Rumors that Nikolai Przhevalsky was Stalin’s real father circulated during the life of the father of nations. Let's check if this is true.

If you put photographs of the mature traveler Nikolai Przhevalsky and the mature Stalin side by side, you will notice a certain similarity. Exists legendthat this is not accidental and that Przhevalsky is Stalin’s real father. Moreover, they say that Stalin himself knew about this and was secretly proud of it.

In 1878–1879, Przhevalsky allegedly lived in the Georgian city of Gori, where Stalin was born in 1878. Przhevalsky used to record in detail every day in his diary all his actions and all events. According to legend, everything related to the period of his stay in Gori was removed from Przhevalsky’s archive during the years of Stalin’s rule. “However, in the account book, the insufficiently attentive confiscator of the archive left pages on which expenses were recorded: money sent to Stalin’s mother in Gori in 1880 and 1881. Later, the transfer of money was stopped,” writes writer and collector of Soviet folklore Yuri Borev in 1990 in the book “Staliniad.”

It was probably he who first published this legend in the official press. According to the preface, the author spent almost half a century collecting material for the book. At the same time, Borev himself writes: “These arguments are completely untenable, and the legend has neither historical nor artistic value, but is significant as evidence of the obscurity of Stalin’s origins.”

The popularity of the version about Przhevalsky’s paternity was added by the writer and TV presenter Edward Radzinsky, whose works are often criticized by professional historians for “flights of fancy.” In his book about Stalin he is considering This version does not directly confirm, but does not refute either. In addition, Radzinsky writes that “Przhevalsky, the famous traveler, actually came to Gori.”

But this is just a verifiable statement, and it does not correspond to reality. Whether or not Przhevalsky had any confiscated personal diaries, we don’t know for sure. But he had very detailed expedition diaries, which were published in separate books.

Stalin has two dates of birth: one real, recorded in the church book, the other official, which he himself chose almost on the eve of his 50th birthday. The current date is December 1878. The second - December 1879. That is, conception must have occurred around March of one of these two years.

But Przhevalsky’s diaries indicate that in both of these years in March he was in Zaisan, on the border of modern Kazakhstan and China, 4500 km from Gori. In 1878, due to a serious illness, he had to abort the expedition and go to St. Petersburg for treatment, and in 1879 he just resumed the expedition and went to Tibet. Przhevalsky, most likely, had never been to Georgia at all. In any case, there is no documentary evidence of this now.

There is one more detail that makes the relationship between Przhevalsky and Stalin doubtful. He never had a wife or children. Foreign biographers of the traveler are surethat he was homosexual and that he took young people close to him with him on all expeditions.

True, there is still one interesting piece of evidence in favor of the legend. It is worth paying attention to, if only because it comes from Andrei Petrovich Kapitsa, the son of a Nobel laureate, former dean of the Faculty of Geography of Moscow State University and corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. In a 2001 home video, he tells about the fact that he allegedly found a letter from Przhevalsky to his friend and Kapitsa’s great-grandfather, General Stebnitsky, with the following words: “If the events you know happen in Gori, then you will have to help him for the rest of your life, because I will no longer have the funds.”

Kapitsa was sure that it was about his future son and that it was his great-grandfather’s participation in the fate of the boy, about whom Stalin knew, that subsequently saved his own father, Pyotr Kapitsa, from repression.

Unfortunately, we cannot ask him or his famous older brother Sergei Kapitsa about this letter, they are no longer alive. But the letter itself was never presented. What is behind this story: false memory, fantasy or some kind of confusion - we do not know. But this evidence cannot yet seriously shake the confidence that the story about Przhevalsky and Stalin is a fake. As for external resemblance, Joseph looks at least no less like his official father, shoemaker Vissarion Dzhugashvili. Especially in non-ceremonial photographs.