin had a beautiful, sweet, high voice and was always his first choice for solos. He also noted that Soso had a gift for working a crowd and performing. In fact, he was so good at this that he started up a side business

as a wedding singer. What? Yeah. Young Stalin, just burning down vineyards, orchards, constant fistfights. Catapulting cows. And a wedding singer. All right, okay.

A complicated guy, you know? Yeah. Simon recalled people would turn up just to watch him sing, saying, let's go see how the Juggish Vili Voi amazes everyone with that voice. Wow. Yeah. All right.

Joseph was also a gifted painter and actor and even a comedian. All of his classmates agreed he was something of a prodigy, talented at just about everything he tried. This was not easy for him. Young Stalin spent all of his spare time reading and constantly had his nose in a book. He would walk around town with books shoved into the belt of his trousers. He was the very top of the class

and never skipped school or showed up late. But Soso was also a good tutor and volunteered hours of his time to help worse students in class with their studies. He happily volunteered to inform on his classmates too, whenever they were late to class or cheated on tests. He was nicknamed the gendarme, which means his classmates all basically called him a cop.

So, yeah. Yeah, he's a narc. Yeah. Bezo, his father, was impoverished and frequently out of work by the time Joseph was an adolescent. And normally he was happy to let KK take the boy. But from time to time he'd be seized by a drunken impulse to kidnap his son and take charge of him.

At one point, according to KK, Bezo burst into the school drunkenly to grab Soso by force. After this, Joseph had to be smuggled into class every day under the coats of his uncles. KK claimed that everyone in town helped to hide him, lying to Bezo that he'd switched schools. Jeez. This is a complicated young boy.

Yeah, a lot of stuff going on with this kid. My God. It is a full childhood. He's got to get smuggled in and then also find a place to change into his fighting clothes after he gets smuggled in. So, Stalin's early childhood was complex and multifaceted. Filled with abuse and trauma,

but also love and an incredibly supportive community. None of the shit Bezo put him through stopped Stalin from consistently excelling academically. In fact, the only thing that made him miss school for any length of time was his apparently magnetic attraction to being run over by carriages. You're taking me on a wild ride here, Robert. I don't even know why I'm surprised at this point.

That was a sentence that you said out loud to me about a person. You cannot stop young Stalin from getting hit by fucking carriages. You know what? I wouldn't want to. I'm going to quote again from young Stalin. Please do. The boys enjoyed playing chicken, grabbing the axles of galloping carriages. Perhaps this was how Stalin was hurt.

Once again, the poor mother was mad with fear, but the doctors treated him for free, or Ignatyshvili was quietly paying the bills. Keke, her son said later, also called in a village quack who doubled as the local barber. The accident gave him yet another reason, on top of his webbed foot, pock marks and rumors of bastardy,

for vigilance and inferiority, for being different. It permanently damaged his left arm, which means he could never be the bow ideal of the Georgian warrior. He later said it prevented him from dancing properly, but he still managed to fight. Yeah, he did. So he gets hit by a carriage, playing chicken with his friends, fucks up his arm.

Now, Joseph did not want to be a shoemaker, which is what his dad wanted him to do. Yeah, get that vibe, it's probably not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So after his dad kidnapped him, he returned home and went back to school. And the precentif... Yeah, sorry.

So his dad kidnaps him at a couple of different points. At one point, takes him into the town to go learn to be a shoemaker. And basically, Keke has to go to the precentiflus and force them to make his dad give their son back to her. And so-so continues his studies until 1890, when on a school trip with the choir, he's hit by another runaway carriage.

Sure, yeah. Yeah, the 12-year-old Stalin's legs were shattered by the wooden wheels, and he was taken to Tiflis again and spent months out of school recovering. His legs were so damaged that for the rest of his life, he walked with an awkward sideways gate. From this, he acquired his second nickname, crimped. Hmm. So people call him pockmarked and crippled, basically.

