20 Mind-Blowing Facts About Joseph Stalin

20. Nobody Actually Knows When His Birthday Is

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Well, Stalin knows. But we can't exactly ask him. The official Russian records (and Wikipedia) state that he was born on 18 December 1878. However a particular old style Julian Calendar of the time lists his birth-date 12 days earlier on 6 December.

More confusing still is that Stalin actually deliberately changed his own birthday in a ploy to confuse Tsarist Officers, moving the date to the 21st of December and the year to 1881 - the idea being that it would remove him from a number of their official documents and records. In reality all it did was cause all his cards to be late.

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WhatCulture's Managing Editor and Chief Reporter | Previously seen in Vice, Esquire, FourFourTwo, Sabotage Times, Loaded, The Set Pieces, and Mundial Magazine