Stalin’s Diminutive Size
While Joseph Stalin’s cult of personality, subsequent statues, and certain photos and paintings may have you thinking he was a giant of a man, in truth the former Soviet leader and glorious moustache owner was only around 5 feet 5 inches tall (165 cm), give or take an inch.
While this is decidedly below average in many regions of the world for men today, in his own time, it wasn’t quite as much so, with the average height of men in Russia as Stalin ventured into adulthood only ringing in at just under 5 feet 8 inches (173 cm) tall. Despite only being a little below average, Stalin went to some rather extreme lengths to hide his true stature, as well as other less literal shortcomings, from the general public.
Winston Churchill (5 ft 6 in.), Harry Truman (5 ft 8 in), Joseph Stalin (5 ft. 5 in.)
Stalin’s propensity to try to make himself appear taller was no doubt spurred on by comments such as the one United States President Harry Truman (who was approximately 5 feet 8 inches tall) made, referring to Stalin as “little squirt”. Likewise, Grigol Uratadze, a man who was imprisoned alongside Stalin during his time as a revolutionary, described him as unassuming with a “creeping way of walking, taking short steps…”, while Milovan Đilas, a former Yugoslavian politician mentioned that he was “small” with an “ungainly build” in a later book describing their encounters.
Along with his below average stature, Stalin’s left arm was shorter than his right with a slightly withered hand due to an injury he sustained at age 12 when he was hit by a horse and ultimately suffered severe blood poisoning. Although Stalin retained most of the use of his left arm throughout his life, it was noticeably more stiff and clumsy than his preferred appendage and he was reportedly unable to fully extend his elbow from that age onward. He mostly hid this injury by folding his hands over one another when taking photographs or by putting his left hand into his pocket.
On top of this, Stalin’s face was covered in pockmarks from a bout of near fatal smallpox he contracted at age 7, which he hid in later life with, among other methods, his gloriously maintained facial hair.
Despite all this, Stalin’s cult of personality painted a very different picture, as did the actual artists who painted him. Presumably because of the fact that displeasing Stalin at the height of his power was a great way to find yourself no longer breathing (and possibly even erased from all records, see Bonus Facts below), most every “official” photo, painting and sculpture of the Father of Nations depicts him as being a man of gigantic size who towered over his subordinates.
Stalin also insisted that Mikheil Gelovani, an actor given Stalin’s personal blessing to portray him in films and other propaganda, not accept roles that would require him to portray “a mere mortal” because of how similar in appearance the two men were (though Gelovani was reportedly much taller).
To maintain this illusion in face-to-face meetings, Stalin also took to wearing boots with cleverly masked, significantly raised heels and would often pose for photos while standing on a raised platform or positioned well in front of or above those around him. Of course, few of Stalin’s subordinates would dare ever make fun of Stalin’s penchant for trying to look taller, and the propaganda machine continually depicting him as having “characteristics akin to those of a god,” according to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, no doubt helped them rationalize Stalin’s need to maintain the image. However, the same cannot be said for the likes of President Truman and Winston Churchill who both found the lengths Stalin went to make himself appear taller amusing when they met with him. (And lest you think Truman was just trying to be insulting with the “little squirt” quip, he also had a lot of positive things to say about Stalin after their 1945 meeting, including writing in his diary on July 17th that “He [Stalin] is honest, but smart as hell.“)
Besides the high heels, platforms in photographs, and exaggerated stature in paintings, Stalin’s private residence in Sochi was specially constructed with his frame in mind and everything in it, from the chairs to the staircase were made slightly smaller than usual so that Stalin could use them perfectly comfortably and otherwise appear especially tall in stature. Even his pool was only a little over four feet deep at its maximum depth because he couldn’t swim (he did, however, enjoy taking little walks back and forth in it) and didn’t want to be submerged if he ventured into the deep end.
