Hdsj2. 9 (21) December, 1879 in the town of Gori, Tiflis Province, into the family of a shoemaker was born Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Dzhugashvili), Soviet state and party leader. According to some other sources, the date of birth of Stalin was 6 (18) December, 1878.
3. In 1894 Iosif Dzhugashvili graduated from the Gori seminary, the same year he entered the Tiflis Orthodox seminary. Under the influence of the Russian Marxists, living in the Transcaucasia, he joined the revolutionary movement; a member of an illegal circle, he studied the works of K. Marx, F. Engels, V. I. Lenin, G. V. Plekhanov. In August 1898 Stalin officially entered the Tiflis organization of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Being a member of the social-democratic “Mesamedasi” group, he propagandized Marxists’ ideas among the workers of the Tbilisi Railway Shops. In 1899 he was excluded from the seminary. Thus he went underground becoming a professional revolutionary. During his underground revolutionary work, he was repeatedly arrested and exiled.
4. In 1912, after the Prague Conference of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Stalin was co-opted in his absence to the party’s Central Committee and headed its Russian Office. He actively contributed to preparation and publication of the first issue of “Pravda” paper. At the same time he published his first large theoretical work “Marxism and the national problem”, highly appreciated by V. I. Lenin.
5. In February 1913 Iosif Stalin was again arrested and exiled to the Turukhansky Krai. Having returned from the exile to Petrograd after the February Revolution, Stalin led the work of the Central Committee and the Petersburg Committee of Bolsheviks until the arrival of Lenin. From May 1917 he had been a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee. Stalin participated in the October armed revolt, after which, at the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets on October 26 (November 8), 1917 was elected a member of the first Soviet government as a Peoples’ Commissar for nationalities (1917-1922); at the same time, in 1919-1922, he headed the Peoples’ Commissariat for the state control, reorganized in 1920 into the Peoples’ Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection.