Gori, Georgia
Stalin was born on December 18, 1878 in Gori, Georgia to a family of limited financial means. He was the fourth child born to the family of Ekaterina Gheladze and Vissarion Djugashvili; the prior three children of the couple had died at an early age. Stalin later became politically active and, during the Russian Revolution of 1905, organized and armed Bolshevik militias across Georgia, running protection rackets and waging guerrilla warfare. After meeting Lenin at a Bolshevik conference in 1906 and marrying Ekaterina Svanidze, with whom he had a son Yakov, Stalin temporarily resigned from the party over its ban on bank robberies. Embarking on an effort to organize Muslim Azeri and Persian partisans in the Caucasus, Stalin conducted protection rackets, ransom kidnappings, counterfeiting operations and robberies, until arrest and exile in 1908.