Other features of Stalin’s mansion, which you can still tour today, include a smaller than regulation size billiards table complete with a smaller than average, weighted cue the dictator used to make his shots more powerful. Not that he needed it because, once in power, Stalin reportedly never lost a single game of billiards against any of his guards… (And if that’s not just propaganda akin to Kim Jong Il’s claim that he shot 11 hole-in-ones his first time ever playing golf, it no doubt had something to do with the fact that Stalin could have any of his guards killed if they displeased him.)
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Bonus Facts:
Beyond having numerous people killed for various reasons, Stalin was also famous for erasing any record of people he didn’t like from photos and official documents (a practice the Ancient Romans referred to as Damnatio Memoriae), such as the picture on the right. The disappearing man is Nikolai Yezkov, one time very powerful head of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs). In his post there, he presided over numerous tortures and mass-executions during the Great Purge, but later fell out of favor and himself was tortured until he admitted to being a traitor; after this, he was purged. Once this happened, he became “The Vanishing Commisar” with records of him, including in photographs, suddenly disappearing, which was no small feat given the high profile position Yezkov had previously held and the lack of Photoshop. 😉- After his presidency, Harry Truman returned to his home in Missouri with his only income his old army pension, which was no more than $112.56 per month or about $982 today (largely as a response to his somewhat impoverished situation, Congress later passed the Former Presidents Act to give U.S. President’s pensions). Truman had numerous offers from large corporations for work, but turned them all down, stating: “I knew that they were not interested in hiring Harry Truman, the person, but what they wanted to hire was the former President of the United States. I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and the dignity of the office of the Presidency.”
- Another famed leader who is equally famous for being short of stature, Napoleon Bonaparte, actually wasn’t, at least by the standards of the day and region he lived in. The myth that he was short stems primarily from the fact that he is listed as 5 feet 2 inches tall at the time of his death. However, this is 5 feet 2 inches in French units. In modern international units, he was just shy of 5 feet 7 inches. Now I know you are saying, “Well, that is still pretty short for a man”. That is true by modern day standards in certain places in the world, such as the United States. However, at the time in France, the average height for an adult male was about 5 feet 5 inches in modern international units. So in fact, he was slightly above average in height for his day. Despite this fact, Napoleon is primarily remembered for two things; being a master tactician and being short. The so called “Napoleon Complex” named after him, describes men who have an inferiority complex or more aptly “Short Man Syndrome”.
- Stalin’s mansion also boasts a cinema, complete with a bulletproof sofa in which Stalin used to enjoy watching American cowboy movies that were translated in real time by the commissar of cinema, Ivan Bolshakov, who only spoke broken, fractured English- much to the amusement of Stalin and his guests.
- At least according to one of the mansion’s tour guides, Anna Hovantseva, Stalin absolutely insisted that his mansion didn’t have any carpet purely so that he could “hear people coming”. While tour guides aren’t exactly known for the accuracy of their “facts”, Stalin was notoriously paranoid, and even had the exterior walls of his mansion painted the same shade of green as the trees outside to help camouflage the building from the air. Beyond that, the exterior walls of the building are approximately 2.3 ft thick (70 cm) for security reasons.
- Stalin was born, loseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, but later changed his name to Stalin evoking the Russian word “Stal” which means steel, which he felt was more powerful and intimidating. Another famous dictator who changed his name to help in his rise to power was the aforementioned Kim Jong Il, who was born Yuri Irsenovich Kim.
- Born a native Georgian, Stalin attempted to disguise this fact in later life, painting himself as a Russian man through and through.
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- Russian Rulers and Dictators > Joseph Stalin
- The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power
- Paranoia, parquet floors and pool tables: Welcome to the Sochi home of Stalin
- Joseph Stalin
- Stalin’s Cult of Personality
- Human Height
- Joseph Stalin
- Trends of Height for European Men in the 20th Century
- Truman Little Squirt
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Surprised there’s no mention of Vladimir Putin. He’s 5’4″ and wears platform shoes as well. Shorter than both Napoleon and Stalin. He’s the same height as Michael J Fox.
