Before he was Stalin: seminarian, weather observer and serial escapee
The man who ruled the Soviet Union for three decades began as Ioseb Jughashvili, a scholarship student training for the Orthodox priesthood in Tiflis. He dropped out, briefly worked at a meteorological observatory, and spent years escaping Tsarist exile before adopting a pen name built from the Russian word for steel.
He was born in Gori, Georgia, on 18 December 1878, the only one of his parents' three children to survive infancy. His father's shoemaking business collapsed into poverty and drink, and mother and son left home by 1883, moving through nine rented rooms. Smallpox scarred his face in 1884, and at 12 a carriage accident permanently weakened his left arm. He did well at the Gori church school and in 1894 won a place at the Tiflis Theological Seminary.
There he lost interest in theology and found revolution. He devoured radical fiction, taking the nickname Koba from the bandit hero of Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, and moved on to Marx's Das Kapital. He left the seminary in April 1899, took a job at the Tiflis observatory that October, and began organizing strikes. For the next decade and a half he was repeatedly arrested and exiled, to Siberia and to northern Russia, and repeatedly escaped. His Bolshevik fundraising included bank robberies, protection rackets and kidnappings for ransom, among them a notorious 1907 stagecoach holdup in Tiflis. His first wife, Kato Svanidze, died of typhus that year, months after the birth of their son Yakov.
Lenin had him co-opted onto the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912, hoping a Georgian would attract support among the empire's minorities. That year he secretly edited the first issues of the new daily Pravda. Travelling to Vienna on a false passport, he wrote Marxism and the National Question, published in 1913 under the name K. Stalin, meaning roughly Man of Steel. Arrested again, he was sent to Turukhansk in Siberia.
After the 1917 revolution he rose to the Politburo and, following Lenin's death in 1924, took control. He replaced the New Economic Policy with a command economy; forced collectivization and rapid industrialization contributed to the famine of 1932 to 1933, and in the Great Purge at least 700,000 people were executed. His Red Army reached Berlin in 1945, and the Soviet Union tested a nuclear weapon in 1949. He died on 5 March 1953, and Nikita Khrushchev later denounced him.
Source: Joseph Stalin