And a cop. Yeah, and a cop. Yeah, three nicknames. Yeah. He was brought to Tiflis, the nearby city, to recover. Now, by this point, Soso had moved there to work in a shoe factory, and once he learned his son was in town, he waited outside the hospital, and yet again,

kidnapped Stalin and hit him from his mother. He gets kidnapped all these many times. Geez, good. He gets hit by carriages. Right, he's got a wide range of fun activities. And again, he's like 12 at this point. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like right after he got a bunch of 18-year-olds

to threaten to murder his teacher. Yes, yeah. Bezo forcibly enrolled his son as an apprentice at the shoe factory where he worked. When Keke tried to take Joseph back, he screamed at her. Bezo screamed at her, you want my son to be a bishop over my dead body, he'll be educated. I'm a shoemaker, and my son will be one too.

Keke did not take this lying down. 1800s Georgia was, you know, pretty obviously a very patriarchal place. Fathers tended to get their way. But that did not happen in this case. Biographer Stephen Kotkin writes, Keke brooked no compromise. She rejected the Tiflis Church's authorities' proposed solutions that social be allowed to sing in their Tiflis school choir or remaining with his father.

She accepted nothing less than Soso's return to Gory for the start of the next school year in September 1890. Her triumph over her husband in a deeply patriarchal society was supported by family friends who took the woman's side and by the boy himself. In the parental tug-of-war between becoming a priest or a cobbler, Soso preferred school and therefore his mother. So it's like a really strange thing that she gets her way in this.

Yeah. And Stalin gets his way in this. It kind of tells you what sort of person she was. Right, right. Interesting that, yeah, if the, if society, like, that's an issue and if the dad got his way, then things would have turned out way differently. They might have. They might have.

Might have. Might have. Might have. Stalin's months of absence from school seemed to have no impact on his grades. He got up instantly and was right back to being at the top of his class. But his behavior was notably different after his second kidnapping from his father.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Well, weird how that changes a person. Weird how that has an impact. He started facing regular punishment from his teachers and he organized his first protest against a school inspector named Buttersky who viciously punished students for using Georgian.

Stalin organized a protest which, fueled by his rhetoric, almost turned into a riot. This is his first, like, mass demonstration of what Stalin organizes. In 1892, when Joseph was 14, a group of three peasant bandits were captured by the police and sentenced to die by hanging. Because it was the 1890s, the school's teachers decided that the right thing to do was to take their young students out

to go watch several strangers die horrifically. Some biographers suspect, again, that this brutality had a deep impact on Stalin's future violence. But this misses the point. The condemned men had stolen a cow and killed a policeman. They'd spent months living in the forest, attacking rich people and handing out food to other peasants. They were basically Georgian robin hoods,

only not very good at it. Stalin and his friends sympathized with the bandits and they felt it was wrong for the priests who taught them thou shalt not kill to participate in gleefully sanctioned state murder. Yeah, I mean. Yeah. So Stalin winds up, like, very sympathetic with these revolutionaries

and kind of recognizing, gradually, that the order of his society is fucked up. Partly as a result of this. Like, it doesn't seem like he gains, like, a blood thirst for execution from this. Right, it's more of, yeah, a view of society and less on, like, what to do about it. Yeah.

Now, Cody, you know what won't execute peasants for stealing a cow and killing a cop? I do know. It's products and its services. It's products and services. That's right, that's right. All of the products and services in this are firmly pro-cow stealing. Mm-hmm.

Orchard fires. Orchard fires, too. Definitely pro-Orchard fires, yeah. So lighten an orchard on fire and buy some of these products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. The FBI sometimes gets to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man

who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good badass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys

on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today

is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize

that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little

band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit

when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days

he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! So, Stalin loved to read.

Big, big bookworm as a kid. And one of his favorite books as a teenager was Darwin's The Origin of Species. He fell madly in love with the book and he pushed it on all of his friends. Darwin's theories seemed to have helped push the young Joseph, whose mother desperately wanted him to be a priest, into atheism.

