This is a very tricky issue and one to tread cautiously. On one hand, it was undeniable that Stalin experienced a rough childhood in Gori. However, such a childhood was far from unique for Georgia or for the late nineteenth century Russian frontier zone. Popular biographies and histories often zero in on these hardships as formative to the dictator's weltanschauung. This often goes too far. Volume One of Stephen Kotkin's biography of Stalin attacks these notions and is worth quoting at length:

In biography generally, the trope of the traumatic childhood—an outgrowth of the spread of Freudianism—came to play an outsized role. It is too pat, even for those with genuinely traumatic childhoods. The future Stalin’s childhood was certainly not easy: illnesses and accidents, forced house moving, straitened circumstances, a broken-down father, a loving but severe mother rumored to be a whore. But in adulthood, even as the dictator indulged roiling resentments that would seal the fate of most of his revolutionary colleagues, he would voice no special anger at his parents or his early life experiences. The future Kremlin leader experienced nothing of the bloody intrigues of the court childhoods of Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great (to both of whom he would often be compared). Ivan’s father died from a boil when the boy was three; his mother was assassinated when he was seven. The orphaned Tsar Ivan the Terrible was reduced (by his regents) to begging for his food, and he witnessed the elites’ murderous struggle for power in his name, coming to fear his own pending bloody demise. The young Ivan took to tearing off birds’ wings and throwing cats and dogs off buildings. Peter the Great’s father died when he was four. Thereafter, the boy’s life was under threat by the warring court factions that were connected to his father’s two widows. After Peter was made tsar at age ten, the losing faction rebelled, and the young Peter witnessed relatives of his mother and friends being thrown onto upraised pikes. To be sure, some analysts have exaggerated the horrors of Ivan’s and Peter’s childhoods, offering pseudopsychological explanations for their often cruel reigns. Still, the most that could be claimed about the young Jughashvili was that he might have seen his father once come after his mother with a knife.

Next to what Ivan and Peter had gone through, what were the future Stalin’s childhood tribulations? Consider further the early life of Sergei Kostrikov, known later under the revolutionary name Kirov, who would become Stalin’s closest friend. Born in 1886 in a small town in Vyatka province, central Russia, Kirov would be considered as among the most popular of Stalinist party leaders. But his childhood was difficult: four of Kirov’s seven siblings died in infancy, his father was a drunkard who abandoned the family, and his mother died of TB when the boy was just seven. Kirov grew up in an orphanage. A similar fate befell another key member of Stalin’s inner circle, Grigol “Sergo” Orjonikidze, whose mother died when he was an infant, and whose father died when he was ten. By contrast, the young Stalin had his doting mother and a variety of important mentors, as the strikingly numerous memoirs from that time indicate. Keke’s {Stalin's mother} extended family lived close by, including her brother Gio and his children (Keke’s other brother, Sandala, would be killed by the tsarist police). And Beso’s family (his sister’s children) remained a presence even after Beso lost the custody showdown in 1890. Family was the glue of Georgian society, and Soso Jughashvili had not only his own extended kin, but the surrogate kin provided by the Egnatashvilis (as well as the Davrishevis). Smalltown Gori took care of its own, forming a tight-knit community.

As this extended quote indicates, there is a danger in an excessive focus on Stalin's traumatic childhood. Much of the surviving documentation on Stalin's childhood shows it was not entirely outside of the pale for other Georgians of his era. It is not outside the realm of possibility that Stalin's paranoia may have been influenced by his childhood, but these psychological explanations do little to explain why so many of Stalin's compatriots went along with his dictatorship. Even if there was some Freudian excuse behind Stalin's actions, that does not explain why, for example, did the Red Army's officer corps engaged in massive purges numbering in the thousands instead of launching a coup. More was going on in the Stalinist period than its dictator's personal history and psychological profile. The Soviet system was well-primed for this type of palingenetic behavior; the experience of the Civil War dovetailed with a Marxist-Leninist ideology that saw conspiracies everywhere. While Stalin was a crucial catalyst for the Terror and other repressive acts of the state, there were other factors driving it.

In the end, it is always a tricky thing to get into a person's head- even if you're a trained medical professional. This is one of the reasons why psychohistory and psychologically-based analyses are very passe within the academy. Stalin or other people from the past cannot be put on the couch and be evaluated via the DSM-V. All diagnoses have to rely upon hearsay and preserved records. Biographers looking for psychological basis for Stalin's actions not surprisingly often find them, but ignore the issue that many of Stalin's contemporaries faced the same or worse hardships and did not develop into paranoiacs.