Vissarion Jughashvili

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Vissarion (Beso) Ivanovich Jughashvili (Виссарион (Бесо) Иванович Джугашвили in Russian; ბესარიონ ჯუღაშვილი Besarion Jughashvili in Georgian) (c. 1854 - 1890?) 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. His father's name was Vano and he had 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, ^{[attribution needed]} was thrown out by his wife). In any event, it is 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 1906. 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 is not 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). Vissarion Jughashvili's grave has never been found.

[edit] 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 is no way of either proving or disproving this.