One of his friends, Grisha, later recalled a day when he and Stalin lay on the grass talking about the injustice of poverty. He claims young Stalin suddenly said, God's not unjust. He doesn't actually exist. We've been deceived. If God existed, he'd have made the world more just.

When Grisha pressed him on this, he referred his friend to Charles Darwin. The revelation did not immediately stop Stalin from pursuing a career in the clergy though. For a young, brilliant boy in a town like Gory, the seminary was basically the only way to ever actually build a future or get an education.

So when he was 15 years old, Stalin took the entrance exams for the spiritual seminary in Tiflis, Georgia. This was an extremely prestigious institution, and Kecke had to, once again, pull strings and call in favors from friends to get Stalin in, even with his exceptional greats. The spiritual seminary was not cheap,

and Stalin was by far the poorest child in the school. Kecke had to work her fingers to the bone in order to pay for his schooling, but to her, it was worth it to give her son a chance to become a bishop. Now, the seminary enforced a brutal schedule for its students.

They had to attend a prayer session before an actor breakfast, and then attend classes and prayers until 10 p.m. The schedule was only broken up by lunch and dinner and an hour and a half in the late afternoon where he was free to go about in the city. Despite, or perhaps because of this discipline, the seminary in Tiflis had a tendency

to breed rebels. A huge number of the Bolshevik rebels who overthrew the Czar's empire came from this specific seminary in Georgia. Yeah, it was like a school for revolutionaries unwittingly. In 1885, a little before Stalin went there, a student had beaten up one of his teachers

for saying Georgian was a dog's language. The next year, that same rector was murdered with a sword. Yeah. This ain't your daddy's grand school. My gosh, some escalation. Yeah, yeah. There were constant student strikes and protests,

and years later, another Bolshevik would claim no secular school produced as many atheists as the Tiflis seminary. Outside of class hours, Stalin drank and probably carried on a handful of romantic liaisons. There are even semi-credible rumors that he may have fathered a child during this time.

But the bulk of his time was spent writing poetry. He contributed several of his poems to a local newspaper, and they were good enough that Ilya Chavchatovies, I'm not going to pronounce that right, the greatest poet in Georgia, met directly with Stalin. He ordered the magazine to publish five of Stalin's poems

and called him the young man with the burning eyes. Poetry was huge in Georgia at the time in a way that we really can't understand, and poets were some of the land's greatest heroes. And Stalin actually becomes famous for his poetry while he's still a teenager. He wrote it under the pseudonym Socello, but he was extremely popular

and famous as a poet before he was ever famous as a revolutionary. And his work is actually still praised as quite good today. It's like one of those things, you have a lot of stories of like bad artists who become dictators, and Stalin's the opposite. Like every artistic endeavor he took part in,

he was really good at. Yeah, he seems really talented in general at art in many, many different ways. And some of the poems he wrote hold a few hints about the man that he became, and I'm going to quote from young Stalin again. Socello's next poem, A crazed ode to the moon reveals more of the poet,

a violent, tragically depressed outcast in a world of glaciers and divine providence is drawn to the sacred moonlight. From Stalin explores the contrast between violence and man and nature, and the gentleness of birds, music and singers. The fourth is the most revealing. Stalin imagines a prophet not honored in his own country,

a wandering poet poisoned by his own people. Now 17, Stalin already envisions a paranoic world where great prophets could only expect conspiracy and murder. So he's a little, little kind of, kind of goth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Conflicts, conflicts going on.

So he's very successful and his later, like the bank robbery that's one of his first famous actions, part of why he's able to carry it out is that like one of the guards that he relies on for inside information is a huge fan of his poems. Oh, wow. Yeah.

But he doesn't keep it up for very long. After like a year or so of incredible success, Joseph stops writing poetry and he later explains, I lost interest in writing poetry because it requires one's entire attention, a hell of a lot of patience, a lot of quicksilver.

