Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

STALIN, JOSEPH (IOSIF) VISSARIONOVICH (Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili) (6 December 1878–5 March 1953). The Soviet military and political leader of the civil-war era and subsequent long-term dictator of the USSR, Joseph Stalin, was born into the family of an impoverished cobbler in the eastern Georgian town of Gori. He was raised by his pious mother after his alcoholic father deserted the family; was educated at the local (Russian-speaking) church school; and at the age of 16, as a star pupil, won a scholarship to the Georgian Orthodox Seminary in Tiflis. He was expelled from the seminary in 1899, by which time he had become attracted to Marxism, and thereafter spent his life working for the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (which he joined in 1898) as a “professional revolutionary.” In the case of Stalin (although at this time he was chiefly known as “Koba,” after a fictional Georgian hero, only adopting the soubriquet “Man of Steel” at a later date), as a follower of the Bolsheviks, this meant organizing armed militias, inciting strikes, spreading propaganda, and raising money through bank robberies (“expropriations”), holdups, ransom kidnappings, and extortion. Such activities were frowned upon by the Mensheviks, who were dominant in the Georgian Social-Democratic Labor Party, but were defended by V. I. Lenin, who valued Stalin’s work highly.

“Koba” was arrested and imprisoned and/or exiled on seven occasions before the First World War. (There is some evidence that he was in the employ of the tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, in this period, but this may have been a diversionary tactic on his part and does not necessarily signify treachery to the party.) During periods of liberty he was elected, at its Prague conference, to the first Central Committee of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks) (17 January 1912), helped found the party newspaper Pravda (“The Truth”), and became the Bolsheviks’ chief spokesman on the nationalities question (apparently as a consequence of his ethnicity, rather than any significant interest on his part in Marxist theories about nationalism). Following his final arrest by the tsar’s police (on 23 February 1913), Stalin remained in exile in Siberia (in the remote district of Turukhansk, northern Eniseisk guberniia).

Stalin was liberated on 2 March 1917, following the February Revolution, and returned to Petrograd, where he was elected to the Russian Bureau of the RSDLP(b) (12 March–31 April 1917) and worked on the editorial board of Pravda. He was also elected to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, on 18 March 1917. In those capacities, alongside L. B. Kamenev, Stalin professed a defensist attitude with regard to the war—something unsurprisingly passed over in histories written during his dictatorship in the USSR—and urged qualified support for the foreign and military policies of the Russian Provisional Government, although he rapidly accepted Lenin’s rejection of these policies upon the Bolshevik leader’s arrival back in Russia in early April 1917. Thereafter, Stalin (who from June 1917 was also a member of VTsIK) undertook numerous assignments on Lenin’s behalf, including arranging the latter’s flight from Petrograd in the aftermath of the July Days. However, he was only cautiously supportive of Lenin during the party debates on the seizure of power prior to the October Revolution, although he did follow Lenin’s line in the debates on peace of early 1918 that led to the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918).