Stalin, Joseph (1879-1953), Soviet Communist leader, the longtime ruler who more than any other individual moulded the features that characterized the Soviet regime and shaped the direction of post-World War II Europe; in this regard, Stalin may be considered the most powerful person to live during the 20th century.

Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, as he was originally named-he adopted the pseudonym Stalin, meaning "a man of steel", around 1910-was born on December 21, 1879, in Gori, now in the Republic of Georgia. Both his parents were Georgian peasants. Neither of them spoke Russian, but Stalin was forced to learn it, as the language of instruction, when he attended the Gori church school in 1888-1894. The best pupil in the school, Soso (his schoolboy nickname) earned a full scholarship to the T'bilisi Theological Seminary.

The Revolutionary

While studying for the priesthood, Stalin read forbidden literature, including Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and soon converted to a new orthodoxy: Russian Marxism. Before graduation he left the seminary to become a full-time revolutionary.

Stalin began his career in the Social-Democratic party in 1899 as a propagandist among T'bilisi rail workers. The police caught up with him in 1902. Arrested in Batum, he spent more than a year in prison before being exiled to Siberia, from which he escaped in 1904. This became a familiar pattern. Between 1902 and 1913 Stalin was arrested eight times; he was exiled seven times and escaped six times. The government contained him only once; his last exile in 1913 lasted until 1917.
On his return from Siberia in 1904 Stalin married. His first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze, died in 1910. A second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, whom he married in 1919, committed suicide in 1932.

In the last years of tsarist Russia (1905-1917) Stalin was more of an up-and-coming follower than a leader. He always supported the Bolshevik faction of the party, but his contribution was practical, not theoretical. Thus, in 1907 he helped organize a bank robbery in T'bilisi to "expropriate" funds. Lenin raised him into the upper reaches of the party in 1912 by co-opting him into the Bolsheviks' Central Committee. The next year he briefly edited the new party newspaper, Pravda (Truth), and at Lenin's urging wrote his first major work, Marxism and the Nationality Question.