Claim: Joseph Stalin was involved in a bank robbery.

The 1907 Tiflis bank robbery , also known as the Yerevan Square expropriation , was an armed robbery on 26 June 1907 in the city of Tiflis -LRB- now Georgia 's capital , Tbilisi -RRB- . A bank cash shipment was stolen by Bolsheviks to fund their revolutionary activities . The robbers attacked a bank stagecoach and surrounding police and military using bombs and guns while the stagecoach was transporting money through Yerevan Square -LRB- now Freedom Square -RRB- between the post office and the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire . The attack killed forty people and injured fifty others , according to official archive documents . The robbers escaped with 341,000 rubles -LRB- equivalent to around US 3.4 million in 2008 -RRB- .   The robbery was organized by a number of top-level Bolsheviks , including Vladimir Lenin , Joseph Stalin , Maxim Litvinov , Leonid Krasin , and Alexander Bogdanov , and executed by a party of revolutionaries led by Stalin 's early associate Ter-Petrosian -LRB- Kamo -RRB- . Because such activities were explicitly prohibited by the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party -LRB- RSDLP -RRB- , the robbery and the killings caused outrage within the party against the Bolsheviks -LRB- a faction within the RSDLP -RRB- . As a result , Lenin and Stalin tried to distance themselves from the robbery . The events surrounding the incident and similar robberies split the Bolshevik leadership , with Lenin against Bogdanov and Krasin . Despite the success of the robbery and the large sum involved , the Bolsheviks could not use most of the large bank notes obtained from the robbery because their serial numbers were known to the police . Lenin conceived of a plan to have various individuals cash the large bank notes at once at various locations throughout Europe in January 1908 , but this strategy failed , resulting in a number of arrests , worldwide publicity , and negative reaction from European social democrats .   Kamo was caught in Germany shortly after the robbery but successfully avoided a criminal trial by feigning insanity for more than three years . He managed to escape from his psychiatric ward but was captured two years later while planning another robbery . Kamo was then sentenced to death for his crimes including the 1907 robbery , but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment ; he was released after the 1917 Revolution . None of the other major participants or organizers of the robbery were ever brought to trial . After his death , a grave and monument to Kamo was erected near Yerevan Square in Pushkin Gardens . This monument was later removed , and Kamo 's remains moved elsewhere .