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The Youth. The man who (with Lenin) embodied this historic force was born (1879) in a small village near Tiflis in Georgia. For the new age, his family status was equivalent to a patent of nobility: Stalin's father was a semiliterate shoemaker who had been a peasant. Georgia is one of Asia's few Christian countries ("I too am an Asiatic," Stalin greeted the Japanese Foreign Minister in 1941). So Stalin went to a Jesuit seminary to become a priest. But he soon left. At an age (15) when Winston Churchill was at Harrow and Franklin Roosevelt at Groton, young Joseph Djugashvili was organizing revolutionary cells.
"Bolshevism," Bolsheviks liked to brag, "has peopled half the jails of Europe with philosophers." In almost no time Stalin became one of these philosophers. His first arrests were for organizing illegal strikes and Marxist groups. Later he was jailed on more colorful charges. When Lenin split the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (1903) into a minority (Mensheviks) and a majority (Bolsheviks), Stalin followed Lenin. But times were hard. The Bolsheviks were only a handful of zealots. Their work was hampered by comrades who eked out lean livings as revolutionists by spying in their spare time for the Tsar's police. ("Thanks to Zhitomirsky's treachery," wrote Lenin's wife indignantly, "Comrade Kamo was caught with a suitcase containing dynamite.") There was little money with which to carry on. Stalin, always practical, undertook to make the Tsar finance the revolution. He organized a series of profitable holdups (called "expropriations") of Imperial Bank trucks. One such attempt netted $75,000, resulted in the death of 20 people when one of the comrades, in the heat of expropriation, tossed a bomb. Besides, the expropriated bank notes had been in large denominations, and all over Europe comrades (among them Soviet Foreign Vice Commissar Maxim Litvinoff) were jailed for passing the hot money.
Stalin was spending a few years in an Arctic prison camp when the democratic Government of Alexander Kerensky liberated the Bolshevik prisoners from whom, six months later, Kerensky was fleeing for his life.
In November 1917 the Bolsheviks seized power. Said Lenin, at the second All-Russian Congress of the Soviets: "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order." The most stubborn fact in modern history had turned up: in a country continental in size, one class (the proletariat) had repudiated democracy and, guided by a monolithic party, rushed in the name of Communism toward the totalitarian state.
The Man. The facts of young Djugashvili's early biography are scarcely more relevant than those eagerly reported from wartime visitors to Moscow: that Stalin speaks Russian with a thick Georgian accent; that he has been thrice married, that his present wife, Rosa, is the sister of the Vice President of the Council of the People's Commissars, Lazar Kaganovitch; that Stalin is rather formal with his sons (one of whom is a German prisoner) but occasionally romps with his rugged daughter; that he works at any hour of the day & night; that he prefers his office in the Storaya Ploshad to his offices in the Kremlin; that he rests up three days a week in the country house where Lenin died; that he travels in a bulletproof automobile.