Early life of Joseph Stalin

[21] 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.

[43] 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.

[73] 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.

[109] The state prosecutor subsequently ruled that there was insufficient evidence for Stalin being behind the Batumi disturbances, but he was instead indicted for his involvement in revolutionary activities in Tiflis.

[113] Stalin began his journey east in October, when he boarded a prison steamship at Batumi harbour and travelled via Novorossiysk and Rostov to Irkutsk.

[124] Stalin was defended by the first Georgian Marxist to officially declare himself a Bolshevik, Mikha Tskhakaya, although the latter made the young man publicly renounce his views.

[137] According to Montefiore, Stalin socialised with hitmen “Kamo and Tsintsadze" but issued formal commands to the rest of the Outfit members through his bodyguard.

[138] Stalin also formed a Bolshevik Battle Squad which he ordered to try and keep the warring ethnic factions apart, also using the unrest to steal printing equipment.

[146] Using the alias of "Ivanovitch", Stalin set off by train in early December, and on arrival met with Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who informed them that the venue had been moved to Tammerfors in the Grand Duchy of Finland.

There, he rented a room in Stepney, part of the city's East End that housed a substantial Jewish émigré community from the Russian Empire.

[191] The Outfit continued to attack Black Hundreds, and raised finances by running protection rackets, counterfeiting currency, and carrying out robberies.

[204] There he stayed in a communal house with nine fellow exiles[205] but repeatedly got into trouble with the local police chief; the latter locked Stalin up for reading revolutionary literature aloud and fined him for attending the theatre.

[224] At the Prague Conference, the first Bolshevik Central Committee was established; Lenin and Grigory Zinoviev subsequently proposed co-opting the absent Stalin onto the group.

[265] Stalin soon earned a reputation for self-centeredness among the locals when he simply seized the library of a deceased co-exile instead of sharing it in accordance to the "exiles' code".

[266] According to several of his biographers, including Stephen Kotkin, Ronald Grigor Suny, Simon Sebag Montefiore, and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin had a relationship with Lidia Pereprygina at Kureika.

[284][285] Stalin was in Achinsk when the February Revolution took place; uprisings broke out in Petrograd—as St Petersburg had been renamed—and the Tsar abdicated, to be replaced by a Provisional Government.

[287] There, Stalin and Kamenev expressed the view that they were willing to temporarily back the new administration and accept the continuation of Russian involvement in the First World War so long as it was purely defensive.

[13] During this raid, Stalin smuggled Lenin out of the newspaper's office and subsequently took charge of the Bolshevik leader's safety, moving him to five safe houses over the course of three days.

[303] In Lenin's absence, he continued editing Pravda and served as acting leader of the Bolsheviks, overseeing the party's Sixth Congress, which was held covertly.

[307] On 24 October, police raided the Bolshevik newspaper offices, smashing machinery and presses; Stalin managed to salvage some of this equipment in order to continue his activities.

[309] Armed Bolshevik militia had seized Petrograd's electric power station, main post office, state bank, telephone exchange, and several bridges.

[310] A Bolshevik-controlled ship, the Aurora, sailed up to the Winter Palace, and opened fire, with the assembled delegates of the Provisional Government surrendering and being arrested by the Bolsheviks.

[312] An ethnic Georgian, he also was a subject of the Russian Empire, so he also had a Russified version of his name: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (Иосиф Виссарионович Джугашвили).

[321] The rumours were reinforced by being published in the Soviet Union memoirs of Domenty Vadachkory, who wrote that Stalin used an Okhrana badge apparently stolen by him to help in his escape from the exile.

Everything suggests that Stalin, the former Okhrana agent, remained a monarchist at heart: his autocratic predilections, his brutal contempt for revolutionaries, his ignorance of Marxist and socialist doctrine”.

One such example was the raid that occurred on the night of 3 April 1901, when nearly everyone of importance in the Socialist-Democratic movement in Tiflis was arrested, except for Stalin, who was apparently "enjoying the balmy spring air, and in one of his to-hell-with-the-revolution moods, [which] is too impossible for serious consideration.

[331] Historian Roman Brackman also shared this view as he described Stalin as having “inundated Soviet archives with fake documents in order to hide the record of his Okhrana service and to glorify his past as a revolutionary”.

[332] Ronald Hingley regarded the issue as an “intriguing problem which may never receive its final solution” and argued this was partly due to the rewriting of history under the Stalinist regime.

He also cited biographer Edward Ellis Smith who stated that most of the people who knew Stalin during his first thirty-seven years had been executed after being forced to sign falsified accounts.

[284][285][334] KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin claimed that during a visit to a secret section of the Moscow Main Archives Directorate, he had been shown an Okhrana file on Stalin.