The early life of Joseph Stalin covers the period from Stalin's birth, on 18 December 1878 (6 December according to the Old Style), until the October Revolution on 7 November 1917 (25 October). Born Ioseb Besarionis dze 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 (modern-day Tbilisi) 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 figure. After being marked by Russian secret police for his activities, he became a full-time revolutionary figure and was involved in a various criminal activities which included robbery, kidnapping and arson. He became one of the Bolsheviks' chief operatives in the Caucasus, organizing paramilitaries, spreading propaganda, and utilizing 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.
Childhood: 1878–1893
Stalin was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili on in the town of Gori, in what is today the country of Georgia. He was baptised on and christened Ioseb, and known by the diminutive "Soso". His parents were Ekaterine (Keke) and Besarion Jughashvili (Beso). He was their third child; the first two, Mikheil and Giorgi, had died in infancy.The couple's first child, Mikheil, was born on 14 February 1875, but died two months later. A second son, Giorgi, was born on 24 December 1876 but succumbed to measles and died in June 1877. See , .
Stalin's father, Besarion, was a shoemaker and owned a workshop that at one point employed as many as ten people, but which slid into ruin as Stalin grew up. Beso had specialised in producing traditional Georgian footwear and did not produce the European-style shoes that were becoming increasingly fashionable. This, combined with the deaths of his previous two infant sons, precipitated his decline into alcoholism. The family found themselves living in poverty. The couple had to leave their home and move into nine different rented rooms over ten years.
Besarion also became violent towards his family. To escape the abusive relationship, Keke took Stalin and moved into the house of a family friend, Father Christopher Charkviani. She worked as a house cleaner and launderer for several local families who were sympathetic to her plight. Keke was a strict but affectionate mother to Stalin. She was a devout Christian, and both she and her son regularly attended church services. In 1884, Stalin contracted smallpox, which left him with facial pock marks for the rest of his life. Charkviani's teenaged sons taught Stalin the Russian language. Keke was determined to send her son to school, something that none of the family had previously achieved. In late 1888, when Stalin was ten, he enrolled at the Gori Church School. This was normally reserved for the children of clergy, but Charkviani ensured that Stalin received a place by claiming that the boy was the son of a deacon. This may be the reason why—in 1934—Stalin claimed to have been the son of a priest. There were many local rumours that Beso was not Stalin's real father, which in later life Stalin himself encouraged. Stalin biographer Simon Sebag Montefiore nonetheless thought it likely that Beso was the father, in part due to the strong physical resemblance that they shared. Beso eventually attacked a policeman while drunk which resulted in the authorities ejecting him from Gori. He moved to Tiflis, where he worked at the Adelkhanov shoe factory.
Although Keke was poor, she ensured that her son was well dressed when he went to school, likely through the financial support of family friends. As a child, Stalin exhibited a number of idiosyncrasies; when happy, he would for instance jump around on one leg while clicking his fingers and yelling aloud. He excelled academically, and also displayed talent in painting and drama classes. He began writing poetry, and was a fan of the work of Georgian nationalist writer Raphael Eristavi. He was also a choirboy, singing both in church and at local weddings. A childhood friend of Stalin's later recalled that he "was the best but also the naughtiest pupil" in the class. He and his friends formed a gang, and often fought with other local children. He caused mischief; in one incident, he ignited explosive cartridges in a shop, and in another, he tied a pan to the tail of a woman's pet cat.
When Stalin was twelve, he was seriously injured after having been hit by a phaeton. He was hospitalised in Tiflis for several months and sustained a lifelong disability in his left arm. His father subsequently kidnapped him and enrolled him as an apprentice cobbler in the factory; this would be Stalin's only experience as a worker. According to Stalin's biographer Robert Service, this was Stalin's "first experience with capitalism", and it was "raw, harsh and dispiriting". Several priests from Gori retrieved the boy, after which Beso cut all contact with his wife and son. In February 1892, Stalin's school teachers took him and the other pupils to witness the public hanging of several peasant bandits; Stalin and his friends sympathized with the condemned. The event left a deep and lasting impression on him. Stalin had decided that he wanted to become a local administrator so that he could deal with the problems of poverty that affected the population around Gori. Despite his Christian upbringing, he had become an atheist after contemplating the problem of evil and learning about evolution through Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
Tiflis Seminary: 1893–1899
In July 1893, Stalin passed his exams, and his teachers recommended him to the Tiflis Seminary. Due to his impoverished circumstances, the seminary would provide Soso with the best, well-rounded education he could ever hope to achieve. 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 rubles 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. 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 peers had also attended the Gori Church School. At Tiflis, Stalin was again an academically successful pupil, gaining high grades in his subjects. Completion of the seminary course required a variety of subjects, including 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 supplement his income, 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, Robert 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. The pseudonym "Koba" may also have been a tribute to his wealthy benefactor, Yakobi "Koba" Egnatashvili, who paid for his schooling at the Tiflis seminary. ("Koba" is the Georgian diminutive of Yakobi, or Jacob, and Stalin later named his first-born son in Egnatashvili's honour.)Brackman, Robert. 2004. The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. London: Frank Cass, p. 7Montefiore, Simon Sebag (6 September 2007). "Stalin, his father and the Rabbit". The New Statesman. Archived from the original on 8 August 2022. Retrieved 8 August 2022.
He also read Capital, the 1867 book by German philosopher 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 had developed. Marxism provided him with a new way of interpreting the world. The ideology was on the rise in Georgia, one of various forms of socialism then developing in opposition to the governing Tsarist authorities. At night, he attended secret meetings of local workers, most of whom were ethnic Russians. He was introduced to Silibistro "Silva" Jibladze, the Marxist founder of Mesame Dasi ('Third Group'), a Georgian socialist group. One of his poems was published in the group's newspaper, Kvali. Stalin found many socialists active in the Russian Empire to be too moderate, but was attracted by the writings of a Marxist who used the pseudonym of "Tulin"; this was Vladimir Lenin. It is also possible that he had pursued romantic and sexual relationships with women in Tiflis. Years later, there was some suggestion that he might have fathered a girl named Praskovia "Pasha" Mikhailovskaya around this period.