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იოსებ სტალინი seems to have had a good education, despite having had the kind of early family life which makes for either bitter revolutionaries or slow, steady, drinking. I wonder if his choice of nom de guerre had been a deliberate 20th century rejection of Plato's {gold, silver, iron, brass} men in the Republic?

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...

(compare the meritocracy espoused here and in following sections with that described by Goldstein in 1984 ... and we can be certain EA Blair had read the Republic)

[gumby]

As an old Etonian he certainly would have read it.