You forgot to mention what his heart looked like – a tiny black little stone.
Where did you dig up sources for this article? Goebbel’s anti-Soviet propaganda, or the CIA’s anti-Soviet propaganda, or perhaps the debunked fascist propaganda book known as the Black Book of Communism? I didn’t even know that cold war fanatics still existed and still ragged on Stalin’s alleged “cult of personality”. Meanwhile, all US presidents come from millionaire backgrounds (including Harry Truman, don’t even try to pretend that he was a modest and loving gentleman — the guy felt that he didn’t need to apologize for nuking over 2 million Japanese and German civilians towards the end of WW2, and sending over a couple hundred thousand survivors to work in internment camps in Nebraska and on plantations), and all of them pay good money for their cults. Obama trading cards and action figures, for crying out loud. During the Bush regime, everybody had to have his face on the wall. In order to make your own dictators look nice, you exaggerate all manner of statistics about foreign enemies. “Stalin was short!” “Stalin killed 8 billion people!” “Lenin was bald!” “Mao was fat!”
And yet, it is the USA, Germany, France and UK that regularly launches an official or unofficial war on 5-10 countries every 5 years, while the USSR was, at most, at war with max 5 countries through its entire history. In America, riots and strikes are, to this day, met with violence and the National Guard shooting up civilians. Violent street crime and sexual assault keeps the American population shut up in their houses, cars or at work. At any given moment, about 5% of the US population is in prison, and most prisoners are Blacks and Hispanics, despite the fact that crimonology and history studies tell us that Caucasians are more inclined to violent and sexual crimes, as well as drug addictions, than either Blacks or Hispanics! In Spain, Germany and several other European countries, you can be fined or sent to prison for disagreeing with the government or wishing to affect a change in the governmental system. In these same countries, as well as in the USA, homosexuals aren’t allowed to donate blood. Throughout their history, UK, Germany and the USA have set up countless labor camps and secret prisons in their own country, not to mention prison camps and mercenary training cells in foreign countries! And despite being officially against Germany and Japan in WW2, both UK and the USA traded with German antisemitic businesses, helped high-ranking nazis to escape to South America, hired fascist Japanese scientists to work on biowarfare projects in America, AND they financially supported the military junta in Japan and Greece as well as an attempted coup in China after the Maoist revolution!
So, who’s the bad guy here? Our country, that we know for sure has slaughtered tens of millions of innocents, that oppresses its own people, that rewards gangsters by putting them into office or giving them financial bail-outs, and that ignores its own constitution in order to rule with an iron fist — or the country that our country CLAIMS has committed the crimes that actually THEY, OUR country, has committed? Hm, that’s like listening to Al Capone tell you that the police captain has a tiny weiner and is responsible for all the bad business in the world, while he continues his tirade of fear and terror. If Stalin and the USSR was so evil, then why doesn’t anybody come up with genuine, historical documents of how many people he killed? The USA didn’t keep any documents of the people who died at the hands of American death squads in Chile, and yet we still know the names of those people! And why did the USSR have so many politicians who were more influential and important than Stalin or, at least, just as important? I have read several interviews with Stalin, by Russian and by outside journalists, and in all of them he said that in many cases his hands were tied. Other politicians, like Dmitrov, as well as court judges and soviet/union leaders, had their say in many areas where Stalin didn’t.
Also, where are all of the anti-Stalinist writers, eh? You could argue that Stalin oppressed them all, but that’s a shitty argument, because the Inquisition oppressed heresy even harsher, and yet there was still a heck-ton of writers who broke through!
