Josef Stalin Josef Stalin was born in 1879, under the name Iosif Vissarionich Dzhugashvili. He was born in Gori, which is now the Republic of Georgia, and his parents were both Georgian peasants who did not know However, Stalin learned the Russian language at his school, a Georgian church school, which he attended from 1888 to 1894. Here, he earned a full scholarship to the Tbilisi Theological Seminary, where he started reading and learning about the principles of Marxism. Stalin was later expelled from the seminary for distributing Marxist propaganda, and thus became a full-time revolutionary.