Whatever the case, children tend to over-simplify the behaviour of their parents – not yet mature enough to understand life and what it does to an individual. To this distorting effect can be added all the lies and disinformation that have been poured upon Stalin. Even when Joseph McCabe wrote his excellent biography of Stalin in 1944 – there had been at least twenty-years of misrepresentation. From this book we learn that his mother was a strict Orthodox Christian (this is never said about his father) and that it is through her influence that Stalin was forced into education and learned to read and write. At fourteen-years of age, his mother enrolled Stalin in a local Seminary School with the intention of him becoming an Orthodox Priest (she had already named him after “St Joseph”). Ironically, it was amongst the students at this ecclesiastic school that he first encountered Marxism as a theory. Stalin entered Seminary at aged fourteen in 1894 – and was expelled in 1899.
