Early Life of Joseph Stalin - Name and Aliases

Name and Aliases

Stalin's first name is also transliterated as "Iosif". His original surname, ჯუღაშვილი, is transliterated as "Jughashvili" or J̌uḡašvili. The Russian transliteration is "Джугашвили", which is in turn transliterated into English as "Dzhugashvili" and "Djugashvili"; -შვილი ("-shvili") is a Georgian suffix meaning "child" or "son".

There are several etymologies of the jugha (ჯუღა) root. In one version, the name derives from the village of Jugaani in Kakhetia, eastern Georgia.

Neo-Nazi and other anti-Semitic sources have claimed that "Dzhuga" or "Jugha" means "Jew" in Georgian and hence "Dzhugashvili" literally means "Jew-son" or son of a Jew. This, however, is incorrect as the word for "Jew" in Georgian is "ebraeli" (ებრაელი).

An article in the newspaper Pravda in 1988 claimed the word derives from the Old Georgian for "steel" which might be the reason for his adoption of the name Stalin. Сталин ("Stalin") is derived from combining the Russian сталь ("stal"), "steel", with the possessive suffix -ин ("-in"), a formula used by many other Bolsheviks, including Lenin.

According to theories Mihail Vayskopf version, it is the Ossetian for "herd of sheep"; the surname "Jugayev" is common among Ossetians, and before the revolution the names in South Ossetia were traditionally written with the Georgian suffix, especially among Christianized Ossetians. Allusions to the hypothesis of Ossetian ethnicity of Stalin are present in the important Stalin Epigram by Osip Mandelstam:

..When he has an execution it's a special treat,

..And the Ossetian chest swells (Translation by A. S. Kline).

Like other Bolsheviks, he became commonly known by one of his revolutionary noms de guerre, of which "Stalin" was only the last. During his education in Tiflis, he picked up the nickname "Koba", the Robin Hood-like protagonist from the 1883 novel The Patricide by Alexander Kazbegi. This became his favorite nickname throughout his revolutionary life. Stalin continued to use Koba as his Party name in the underground world of the RSDLP. During conversations, Vladimir Lenin called Stalin "Koba". Among his friends he was sometimes known by his childhood nickname "Soso" – a Georgian diminutive form of the name Iosif (Ioseb).

Stalin is also reported to have used at least a dozen other nicknames, pseudonyms and aliases such as "Josef Besoshvili"; "Ivanov"; "A. Ivanovich"; "Soselo" (a youthful nickname), "K. Kato"; "G. Nizheradze"; "Chizhikov" or "Chizhnikov"; "Petrov"; "Vissarionovich"; "Vassilyi". Directly following World War II, as the Soviets were negotiating with the Allies, Stalin often sent directions to Molotov as "Druzhkov".