ABSTRACT
Jossif Vissarionovitch Djugachvili-Stalin was born at Gori, in Georgia, a small Transcaucasian country. He is greatly attached to it, and he is fond of drawing parallels between its individual history and the events of world-history. It is a territory of something less than 30,000 square miles, bounded on the south-east by the Chirvan, on the south by Armenia, on the north by Ossetia and Western Caucasia, on the north-east by Daghestan, and on the west by the Turkish districts of Asia Minor. A very ancient country, it makes its appearance in history at the very dawn of the civilizations of the Near East. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Ossetes came down from the mountains to pillage the countryside. The Ossetes were an Indo-Caucasian people, like the Georgians, who had long mingled their blood with that of the Mongolized tribes coming from Tatar Azerbeidjan.
