ABSTRACT
Ioseb Dzhugashvili, the son of Besarion, was born in Gori, a small town in Georgia, in the south of the Russian Empire, on 6 December 1878. In Russian, he was known as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili but to the world he was Joseph Stalin. The Georgian Orthodox Church used the Julian calendar which means that, according to the Gregorian calendar, he was born on 18 December 1878. His birth certificate, his christening certificate, his seminary school records and his graduation certificate all bear the same date. The documents of the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, give 6 December 1878, as his date of birth. In December 1920, Stalin filled in a long questionnaire for the Swedish newspaper, Folkets Dagblad, and, again, gave as his date of birth 6 (18) December 1878. However, in late 1921, the date of his birth was changed to 21 December 1879 (9 December 1879 old style). Subsequently, this latter date was always given as his date of birth. No one has yet explained why Stalin changed his date of birth to render himself one year and three days younger. He once remarked that he had done nothing outstanding, compared to others, before the revolution. Perhaps changing his date of birth was a symbolic way of distancing himself from the years before 1917. He never allowed anyone to write a biography of his activities before October. Indeed, his private secretary, Tovstukha, the keeper of his personal archive until 1935, withdrew as many documents about his activities before 1917 from archives as he could find and they were then passed on to the Stalin, most of them never to be seen again.
