Where did Joseph Stalin grow up and live?

📍Gori, Shida Kartli, Georgia

1878 – 1953

“I was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili on the 18th of December 1878 in Gori, a small city in central Georgia, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman. Gori gave me the Georgian toughness and the outsider's hunger for power that I carried into the Russian revolutionary movement. I became Joseph Stalin — Man of Steel — and ruled the Soviet Union from 1924 until my death in 1953. I industrialised a peasant country in a decade through forced collectivisation that killed millions. I led the Soviet Union to victory in the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany at the cost of twenty-seven million Soviet lives. I built a totalitarian state of extraordinary cruelty. Gori erected a museum to me. History has not yet finished arguing about what I was.”

👍 LovedThe Georgian landscape of my childhood — the Caucasus mountains, the Mtkvari River. The revolutionary movement that gave a shoemaker's son access to power. The industrialisation that transformed the Soviet Union.

👎 DislikedThe collectivisation that killed millions of peasants. The purges that destroyed the party I had built. The paranoia that increased with age and power.

Map showing where Joseph Stalin lived — Gori, Shida Kartli, Georgia

🗺️ Approximate location today

📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons

Sources: Montefiore, S. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), Knopf; Service, R. Stalin: A Biography (2004), Macmillan