Background of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was originally named Djugashvili. He was born December 21, 1879, in the little town of Gori near the border of Turkey. Today the humble wooden house which first sheltered him has been made into a national monument with a marble canopy covering it.
Stalin’s father was a shoemaker with an addiction for alcohol which eventually cost him his life. Stalin was only eleven years old when his father died. Thereafter, Stalin’s mother washed, scrubbed, sewed, and baked to earn enough money to put Stalin through school. Since his mother wanted him to be a priest, he was enrolled in the nearby theological seminary at Tiflis.
As he learned his way around, Stalin discovered that the seminary was honeycombed with secret societies. Many of them were fostering the atheistic writings of Feuerbach and Bauer and the revolutionary writings of Marx and Engels. Before long Stalin convinced himself that he had a preference for revolution rather than religion and he therefore became vigorously active in the clandestine organizations which existed among the students of the seminary. He continued these activities for nearly three years, but he was finally exposed in May, 1899, and was expelled from the seminary for “lack of religious vocation.”
Once he joined the outside world, Stalin spent his full time as a professional Marxist revolutionary. He organized strikes, conducted illegal May Day festivities, and finally fled to Batumi where he became the principal labor agitator for the Social-Democratic party. Eventually he was arrested and after remaining in prison until 1903, he was sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia.
He was still in Siberia when he heard about the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Stalin almost instinctively felt himself to be a hard-core Bolshevik and after successfully escaping from Siberia the following year, he returned to Tiflis and became the leader of the Transcaucasian Bolsheviks. During the Revolution of 1905 he led an abortive revolution in his home province of Georgia and then departed immediately for Finland to attend a Bolshevik conference and make contact with Lenin.
From then on Stalin remained the aide-de-camp to Lenin whom he deeply admired. It was not long before his zeal for the Communist cause began to forcefully manifest itself.
Stalin Engages in Criminal Activities
In the summer of 1907 Joseph Stalin held a secret meeting with Lenin in Berlin. Afterwards he returned to Tiflis and organized a holdup. It was no mere Robin Hood adventure to steal money from the rich, but a major gangster operation with complete disregard for the lives of men, women, and children in Stalin’s own home- town.
A powerful bomb was thrown in front of a convoy carrying money from the post office to the Tiflis Branch of the State Bank. The bomb destroyed the horses pulling the carriage, killed several by-standers, and wounded more than fifty children and adults. In the hysteria which followed, the moneybags containing 341,000 rubles (about $170,000) were snatched from the carriage by the bomb-throwers and hurriedly carried away.
The crime reflected such complete disregard for human life that authorities both inside and outside of Russia attempted to run down every possible clue which would disclose the identities of the criminals. Finally, the money was found in the possession of a close associate of Stalin named Maxim Litvinov (the man Stalin later sent to the United States in 1933 to seek U.S. recognition for Soviet Russia). Litvinov and a companion were arrested in Paris by the French authorities when they tried to change the rubles into francs before sending the money on to Lenin. Details of the crime were finally unraveled by the authorities, and the names of original perpetrators were disclosed. Nevertheless, Stalin succeeded in remaining at large for several more years and continued his revolutionary activities.
Stalin as a Union Organizer, Writer and Bolshevik Leader
The years 1907-1913 were pick-and-shovel years for Joseph Stalin. No one could accuse him of being merely an “intellectual Communist” as they sometimes described Lenin. Stalin learned every trick of propaganda, pressure politics, mass communications, strike techniques and labor agitation. Some of his most significant experiences occurred in the highly active industrial district at Baku. There he was assigned to organize tens of thousands of oil well and refinery workers. To do this he set up a triple-system of legal, semi-legal, and totally illegal organizations. He imposed his leadership so completely on the workers in this large industrial center that he was able to organize a powerful industrial soviet (workers’ council) dominated from top to bottom by his own loyal Bolshevik colleagues.
Stalin was never very effective as a speaker because of his strong Georgian accent, but between 1907 and 1913, he became proficient as a revolutionary writer. For awhile he edited a Socialist newspaper in Tiflis called
In 1912 Stalin received special recognition when Lenin broke away completely from the Social Democrats and set up an independent Bolshevik Party. In the new organization Lenin appointed Stalin to the Central Committee.
The very next year, however, Stalin’s career was interrupted when he was arrested and sent to Siberia. For Stalin it was an old story. Since 1903 he had been arrested eight times, exiled seven times, and escaped six times. But there was to be no escape on this latest arrest. He was sent to one of the most remote regions of Siberia.
With the arrival of World War I, Stalin had no particular desire to escape. He told his friends he would relax and enjoy his “vacation” in Siberia since escape might result in his being drafted into the armed services. He wanted no part of military service.
The Role of Russia in World War I
It will be recalled that the year 1914 found all the major nations of Europe flexing their military muscles. It was inevitable that the slightest miscalculation in diplomatic relations might turn loose a churning volcano of human destruction. The spark in the powder keg was the assassination of the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne by a member of a Serbian secret society. This occurred June 28, 1914.
Austria-Hungary had been looking for an excuse to take over Serbia, and therefore her troops began marching in. This angered the Tsar because Serbia was on his own calendar of conquest so he declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany came to the defense of Austria-Hungary and declared war on Russia. At the time France was an ally of Russia, so Germany used this as an excuse to declare war on France. This brought England into the War as an ally of France. Thus the machine of war began to roll.
From the point of view of the Russian Tsar, the First World War did not come as any particular surprise. For years he had been busily preparing for it by building a powerful military machine. Nevertheless, the Russian people were not psychologically prepared for war.
For nearly a decade there had been a growing tension between the people and the Tsar because he had failed to provide them with the constitutional government which he had promised in the October Manifesto of 1905. Of course, when the people were threatened by attack at the outbreak of World War I, they instinctively banded together in the common defense, and Tsar Nicholas promptly took this as an omen that they would support him loyally throughout the conflict.
