Everything about Vissarion Jughashvili totally explained
Vissarion (Beso) Ivanovich Jughashvili (
Виссарион (Бесо) Иванович Джугашвили in
Russian; ბესარიონ ჯუღაშვილი
Besarion Jughashvili in
Georgian) (
1853 or
1854 -
1890, possibly sighted in
1931) was
Joseph Stalin's father. His surname (also known as
Dzhugashvili) is derived from Georgian village Jugaani, where his predecessors came from.
The little information available on Vissarion Jughashvili is sometimes contradictory. He is known to have been born into an
Orthodox Christian peasant family from the village of Didi Lilo in Georgia, most likely in 1850. He seems to have been of
Ossetian ancestry. His father's name was Vano and he'd a brother called Georgy. According to the Arsoshvili family (Jughashvili's relatives and longtime residents of Didi Lilo), Jughashvili couldn't afford paying a three-
ruble tax and had to move to
Gori in search of employment. In Gori, he lived in a house of an
Ossetian named Kulumbegashvili. Here, Jughashvili found a job as a
cobbler and married
Ekaterina (Keke) Geladze in 1874. It is known that two of their children (Mikhail and Konstantin) died as infants. It is possible that the family lived in Didi Lilo, but when Ekaterina was about to give birth to their third child, Joseph, she returned to Gori (it was customary for a pregnant woman to stay with her relatives during labor and some time after the child was born). Vissarion had to make his way back to Gori in order to care for his wife and a newborn son. It turned out that he never returned to Didi Lilo. Jughashvili also worked at Adelkhanov's shoe factory in
Tiflis for some time. He was apparently a long time alcoholic, and beat his wife and son frequently. Before Joseph was 10, Jughashvili left home (or, according to some reports, was thrown out by his wife). In any event, it's likely that the young Stalin never saw his father again.
Even though the circumstances of Vissarion Jughashvili's death are not clear, most historians tend to trust the account of Stalin's daughter
Svetlana Alliluyeva. In one of her letters to a friend, she wrote that Jughashvili had died in a scuffle from a stab wound. Some historians tend to believe
Soviet sources, which claimed that Vissarion had died from natural causes in
1890. It becomes even more confusing when one looks at a police report (№136) on Stalin's arrest for his
revolutionary activities and transfer to
Vologda in
1909: "Iosif (Joseph) Vissarionovich Jughashvili. Comes from Georgian peasants. Has a 55-year old father Vissarion Ivanovich and mother Ekaterina. Mother lives in Gori, father leads a migratory lifestyle..." In
1912, Stalin gave a different statement to the police: "Father is deceased, mother lives in Gori". It isn't completely clear whether Stalin tried to confuse the police or whether his father was still alive at that time (Stalin was known for lying about his past). In fact, Vissarion Jughashvili may have been seen in a
tavern in
Georgia as late as
1931. Vissarion Jughashvili's grave has never been found.
Posthumous reputation
His effect on the young Joseph has been the subject of speculation, especially amongst psychologists both trying to explain Stalin's brutality, and trying to prove their psychological theories that a brutal father will create a brutal son.
Alice Miller has suggested that Stalin's deformed left arm was a result of multiple fractures sustained while trying to defend himself from multiple beatings as a child, but there's no way of either proving or disproving this.
Further Information
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