He just gets bored of it. Yeah, he's got too much running through his brain. Yeah. Too many fistfights to get in. Right. Well, yeah. You need like quiet reflection and peace and he's got a lot of peace inside him.

Yeah, that is not the guy he is. Yeah. It is likely that Stalin's interest in writing poems was overwritten by a new interest in revolutionary socialist literature. Stalin had a small group of rebellious students who would gather together at night and read forbidden works of political theory,

eventually graduating to heavy hitters like the Communist Manifesto. Stalin and his friends joined a local club for reading a legal books, The Cheap Library, which basically worked as a book sharing program. They also bought books from the local store and Stalin would regularly steal books too, joking to his friends that he had expropriated them

for the revolution. They would wait until lights out to read when the priests were all asleep. Soso would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, sacrificing most of a night's sleep for the chance to read a legal literature. He was caught several times, usually reading books by Victor Hugo.

His favorite book was The Patricide by Alexander Kazbegi, which featured a bandit hero named Koba. Koba was a Georgian partisan, basically a terrorist fighting for liberation from Russia. Young Stalin fell in love with Koba. One of his friends recalled, Koba became Soso's god and gave his life meeting.

He wished to become Koba. And insisted we call him that. His face shown with pride and pleasure when we called him Koba. The name meant a lot to Stalin, the vengeance of the Caucasus mountain peoples, the ruthlessness of the bandit, the obsession with loyalty and betrayal, and the sacrifice of person and family for a cause.

It was a name he already loved, his substitute father. Years later, Stalin would adopt the name Koba as one of his revolutionary pseudonyms. So, he's basically like, he gets super into fucking fan fiction. Yeah, he's a big old fanboy dork.

Yeah, he's a big old fanboy dork, like they all are. Like Hitler with his cowboy novels. Yeah, it's all the same. Like gamers who become Nazis and wrongly sort of like fetishize, I don't know, the god emperor from Warhammer 40,000. Right, it's all the barking crap.

Yeah, it's this train in authoritarian personality. Like every personality, I guess, we all are vulnerable to it. Everybody picks a cool person from history or fiction. Right. The special boy does the special thing. Everybody wants to be the special boy who does the special thing. It is a powerful human need.

Yes, it is. By the late 1890s, Stalin had gone from romantic poet to Marxist fanatic. His reading had convinced him that, quote, the revolutionary proletariat alone is destined by history to liberate mankind and bring the world happiness. This hypothesis, he believed, would require

trial and suffering and change, but would ultimately result in scientifically proven socialism. After a couple years of diligent reading, Joseph got frustrated by the fact that all his group did was read, though. He complained to the leader of the reading circle, a guy named Dev Diorini, and insisted that the group get involved in something real,

something violent. Dev Diorini refused, and Stalin broke off to make his own study group, dedicated to fucking shit up as well as reading. The first outlet for his youthful rage would be a particularly aggressive seminary priest, nicknamed Black Spot for a hideous mole on his head. In 1897,

Stalin had been caught 13 times reading banned books, and as a result, Black Spot launched a crusade to break up these secret reading circles. He would search the boy's footlockers in dirty laundry. Over the months, he grew obsessed with catching Stalin. And I'm going to quote again from young Stalin. At prayers, the boys had the Bible open on their desks

and read Marx or Plekinov, the sage of Russian Marxism on their knees. In the courtyard, stood a huge pile of firewood in which Stalin and Iremashvili would hide the banned works and where they would sit and read them. Abashidze, who's Black Spot, waited for this and then sprang out to catch them,

but they managed to drop the books into the logs. We were locked up in the detention cell at once, sitting late into the evening in darkness without food. But hunger made us rebellious, so we banged on the doors until the monk brought us something to eat. Stalin grew his hair out long as an act of protest deliberately targeting Black Spot. When the priest demanded he cut it,

Stalin thumbed his nose at the man. This prompted the priest to crack down harder, and one night he finally succeeded in catching the reading circle in the act, writing filthy jokes in a notebook. He grabbed the journal out of Stalin's hand, and young Stalin refused to give it up, and they wound up fighting over the book.

