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Vissarion (Beso) Ivanovich Jugashvili (Виссарион (Бесо) Иванович Джугашвили in Russian; Georgian: ?) (c. 1850 - 1890?) was Joseph Stalin's father.
There is very little information on Vissarion Jugashvili. He is known to have been a peasant from a village Didi Lilo. According to the Arsoshvili family (Jugashvili's relatives and longtime residents of Didi Lilo), Jugashvili 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 some Ossetian named Kulumbegashvili. Here, Jugashvili found a job as a cobbler and married Ekaterina (Keke) Geladze. It is known that two of their children (Mikhail and Konstantin) died as infants. Due to some family business, Jugashvili and his wife once came to Didi Lilo. 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 so that he never returned to Didi Lilo. Jugashvili also worked at Adelkhanov's shoe factory in Tiflis for some time.
Even though the circumstances of Vissarion Jugashvili'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 Jugashvili 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 Jugashvili. 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 his father was still alive at that time. Vissarion Jugashvili's grave was never found.
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