The young Stalin made a name for himself as a bank robber

Image Credit: Russia: The Rise of Stalin

Before he eventually gained power over the Soviet Union, which he maintained with a terrorist network, the young Joseph Stalin made a name for himself as a highwayman and bank robber.

Stalin was born Ioseb Jughashvili in late 19th-century Georgia, then a colony of the Russian Empire. He resented Tsarist tyranny and would eventually embrace Leninism. But his work with the Bolsheviks took a turn into deception and bank robbery.

After escaping with his mother from an abusive, alcoholic father, Stalin was sent to a seminary in Tbilisi. But he was not the religious type. Instead, he became enamored with revolutionary texts.

“I think it became increasingly clear to him that the things he hated about his world, the poverty, the brutality of the Russian officers and the secret police, could not be solved through religion,” says Dr. Pablo de Orellana.

De Orellana is one of the experts featured in Russia: The Rise of Stalin on History Hit, the third installment in a new series.

“At first Stalin is more nationalistic and wants to elevate Georgia’s position, perhaps within the Russian Empire. But soon he becomes a socialist.”

Stalin became convinced that something had to change, and it had to be done in a violent and revolutionary way.

Stalin the highwayman

“His early activities seem to be workers’ strikes, writing pamphlets, organizing labor movements,” De Orellana says. “He organizes workers’ strikes to demand rights to raise wages. He also raises money for revolutionary causes and begins to make contacts with larger revolutionary groups.”

In the early 1900s, Stalin came across the Mensheviks, the largest revolutionary group in the Caucasus. He then became attached to Leninism. Lenin led the Bolsheviks, who sought immediate revolution through a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries.

Stalin became a major source of funding for the early Bolshevik Party.

“Stalin seems to have had a talent for organizing criminals from the beginning,” says De Orellana. “Stalin is a bit of a Robin Hood character.”

Although Stalin was not a talented speaker, he excelled in interpersonal relations and manipulation, an essential skill in a violent criminal enterprise.

“Stalin would have been an exceptional head of a mafia family. He had the charisma, the leadership, the incredible intelligence, the organizational know-how.”

He also kept violent criminals at his side, some of whom were afraid of Stalin himself, a precursor to the terror network that would later emerge under his regime.

However, revolutionaries were constantly pursued by the Okhrana, the secret police of the Tsarist regime. After organizing a strike involving some 6,000 workers in Georgia, the Okhrana arrested Stalin and exiled him to Siberia. This raised his profile among the National Bolsheviks.

“He is the man who raises money”

After escaping from Siberia in 1904, he met key Bolshevik figures. Stalin eventually met Lenin at the party congress in Finland in 1905. When Lenin’s relationship with Leon Trotsky cooled, Stalin emerged as the perfect ally.

“If Leninism was about immediate revolution, Stalin was the perfect man to bring it about,” De Orellana says.

Stalin became the most important Bolshevik in the Caucasus, already a kind of local hero. In 1907 Stalin was involved in an armed robbery of a bank stagecoach on Erivansky Square in Tbilisi.

But among the other Bolsheviks he was an outsider. “First of all, he is not middle class, rich and educated like most of the others,” says De Orellana. “He has not written an extensive philosophy, has not studied extensively.”

“He had an accent. He wasn’t Russian, he didn’t speak French or German. He didn’t have an international outlook.”

But he proved his worth.

“He’s the man who collects money,” De Orellana says. “He’s the man who prints newspapers illegally. He’s very good at moving illegally, escaping the secret police in ways that Trotsky and Lenin couldn’t.”

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