page_title: Early life of Joseph Stalin
section_title: Tiflis Seminary: 1893–1899
hierarchical_section_title: Early life of Joseph Stalin / Childhood / Tiflis Seminary: 1893–1899
caption_attribution_description: English: Tbilisi in XIX century, Hotel "Palace", Freedom Square. The Tbilisi Orthodox Theological Seminary. The main facade. The project architect Bernardazzi. The end of 1830s. Photo by D. Jermakov
context_page_description: The early life of Joseph Stalin covers the life of Joseph Stalin from his birth on 6 December 1878 until the October Revolution on 25 October 1917. Born Ioseb Jughashvili in Gori, Georgia to a cobbler and a house cleaner, he grew up in the city and attended school there before moving to Tiflis to join the Tiflis Seminary. While a student at the seminary he embraced Marxism and became an avid follower of Vladimir Lenin, and left the seminary to become a revolutionary. After being marked by Russian secret police for his activities, he became a full-time revolutionary and outlaw. He became one of the Bolsheviks' chief operatives in the Caucasus, organizing paramilitaries, spreading propaganda, raising money through bank robberies, and kidnappings and extortion. Stalin was captured and exiled to Siberia numerous times, but often escaped. He became one of Lenin's closest associates, which helped him rise to the heights of power after the Russian Revolution. In 1913 Stalin was exiled to Siberia for the final time, and remained in exile until the February Revolution of 1917 led to the overthrow of the Russian Empire.
context_section_description: In July 1893, Stalin passed his exams and his teachers recommended him to the Tiflis Seminary. Keke took him to the city, where they rented a room. Stalin applied for a scholarship to enable him to attend the school; they accepted him as a half-boarder, meaning that he was required to pay a reduced fee of 40 roubles a year. This was still a substantial sum for his mother, and he was likely financially assisted once more by family friends. He officially enrolled at the school in August 1894. Here he joined 600 trainee priests, who boarded in dormitories containing between twenty and thirty beds. Stalin was set apart by being three years older than most of the other first year students, although a number of his fellow students had also attended the Gori Church School. At Tiflis, Stalin was again an academically successful pupil, gaining high grades in his subjects. Among the subjects taught at the seminary were Russian literature; secular history; mathematics; Latin; Greek; Church Slavonic singing; Georgian Imeretian singing; and Holy Scripture. As students progressed they were taught more concentrated theological subjects such as ecclesiastical history; liturgy; homiletics; comparative theology; moral theology; practical pastoral work; didactics; and church singing. To earn money, he sang in a choir, with his father sometimes asking him for his earnings. During the holidays he would return to Gori to spend time with his mother.
  Tiflis was a multi-ethnic city in which Georgians were a minority. The Seminary was controlled by the Georgian Orthodox Church, which was part of the Russian Orthodox Church and subordinate to the ecclesiastical authorities in St. Petersburg. The priests employed to work there were largely reactionary, anti-semitic, Russian nationalists. They banned the speaking of Georgian by pupils, insisting that Russian be used at all times. Stalin was however proud to be Georgian.
  He continued writing poetry, and took several of his poems to the office of the newspaper Iveria ("Georgia"). There, they were read by Ilia Chavchavadze, who liked them and ensured that five were published in the newspaper. Each was published under the pseudonym of "Soselo". Thematically, they dealt with topics like nature, land, and patriotism. According to Montefiore, they became "minor Georgian classics", and were included in various anthologies of Georgian poetry over the coming years. Montefiore was of the view that "their romantic imagery was derivative but their beauty lay in the delicacy and purity of rhythm and language". Similarly, Service felt that in the original Georgian language these poems had "a linguistic purity recognised by all".
  Over his years at the Seminary, Stalin lost interest in many of his studies and his grades began to drop. He grew his hair long in an act of rebellion against the school's rules. Seminary records contain complaints that he declared himself an atheist, chatted in class, was late for meals, and refused to doff his hat to monks. He was repeatedly confined to a cell for his rebellious behaviour. He had joined a forbidden book club, the Cheap Library, which was active at the school. Among the authors whom he read in this period were Émile Zola, Nikolay Nekrasov, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Friedrich Schiller, Guy de Maupassant, Honoré de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Particularly influential was Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is To Be Done?. Another influential text was Alexander Kazbegi's The Patricide, with Stalin adopting the nickname "Koba" from that of the book's bandit protagonist. These works of fiction were supplemented with the writings of Plato and books on Russian and French history.
  He also read Capital, the 1867 book by German sociological theorist Karl Marx, and tried learning German so that he could read the works of Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels in the language in which they were originally written. He had soon devoted himself to Marxism, the socio-political theory that Marx and Engels 
caption: Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary (c 1919)
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