Man of Steel: Box of 2 Coins Featuring Portrait of Joseph Stalin A Unique Collection of 2 Silver Coins buy

This remarkable set features the only two coins ever minted featuring the portrait of Joseph Stalin .

Born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili in 1878 in Georgia, Jseph Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from 1928
until his death in 1953. During his brutal 25-year reign, he established himself as the most powerful, and
probably the most feared, dictator the world has ever known—both in the USSR and the Warsaw Pact
countries like Czechoslovakia, over which he exerted enormous influence.

True to his nickname, Stalin liked to think his body was “as tough as steel” to withstand torture and his
mind had a “will of steel” to make necessary sacrifices for the revolution. The people he ruled with ironfisted
terror knew from bitter experience that at any instant he might casually snuff out the life of one
person or of a million – of anybody who stood in the way of his boundless ambitions. His motto: “Only on
the bones of the oppressors can the people's freedom be founded...Only the blood of the oppressors can
fertilize the soil for peasant self-rule.”

The son of a shoemaker, Stalin was a bona fide proletariat, an outlier among the bourgeois Bolshevik
leaders. Possessed of artistic talent—he was, in his youth, a poet and a fine tenor, as Hitler had been an
aspiring painter—he found his calling elsewhere. He became actively involved in the Revolution in 190 2,
and for the next decade engaged in a number of revolutionary activities, including the famed Tiflis bank
robbery of 1907. After the October Revolution of 1917, Stalin served on the Revolutionary Military
Council, and was in charge of the defense of Tsaritsyn—later named Stalingrad—against the White Army.
Contrary to popular belief, Stalin was not Lenin's appointed successor—in fact, the latter warned the Party
about the former, a warning that fell on deaf ears. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Stalin's
legacy of brutal control extended into most of Eastern Europe, the so-called Eastern bloc, well beyond his
lifetime.

While Stalin was not without his admirers, his infamous wholesale butchery became his trademark. As the
historian Nicholas V. Riasanovsky writes, “As in the case of Ivan the Terrible, there was madness in
Stalin's method.” Was Stalin paranoid? Or were people really out to get him? Either way, he was
responsible for the Great Famine of 1932-3, the countless deaths at the gulags, and the brutal Great Purge
of 1937-8—not to mention his strategy during the Second World War, in which he sent as many soldiers to
the front as it took to beat the Nazis, without regard to the casualty rate. As many as 30 million people
died as a result of his brutality, and the USSR lost more men in World War II than any army had ever lost
in any war ever. Stalin himself died after a massive stroke on March 5, 1953. He was 74 years old.

STALIN'S SILVER
Despite his outsized ego, Stalin was not megalomaniacal enough to plaster his visage on his native Soviet
money. After engineering the “Victorious February” 1948 Czechoslovak coup d'état, Stalin's henchmen
assumed control over the government of that country, marking the onset of four decades of Communist
dictatorship. Later that year, plans were finalized to strike special silver 50 and 100 korun coins, to be
issued by Czechoslovakia in 1949 on the occasion of the dictator's 70th birthday. The coins featured a true
numismatic rarity: a portrait of Joseph Stalin. In fact, despite Stalin's enormous historical presence, these
are the worlds only circulating coins ever minted that featured a portrait of the man. The obverse is the
Czech lion with Slovak shield. They are one-year-only commemorative issues that were struck in very low
quantities, only a small fraction of which have survived buy intact to the present day. Even fewer have
survived in the high grade exhibited by these examples, putting them among the most coveted of modern
collector coins.