At the 5th Congress, a resolution was passed condemning participation in or assistance to all militant activity, including "expropriations" as "disorganizing and demoralizing", and called for all party militias to be disbanded.

[6][8][9] Before the 5th Congress met, high-ranking Bolsheviks held a meeting in Berlin in April 1907 to discuss staging a robbery to obtain funds to purchase arms.

The group decided that Stalin, then known by his earlier nom de guerre Koba,[b] and the Armenian Ter-Petrosian, known as Kamo, should organize a bank robbery in the city of Tiflis.

[12][21] On the day of the robbery, 26 June 1907, the 20 organizers, including Stalin, met near Erivansky Square (just 2 minutes from the seminary, bank and viceroy's palace) to finalize their plans, and after the meeting, they went to their designated places in preparation for the attack.

[13] To deal with the increased security, gang members spotted patrolling gendarmes and police prior to the robbery and lookouts were posted looking down on the square from above.

A witness, David Sagirashvili, later stated that he had been walking in Erivansky Square when a friend named Bachua Kupriashvili, who later turned out to be one of the robbers, invited him into a tavern and asked him to stay.

When they received a signal that the bank stagecoach was nearing the square, the armed men quickly left the building with pistols drawn.

[29][30] Ekaterina Svanidze, Stalin's wife, was standing on a balcony at their home near the square with her family and young child.

[32] Pressed for time, they inadvertently left twenty thousand rubles behind,[31] some of which was pocketed by one of the stagecoach drivers who was later arrested for the theft.

[23][33] About 91,000 rubles were in small untraceable bills, with the rest in large 500-ruble notes that were difficult to exchange because their serial numbers were known to the police.

[23][32] Another source stated in a police report that Stalin "observed the ruthless bloodshed, smoking a cigarette, from the courtyard of a mansion.

[23][28][31] Authorities mobilized the army, closed roads, and surrounded the square hoping to secure the money and capture the criminals.

After this incident, Mukhtarov was suspended from the Okhrana, and Stalin was ordered to leave Tiflis and go to Baku to await a decision in the case.

[23] While Brackman claims to have found evidence of this incident, whether Stalin cooperated with the Okhrana during his early life has been a subject of debate among historians for many decades and has yet to be resolved.

[36] The mattress was moved to another safe house, then later put on the director's couch at the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory,[23][33] possibly because Stalin had worked there.

[20] He next traveled to Berlin and delivered a letter from Lenin to a prominent Bolshevik physician, Yakov Zhitomirsky, asking him to treat Kamo's eye, which had not completely healed from the bomb blast.

[20] Unknown to Lenin, Zhitomirsky had been secretly working as an agent of the Russian government and quickly informed the Okhrana,[20] who asked the Berlin police to arrest Kamo.

[38] To avoid being followed, Lenin walked 5 km (3 mi) across a frozen lake at night to catch a steamer at a nearby island.

[38] Zhitomirsky heard of the plan and reported it to the Okhrana,[38] who contacted police departments throughout Europe asking them to arrest anyone who tried to cash the notes.

[43] Most prominent among those arrested was Maxim Litvinov, caught while boarding a train with his mistress at Paris's Gare du Nord with twelve of the 500-ruble notes he intended to cash in London.

[44] Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, discussed these events in her memoirs: The money obtained in the Tiflis raid was handed over to the Bolsheviks for revolutionary purposes.

[46]Brackman claims that despite the arrests, Lenin continued his attempts to exchange the 500-ruble notes and did manage to trade some of them for 10,000 rubles from an unknown woman in Moscow.

[50][51][52] To make sure that he was not faking his condition, German doctors stuck pins under his nails, struck him in the back with a long needle, and burned him with hot irons, but he did not break his act.

[51][53] After all of these tests, the chief doctor of the Berlin asylum wrote in June 1909 that "there is no foundation to the belief that [Kamo] is feigning insanity.

[41][55] In April 1910, he was put on trial for his role in the Tiflis robbery,[56] where he ignored the proceedings and openly fed a pet bird that he had hidden in his shirt.

[56][57] The court eventually found that he had been sane when he committed the Tiflis robbery, but was presently mentally ill and should be confined until he recovered.

[58] In August 1911, after feigning insanity for more than three years, Kamo escaped from the psychiatric ward of a prison in Tiflis by sawing through his window bars and climbing down a homemade rope.

[6] The Mensheviks felt betrayed and angry; the robbery proved that the Bolshevik Centre operated independently from the unified Central Committee and was taking actions explicitly prohibited by the party congress.

Plekhanov's colleague, Julius Martov, said the Bolshevik Centre was something between a secret factional central committee and a criminal gang.

[71][72] Despite being convicted of the bloody robbery, Kamo was originally buried and had a monument erected in his honour in Pushkin Gardens, near Erivansky Square.