Aside from Solzhenitsyn, who was an alcoholic former con-artist and army deserter, and Pasternak, who was a plain bad writer, I don’t know of any notable critics (I do know of many writers who wrote good things about Stalin, however, including Ilf and Petrov, nobel-prize-winning Sholokhov, Albert Einstein, John Steinbeck and Bertolt Brecht, to name a few). I do know of a couple hundred critics who wrote bad but true things about the USA and Germany, for instance, and many of them were hounded down by the CIA! America’s reaction to Snowden comes to mind, and how one Canadian politician openly said that his country will do everything they can to assassinate Snowden. America even brags about how they killed Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussien, Gaddafi and Hugo Chavez, as if assassination was really kick-ass and not at all illegal. And yet, the USA still hasn’t gotten over the assassination of JFK, the moron who signed the papers to attack Vietnam and Cuba, and who was actually murdered by a hit contract placed by his bat-shit-crazy wife and not by a communist, as the USA is wont to use as a scapegoat.
In short, I hope you slip on your cold war propaganda and fall up your own rectum.
If you think that the USA, or Europe, or Japan, or any capitalist country (yes, that includes present-day Russia) is just dandy and humane, you should try leaving your mother’s basement long enough to encounter a homessless person, or drive through a slum or pay a visit to a factory or mine. You don’t even want to know what goes in the meat and processed foods industry. It’s enough to make you vegan for life.
Lighten up, Francis!
Mark, I think that it is shameful of you to defend a brutal dictator. You’re fighting a battle that has already been lost and making yourself look like a fool. I don’t mean any malacw against you, but please just stop.
I meant malace, not whatever that word was.
‘Malice’ ?
I’m a solid core American citizen, and my people have been here since the beginning. I say, let the man speak and listen to what he has to say. Truth is often offensive, abrasive, and contrary to the ‘official story’.
A final word- Mark, good luck with your life, but I have no words for you. Except screw Stalin and I hope he’s roasting in a pit of fire somewhere. That, I will say.
You sound hateful and fearful. Are you an American? If so, please act like one. We’re trying to clean it up around here.
Less caffeine Mark.
you think the earth is flat dont you
Mark, you sound a little tense. Some of your facts are way out in left field.
Jesus Christ …. Try mixing a few facts in with you’re B.S. Just in the cold war period alone the Soviet Union either took part or supported 56 different officially declared wars. The US housed approx 370k POWs during WW2, but only at the request of European allies and at its highest point Nebraska only held 12k, and less than 4k at Fort Robinson which is the facility that was rumored to possibly have been an interment camp. No nukes were ever dropped on Germany, Gaddafi was killed in the street by his own people, Chavez died of cancer, and less than 1% of the population is ever in jail at any time (0.7%).
In your rabid defense of a known butcher, you willingly partake in the sort of ignorant propaganda you’re accusing others of falling victim for. In closing, take your silly little antifa mask off, get a job and stop spewing lies any idiot with a cursory knowledge of basic history can dismiss as pure fantasy.
18 million murdered, starved, cannibalized and slaughtered through mass genocide and bullshit feeble ideologies!! Go slip on an AK and blow your dirtbag commie head off. If you like sucking on Marxist so fn bad then go!! Go be with your sick lefty commie scum you shitbird!! America forever land of the free home of the brave!! See nice and short and to the point while your bullshit sympathizing rant has fallen of the ledge and broke its spine and now dies slowly on the jagged rocks
Ah ha! Little do you know the chief’s wiener IS tiny!
This is a shamefully discriminatory article. Height is no different from race, ethnicity, or sex. People are born as they are, and it is wrong to shame short stature. The character described isn’t the point, it’s shaming him based on stature.
I don’t believe you. I don’t even know you, but I’d bet 10 to 1 that ‘you’ would discriminate on a tribe of people that are 12 to 15 feet tall.
A Stalin apologist in the 21st century! I can’t believe this. Stalin was a psychopathic killer who ruled totally by terror. He was also a pituitary dwarf. I will leave others to decide which is worse. Post WW II Russians like to claim they could have won the war all by themselves. That’s nonsense. Russians couldn’t organize a sock drawer, let alone manufacture the type and amount of armaments that it took to defeat the Axis. The success they did achieve was due to one inclination of Stalin, which, I admit, I agree with, i.e., we’re not concerned with how many Russians die.