page_title: Joseph Stalin
section_title: Rise to the Central Committee and editorship of Pravda: 1912–1917
hierarchical_section_title: Joseph Stalin / Early life / Rise to the Central Committee and editorship of Pravda: 1912–1917
caption_attribution_description: Joseph Stalin, apparently in exile in Siberia. The photograph was reprinted in the United States in Life on 29 October 1951 at p. 109[1] with the caption "In 1915 Stalin, whose nickname was 'Soso,' looked like carefree fop during his last Siberian exile as political offender".
context_page_description: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet politician who ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. He served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and premier of the Soviet Union. Despite initially governing the Soviet Union as part of a collective leadership, he eventually consolidated power to become the country's de facto dictator by the 1930s. A communist ideologically committed to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, Stalin formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are known as Stalinism.
  Born to a poor family in Gori in the Russian Empire, Stalin joined the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a youth. He edited the party's newspaper, Pravda, and raised funds for Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik faction via robberies, kidnappings, and protection rackets. Repeatedly arrested, he underwent several internal exiles. After the Bolsheviks seized power during the 1917 October Revolution and created a one-party state under Lenin's newly renamed Communist Party, Stalin joined its governing Politburo.
context_section_description: In January 1912, while Stalin was in exile, the first Bolshevik Central Committee had been elected at the Prague Conference. Shortly after the conference, Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev decided to co-opt Stalin to the committee. Still in Vologda, Stalin agreed, remaining a Central Committee member for the rest of his life. Lenin believed that Stalin, as a Georgian, would help secure support for the Bolsheviks from the empire's minority ethnicities. In February 1912, Stalin again escaped to Saint Petersburg, tasked with converting the Bolshevik weekly newspaper, Zvezda ("Star") into a daily, Pravda ("Truth"). The new newspaper was launched in April 1912, although Stalin's role as editor was kept secret.
  In May 1912, he was arrested again and imprisoned in the Shpalerhy Prison, before being sentenced to three years exile in Siberia. In July, he arrived at the Siberian village of Narym, where he shared a room with fellow Bolshevik Yakov Sverdlov. After two months, Stalin and Sverdlov escaped back to Saint Petersburg.
  During a brief period back in Tiflis, Stalin and the Outfit planned the ambush of a mail coach, during which most of the group—although not Stalin—were apprehended by the authorities. Stalin returned to Saint Petersburg, where he continued editing and writing articles for Pravda.
  After the October 1912 Duma elections resulted in six Bolsheviks and six Mensheviks being elected, Stalin wrote articles calling for reconciliation between the two Marxist factions, for which he was criticised by Lenin. In late 1912, he twice crossed into the Austro-Hungarian Empire to visit Lenin in Kraków, eventually bowing to Lenin's opposition to reunification with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin travelled to Vienna, where he conducted researches into the 'national question' of how the Bolsheviks should deal with the Russian Empire's national and ethnic minorities. Lenin, who encouraged Stalin to write an article on the subject, wanted to attract these groups to the Bolshevik cause by offering them the right of secession from the Russian state, but at the same time hoped they would remain part of a future Bolshevik-governed Russia.
  Stalin's finished article was titled Marxism and the National Question, and first published in the March, April, and May 1913 issues of the Bolshevik journal Prosveshcheniye; Lenin was very happy with it. According to Montefiore, this was "Stalin's most famous work". The article was published under the pseudonym of "K. Stalin", a name he had been using since 1912. Derived from the Russian word for steel (stal), this has been translated as "Man of Steel"; Stalin may have intended it to imitate Lenin's pseudonym. Stalin retained this name for the rest of his life, possibly because it had been used on the article which established his reputation among the Bolsheviks.
  In February 1913, Stalin was arrested while back in Saint Petersburg. He was sentenced to four years exile in Turukhansk, a remote part of Siberia from which escape was particularly difficult. In August, he arrived in the village of Monastyrskoe, although after four weeks was relocated to the hamlet of Kostino. In March 1914, concerned over a potential escape attempt, the authorities moved Stalin to the hamlet of Kureika on the edge of the Arctic Circle. In the hamlet, Stalin had a relationship with Lidia Pereprygia, who was thirteen at the time and thus a year under the legal age of consent in Tsarist Russia. In or about December 1914, Pereprygia gave birth to Stalin's child, although the infant soon died. She gave birth to another of his children, Alexander, circa April 1917. In Kureika, Stalin lived closely with the indigenous Tunguses and Ostyak, and spent much of his time fishing.
caption: Stalin in 1915
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