ABSTRACT
Joseph Stalin was born as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, on 21 December 1878 in the city of Gori, province of Tiflis, in Georgia, southern part of the Russian Empire. Physically Stalin was rather misshapen, small in size, his face marked and scarred by smallpox, and he was born with his left arm shorter than his right. As an adult he was five feet four inches tall and during his life his shortness of stature annoyed him to the extent that he always used platform shoes in order to appear taller. Stalin witnessed the detention, incarceration, and execution of many of those who were close to him, and becoming his personal friend was a very risky endeavour. The first change Lenin introduced was confiscation of private property without compensation, and later, in the early 1920s, he also created the “New Economic Policy”. When Stalin took power after Lenin’s death, he changed this policy towards total centralisation and control of the economy.
