Jughashvili

Jughashvili is the birth surname of Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, the Soviet leader better known as Joseph Stalin. He was born in 1878 in Gori, a town in Georgia then part of the Russian Empire, to Besarion Jughashvili and Ketevan Geladze. In Georgian naming practice, Jughashvili is the family name, and the full birth name includes the patronymic “dze,” meaning “son of”: Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili.

In his early life and during the revolutionary period, he used several forms of his name. The Georgian version Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili appears in genealogical and archival materials, and he was also known by the nickname “Koba” among fellow revolutionaries. As his political career progressed, he adopted the surname Stalin, a pseudonym meaning “man of steel” in Russian, which he used publicly and officially from the 1920s onward.

Today, Jughashvili is primarily of biographical and historical interest as the birth name of a figure whose global prominence is associated with the surname Stalin. In most scholarly and public contexts, Stalin is the name used, while Jughashvili remains a link to his Georgian origins and early life, appearing mainly in genealogical records and early biographies.