Keke Geladze

Uncommon card · No. 176451

Ekaterine Giorgis asuli Geladze (1856/1858 – 4 June 1937), commonly known as Keke, was the mother of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Born into a family of peasants outside of Gori, in modern Georgia, she married Besarion Jughashvili, a cobbler, and had three sons; only the youngest, Ioseb, lived. Besarion left the family, leaving Geladze to raise her son. Deeply religious, she wanted Ioseb to become a priest, working as a seamstress in Gori to pay for his education. Geladze remained in Gori when Ioseb moved to the Tbilisi Spiritual Seminary, and stayed there until his rise to power in the Soviet Union as Joseph Stalin. In her old age Geladze lived in Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia; while Stalin wrote to her, he rarely visited, with the last visit in 1935. She died in 1937, and was buried in the Mtatsminda Pantheon in Tbilisi.

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