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World War I broke Czarist power, brought about the 1917 short-lived Kerensky government and the Bolshevik coup d'etat. Stalin got out of Siberia, but took small part in these momentous events. U.S. Journalist John Reed did not even mention him in Ten Days That Shook the World. But Stalin, the Inside Man, emerged as one of the seven members of the party's political bureau and was appointed Commissar of Nationalities. Joked Lenin: "No intelligence is needed, that is why we've put Stalin there.''
War & Marriage. Trotsky skyrocketed into world prominence as organizer and Commissar of the Red army in the civil war. Stalin, in charge of the defense of Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad), kept up a running feud with Trotsky and carried the war, against orders, into his native Georgia. In these violent days, he was married a second time, to Nadezhda Allilueva. the pretty daughter of the Petrograd worker in whose house he had once been arrested.
Among the Socialist intellectuals of her home town, the swarthy, shock-haired Georgian added nothing to the brilliant debates in which such men as Lunacharsky, Commissar of Education, the historian Pokrovsky, and Ryazanov, biographer of Marx, took part. His harsh Georgian accent put him at a disadvantage in public speechmaking. Someone asked: "Who is Stalin?" Snapped Trotsky: "The most eminent mediocrity in the Party." But Stalin worked purposefully in committees. His Nationalities Commissariat, which had begun with a bare table in a bare room, numbered hundreds of "experts" and his control extended over 65 million of Russia's 140 million people.
At the end of the Civil War, Lenin decided to remove hostile, corrupt and unreliable elements from his organization and created the Workers' and Peasants' Inspectorate, called Rabkrin (to purge the administration), and the Orgburo (to purge the party). Joseph Stalin directed both. Soon he was running the party's day-to-day business. Early in 1922 the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee was created for him. The title suited him: it sounded innocuous. Stalin was ever contemptuous of trappings; the job could be made all powerful, and to Stalin, reality counted.