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Polar Bear Erect. Stalin was a small, unhandsome man. Visitors were always surprised he was so short, guessed his height at 5 ft. 4 in., his weight from 150 Ibs. to 190 Ibs. His complexion was swarthy, sometimes yellowish, and his face was lightly pitted from a childhood smallpox. His hair was grey and stiff as a badger's, his mustache white. His expression was usually sardonic, his rare smile saturnine. When he laughed loudly he exposed a mouth full of teeth—jagged, yellow teeth—and the sound of his laughter was a controlled, relaxed, hissing chuckle.
His left arm was partly withered and sometimes in chilly weather he wore a glove on his left hand. Two toes of his left foot were grown together. He was stocky, but walked with the muffled ease of a polar bear erect, and, without being athletic, looked supple and active. At a Kremlin party in 1946, drinking Brüderschaft with Tito, he shouted: "There's still strength in me," and slipping his hands under bulky Tito's armpits, lifted him off the floor three times to the beat of a Russian folk melody on the phonograph.
On His Way. The steeling of his character began early; and never ceased. He was born on Dec. 21, 1879, in a humble cottage (now a shrine) in the tiny town of Gori in Georgia, an ancient province in transCaucasia. He was one of four children; the others died in infancy. He was baptized Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili. His father was a shoemaker, an alcoholic who beat Joseph unmercifully and finally deserted his family. But his mother loved her son. "[Soso] was always a good boy ... I never had to punish him," she said years later. Working as a laundress, she earned enough money to be able to send him to a parish school, later entered him in the Orthodox Theological Seminary in Tiflis. Her ambition was to make him a priest.
He was expelled from the seminary for reading radical literature. He had joined a clandestine Socialist organization. He got a job at Tiflis Geophysical Observatory and the group began holding secret meetings in his room. Police raided the room; young Djugashvili went underground, taking his first revolutionary nickname: Koba (meaning Indomitable). He became a strike agitator among Tiflis railroad men, but was soon run down by Czarist police, jailed and deported to Siberia. In absentia, he was elected a member of the executive of the All-Caucasian Federation of Social Democratic groups. He was 23, and on his way.
Siberia was the university of the revolution. Here Koba followed the sharp controversies between the right (Menshevik) and left (Bolshevik) wings of the Social Democrats, without committing himself on either side. He also had time to observe his fellow exiles and to study their weaknesses. That maneuvering, waiting, ruthless mind of his was already shaping. Russia's defeat by Japan in 1904-05 brought on the October 1905 Revolution. Koba escaped from Siberia, traveled hundreds of miles by peasant cart, suffered frostbite, and arrived back in Tiflis. Here he married Katerina Svanidze, an illiterate Georgian girl, who bore him a son, Yakov. It was a strange kind of domesticity, being married to an agitator.