Joseph_Stalin

Joseph Stalin Introduction Joseph Stalin was born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in the village of Gori, in the Russian province of Georgia, on Dec. 21, 1879. His father was a shoemaker with a penchant for drunkenness, who left Gori when Stalin was young to seek employment in the city of Tiflis. Thus Joseph's mother, Yekaterina, made the more profound impact on his life--it was she who directed his education, first in the local Gori Church School and then, thanks to a scholarship, at the Tiflis Theological Seminary. There, she hoped, he would train to become a priest. Instead, the young Stalin became a devoted advocate for Marxist revolution. After leaving the Seminary in 1899, he joined the Social Democrats, Russia's Marxist political party, and became a professional revolutionary. He worked in Tiflis, and then in the Black Sea port of Batumi, organizing worker protests, which led to his arrest in 1902. Exiled to Siberia, he would soon escape, setting a pattern for the next ten years: from 1902 to 1913 he would be arrested and exiled six times, escaping almost every time. (Siberian exile, in Tsarist Russia, was notoriously easy to escape from.) During this period, the Social Democrats split into two factions, the stalin, soviet, war, stalin's, west, states, world, union, russia, power, europe, two, now, marxism, germany, while, revolution, order, nationalism, marxist, malenkov, great, german, forces, during, communist, western, united, stalinist, one, nationalist, long, life, late, last