Trivia

He despised his son Yakov Dzhugashvili so much that when Yakov attempted suicide, Stalin was reported to have said: "Ha! He couldn't even shoot straight!".

The first time Lenin mentioned Stalin in a 1917 memo he forgot his name, made a guess at it, then scribbled it out and just called him 'that Georgian guy'.

Stalin loved the "Tarzan" movies and often watched them at the Kremlin. For some reason, he was amused by the concept of a man being able to communicate with apes. Stalin ordered an expedition in Africa, which gathered over 100 apes and monkeys for his plans of breeding an obedient soldier. The secret research center was set in Sukhumi for breeding experiments on apes and monkeys under personal patronage of Stalin. After several years of non-results Stalin ordered the principal scientists executed and lost interest in breeding soldiers from apes. Today this research center is known as "Obeziannii pitomnik" in Sukhumi.

Stalin's adopted revolutionary name -- "Stalin" -- literally means "Man of steel" in Russian. His mother called him "Soso," his undercover party nickname was "Koba."

Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" (1939).

He could be quite kind to people whom he only met in passing. There is one account of him making sure a man was set free from the Gulag after receiving a letter from the man's young daughter. Another instance was when he and some of his staff had to stay at a old lady's cottage for the night while traveling between Moscow and a military headquarters during the war, he ensured the woman was compensated for the trouble despite the lady declaring that she was happy to provide the service for free.

During their historic meeting he asked Winston Churchill if he ever had any of his subordinates shot. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought it was a joke and went along with the "gag", but the question terrified Churchill so much that he allegedly never openly spoke to Stalin again.

Somewhat ironically, he was a huge fan of movies starring John Wayne, Hollywood's most vocal anti-Communist and a rabid supporter of blacklisting and the McCarthy witch hunts.

When Stalin would enter the Soviet Politburo people would applaud him, sometimes for hours. The reason the clapping went on so long was because everybody was afraid to be the first one to stop.

Was known for completely erasing any and all record of a person's existence as punishment and ascribing Their accomplishments to others or himself. In an ironic turn of events, this also happened to Stalin himself after Khrushchev's secret speech to a certain extent (in Yugoslavia this happened to Stalin even earlier, due to the Tito-Stalin split). While he was never completely written out of history, he was marginalized and became a scapegoat for most problems in the USSR, while his positive achievements were ascribed to Lenin instead. In addition, most of his statues were torn down, and streets and towns named for him were re-named. Finally, his body was removed from Lenin's mausoleum.

Stalin did not officially build extermination camps, although the gulags have been called death camps as prisoners were sent there to be worked to death.

The rate of which the USSR was industrialised under his rule, was the fastest in history. Health care and education were also dramatically improved.

Has been portrayed in movies by actors including F. Murray Abraham, Michael Caine, Robert Duvall, José Ferrer, Bernard Hill, and Andro Kobaladze.

Much of the early archive footage of Stalin is actually an actor portraying him in scenes taken from October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928).

Once stated that the happiest time of his life was when he was in exile in Siberia. There, Stalin felt it was where the true spirit of Russia resided.

Was referred to as "Uncle Joe" by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In a testament written just before his death, Lenin denounced Stalin's ambitions and tried to warn the other Soviet leaders about them. Unfortunately, Stalin managed to blunt the effect of the testament and still seized power after Lenin's death anyway.

Although known for his stoic, reserved and unemotional demeanor, he was far less reserved in private and noted by his closest underlings and his enemies as being given to explosive rages and crushing depressions.

His real birthday is actually December 18, 1878 (or December 6 on the Julian calendar, used in Russia during the 19th century), but he had it changed to December 21, 1879 in official papers for unknown reasons.

First wife died of tuberculosis, second wife committed suicide.

Two sons, Yakov Dzhugashvili (b. 1907, d. 1943 in a Nazi camp) and Vasili Stalin (b. 1921, d. 1962 in exile), and one daughter, Svetlana (b. 1926, d. 2011, defected to USA).

In March 2001, Russian Independent Television NTV discovered a previously unknown grandson of Stalin, Yuri Davydov, living in Novokuznetsk, Siberia. Davydov told NTV that his father had told him of his lineage but, because the campaign against Stalin's cult of personality was in full swing at the time, told him to keep quiet about it. NTV said several historians, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, mention a son being born to Stalin and his common-law wife, Lida, in 1914 during his exile in northern Siberia.

