II.

Young Revolutionary

Stalin began his studies at the seminary as a devout believer in Orthodox Christianity. He was soon exposed to the radical ideas of fellow students, however, and began to read illegal literature based on the works of German political philosopher Karl Marx. In 1899, just as he was about to graduate, he gave up his religious education to devote his time to the revolutionary movement against the Russian monarchy. While employed as an accountant in Tbilisi, Stalin spread Marxist propaganda among railway workers on behalf of the local Social Democratic organization. After moving to the seaport of Bat’umi, where he organized a large workers’ demonstration in 1902, Stalin was hunted down and arrested by the imperial police. A year later he was sentenced to exile in the Russian region of Siberia. He soon managed to escape, however, and was back in Georgia by early 1904.

When the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) split into Menshevik and Bolshevik factions in 1903, Stalin was drawn to the more militant Bolsheviks, who were led by Vladimir Lenin. In Georgia, where Menshevism predominated, Stalin soon gained a reputation as a belligerent and staunch follower of Lenin, whom he had first met in 1905 at a conference in Finland.

In 1905 Stalin married Yekaterina Svanidze, a Georgian woman who died two years later. Stalin was arrested and exiled by imperial police in 1908 because of his illegal underground activities. His escape the next year was followed by further arrests, exiles, and secret trips abroad during the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1912 Lenin elevated Stalin, who by this time had adopted the Russian pseudonym meaning “man of steel,” to the leading Bolshevik Party body, the Central Committee. At Lenin’s behest, Stalin wrote his chief theoretical work, Marxism and the National Question. Stalin was arrested and sent to Siberia before the essay was published in 1913.

Stalin was released from exile upon the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in the February (or March, in the New Style calendar) phase of the Russian Revolution. He went to Petrograd (later Leningrad; now Saint Petersburg), where he became a member of the party’s Central Committee bureau. He then asserted editorial control over the party newspaper, Pravda (Truth).

Although he did not play a prominent role in the Bolshevik takeover of the government in October (November, New Style), Stalin became a member of the new government’s Soviet (Council) of People’s Commissars (Russian acronym, Sovnarkom), heading the Commissariat for Nationality Affairs. Given the vital importance of nationality issues at a time when the Bolsheviks were trying to keep the territories of the former Russian Empire under their power, Stalin’s post was crucial to the Bolshevik victory in the ensuing Russian Civil War (1918-1921). He was elected a member of the Communist Party’s highest decision-making body, the Politburo, and the Central Committee’s Orgburo (Organizational Bureau) in 1919. As a political commissar in the Red Army during the height of the civil war, Stalin supervised military activities against the counterrevolutionary White forces along the western front that were led by General Pyotr Wrangel. During the war between Russia and Poland from 1920 to 1921, his decisions as a political commissar ended in disaster and led to a long-standing conflict with Commissar of War Leon Trotsky. Meanwhile, Stalin, whose first wife had died in 1907, married Nadezhda Alliluyeva in 1918 and moved with the government from Petrograd to Moscow.