The priest won. Black Spot marched Stalin back to his room and forced the boys to soak their journal with wax and then light it on fire. After this, he continued stalking Stalin, catching him again a few nights later reading forbidden books. This was enough to get a letter sent home to Keke, who rode to Tiflis immediately to talk with her son.

They had what Joseph recalled as their first argument over this. At one point, Keke told him, my son, you're my only child, don't kill me. How will you be able to defeat Emperor Nicholas II? Leave that to those who have brothers and sisters. Hurt by his mother's pain and fear, Joseph assured her that he was not a rebel.

Keke called this his first lie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was. Joseph's behavior continued to degrade, and his grades finally slipped to. He was still one of the best students at the seminary, but was no longer at the top of the class.

Seminary journals note that he declared himself an atheist, refused to pray, talked in class, and would not take his hat off as a sign of respect to the monks. He received 11 warnings in the space of a few days, which prompted Blackspot and his fellow priests to search his possessions. Yeah, so he's...

He's... You could say acting out at this point. Yeah, I mean, he's being radicalized. Yeah, he's been radicalized and he's acting out. Yeah. So, this all kind of comes to a head with, you know,

sort of a fight between Stalin and this monk, the Blackspot, who is, like, really the guy who pushes Stalin out of what might be considered a normal path in life, and kind of on this revolutionary course. Yeah. His head was leading him there,

but this is the guy that he sort of binds all of those feelings of frustration up in. Right. It's like, yeah, you go to college and you read and learn and you, like, find these groups of people, but you don't have, yeah, this sort of, like, this uniting figure

that pushes you even farther. Yeah, Abishidze, the Blackspot, this priest kind of becomes the symbol of everything that's wrong with society, with Stalin. Yeah. And I'm going to quote one more time from the book,

Young Stalin, about sort of the last fight they have in the seminary. They sprinted back into the seminary just in time to force open Stalin's trunk and find some forbidden works. Abishidze grabbed them and was triumphantly bearing his prize up the stairs when one of the group charged and rammed the monk, almost loosening his grip

on the books, but Blackspot held on valiantly. The boys jumped on him and knocked the volumes out of his hands. Stalin himself ran up, seized the books, and took to his heels. He was banned from visiting town, and Kelby and his, like, the friend who had charged the priest was expelled. Yet, ironically, Soso's schoolwork seemed to improve.

He received very good fours for most subjects and five for logic. Even now, he still enjoyed his history lessons. Indeed, he so liked his history teacher, the only seminary teacher he admired, that he later took the trouble to save his life. Meanwhile, the Blackspot had lost control of Stalin, but could not restrain his own obsessive pursuit of this

malcontent. They were getting closer to the breaking point. The monk crept up on him and peaked at him, reading yet another forbidden book. He then pounced, taking the book from him. But Stalin simply wrenched it out of his hands, to the amazement of the other boys. He then went on reading it. Abishidze was shocked. You know who I am? He shouted. Stalin rubbed

his eyes and said, I see the Blackspot and nothing else. He had crossed the line. Yeah, Joseph was expelled in May of 1899. The official cause was non-appearance at exams, but this is not entirely accurate. For years, Joseph would claim that he'd been expelled from Marxist propaganda.

His mother, however, claimed that he'd been taken out of school against his will by her when he caught pneumonia. But the real cause seems to be more banal than either of these. The Blackspot raised the tuition rates just high enough that Keke could no longer afford to pay for Joseph to stay enrolled. And this seems to be what forced him out of

seminary. But this was not a great tragedy for young Stalin. He had long ago decided he was never going to become a priest. According to Sebastian Montfiore, Blackspot had perversely turned Stalin into an atheist Marxist and taught him exactly the repressive tactics, surveillance, spying,

invasion of inner life, violation of feelings and Stalin's own words that he would recreate in his Soviet police state. And that, Cody, takes us up to Stalin's adulthood. Aw, what a fun childhood. Jaystall, baby.

Yeah, little baby Joe doing crimes, learning lessons. Having secret book clubs. Yeah, secret clubs. Beatin' up teachers. Secret priest fights. Sorn enemy is a priest. Yeah.

Putting on his fight clothes. Getting kidnapped a couple of times. Kidnapped more times than any of the other students we've talked, or subjects we've talked about. Yeah. He really got kidnapped a lot. Well, I mean, you know, usually you get

kidnapped once and that's kind of, that's the one. Good shit. Yeah. Well, Cody, this has changed your opinion of our old buddy Jaystall at all. I wouldn't say it's changed. I would say it's a robust

some illuminations. Yeah. I mean, sort of every step of the way, you're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Okay. He took that way. He took that with him, carried that with him for a long time. Yeah, that one stayed with him for a while. Yeah, and just sort of every action he took

and every action taken against him. It's like, yep, all right, there you go. That's... Yeah, very illuminating. Cool shit. Cool shit. Well, Cody, has this convinced you to start your own Marxist utopia in the steps of Russia?

It convinced me more, yeah. Okay. We're gonna fight days. It's just going to be fight days. Fight days and kidnapping children. I learned the opposite lesson there that I've learned that kidnapping is good, so... It is good. This has always been a pro-kidnapping podcast.

Okay, that's okay. I didn't want to presume, so... No, Sophie, we're sponsored by the concept of kidnapping, right? I mean, yeah, the number one sponsor is the concept of kidnapping. Promo code, do it. Promo code. Excellent.

D-O-I-T, exclamation point. Exclamation point. Promo code, kidnapping at the new app, Kidnapper with no E. TakeTheChildren.com. TakeTheChildren.com. Oh, boy. Cody, you want to plug your plugables? I can't wait, so I won't.

I'll do it now. I've got a show called Some More News. You can check it out on YouTube. We've got a Twitter, my personal Twitter's Dr. Patrick Cody. We have a podcast, my co-host, Katie Stoll, even more news. I've got another podcast with my co-host, Katie Stoll

and my other co-host, Robert Evans, called Worst Year Ever. Check us out on Worst Year Pod. That sounds like it's terrible. I mean, good. It's pretty good. It's terrible in terms of the subject matter and the time in which it's recorded. If you want to support that, I don't know.

Dave, what's up, guys? How are you doing? How are you doing? The Democrats are losing the impeachment vote as we speak. Is it because the Democrats are losers? Apparently. Yeah, the Democrats. You know what Joseph Stalin wouldn't have done?

Is take a no for an answer from Congress. But that's not a good thing. Yeah, what? His reaction is maybe not something that they should do. Time this episode comes out on Thursday because the Senate's voting on Wednesday. Big ol' losers.

Oh, a bunch of losers, yeah. Yeah, they already lost the witness vote today. Our only hope is that the coronavirus makes it into a really nice DC steakhouse and fins out Congress a little bit. I feel like there's other things that could happen.

Nope. That is it. I feel like if that happens, then just spread more and maybe it won't be contained to just the few members of Congress that we want to go away. Nope. That's it. That is the only hope. And your only hope

is to listen to more Behind the Bastards. You can find us on the internet, along with the sources for this episode at behindthebastards.com. You can find me on Twitter at iRiteOK. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at atbastardspod. You know, that's the episode.

Go out into the world and listen to the most important lesson of Joseph Stalin, regularly fist-fight all of your neighbors. Then catapult the cow. Yeah, catapult the hell out of a cow. Wait, wait. I'm so sorry, listen.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on Trial

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on Trial on the iHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.