As a youth, he was struck down and almost killed by a runaway carriage. The accident left him with a stiff left shoulder and for the rest of his life he was unable to use his left arm.

He suffered recurrent bouts of smallpox as a child, which badly disfigured his face as he grew older.

His body was moved from the Lenin Mausoleum to the Kremlin Wall in 1961.

His trademark hat sat atop the coffin at his funeral.

So much was the disbelief at his death that his coffin had a bubble top over his head so that passersby could see it was actually him.

Stalin was not ethnically Russian. He was a native of Georgia, a Transcaucasian part of the Russian Empire and later a Southern part of the Soviet Union. Stalin was bilingual and spoke Russian fluently, but had a heavy Georgian accent.

Raised money for the Communist Party by committing several armed robberies.

Stalin did not wish to share a historic legacy with anyone, so he ordered the creation of revisionist history which wiped out all mention of Lev Trotskiy and actually removed him from existing photographs.

Ordered the assassination of Lev Trotskiy.

His mother had the same name as his first wife.

His mother was a washerwoman and a seamstress.

Even after Stalin's rise to power, his mother refused to leave her home in the Caucasus.

It is believed by some historians that Stalin's lust for power and the reasons behind many of his decisions and actions were the result of a tendency as a child to slip into fantasies about what he would have done if he were in charge of the country as a means of escaping his abusive father.

Stalin's health deteriorated towards the end of World War II. He suffered from atherosclerosis from his heavy smoking. He had a mild stroke around the time of the Victory Parade, and a severe heart attack in October 1945.

At the end of World War II he wanted to invade Spain, due to the considerable help the Franco regime had given to the Axis from 1940 to 1943. The British and Americans persuaded Stalin to settle for an economic blockade of Spain instead.

Staunchly believed Adolf Hitler would honor the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. When Hitler's forces attacked, Stalin locked himself in his rooms and refused to believe it for several days; his denial caused unnecessarily huge numbers of MIAs and millions of Soviet civilians to be taken into Nazi concentration camps. Stalin had broken the pact by invading Bukovina in June 1940.

Documents released at the end of the Cold War showed Stalin was preparing to attack German forces in Eastern Europe. However he did not think Adolf Hitler would invade the Soviet Union until the war in the West had ended.

Vladimir Putin has made unlawful all published mention of the cruelties Stalin's regime inflicted on its own citizens - including executing an estimated 300,000 soldiers for alleged desertion or cowardice - in order to prevail during World War II. Books by Antony Beevor and Max Hastings are banned in Russia because they describe the Red Army's campaign of rape and pillage in Germany.

At the funeral of his first wife, Ekaterina, Stalin commented that any warm feelings he had for people died with her, for she was the only person who was able to melt his heart. He later ordered Ekaterina's relatives shot.

Called "Old Whiskers" behind his back, usually by prisoners in the gulags he sent them to.

Was a voracious reader and had a personal library of 20,000 academic books (including a handful of basic German texts), and checked out an annual average of 500 books from state libraries. He personally annotated many drafts of Russian-language texts with 'suggestions', and supported Mikhail Sholokhov and Mikhail Bulgakov, authors of the some of the best Russian-language literature ever produced.

In 1933 Stalin added Article 121 to the entire Soviet Union criminal code, which made homosexuality a crime punishable by up to five years in prison with hard labor. The law was finally repealed in Russia in 1993.

Supported the production of Sergei Eisenstein's films Battleship Potemkin (1925) (US title: "Battleship Potemkin"), October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928) (US title: "October") and Alexander Nevsky (1938), but prevented the completion of Eisenstein's trilogy about Czar Ivan IV, Ivan the Terrible (1938).

He was an admirer of the Polish author Boleslaw Prus, in particular his novel "The Pharaoh and the Priest", filmed as Pharaoh (1966).

Early in his life, Stalin had entered an Orthodox seminary to study for the priesthood. He left, partly because the priests discovered his dabbling in communist and anarchist thought, as well as his growing resentment towards authority.

On 25 November 1940 he suggested formally entering World War II on the side of the Axis Powers. His supporters argue this may have been a delaying tactic as he prepared for war with the European Axis Powers.

Deliberately waited until 17 September 1939 before launching his invasion of Poland, knowing that the UK and France would be unable to declare war on both Germany and the Soviet Union.

Although at war with the European Axis Powers from 22 June 1941, Stalin deliberately did not declare war on the Empire of Japan until 9 August 1945 when his forces simultaneously invaded Manchuria.