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The police caught up with him in 1902 where he was arrested and spent more than a year in prison. He was later exiled to Siberia, where he escaped in 1904 when he married his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze. She died six years later in 1910. He was subsequently arrested eight times, but escaped six times. The government contained him only once; his last exile in 1913 lasted until 1917. In 1919 he married for the second time, a woman called Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who later committed suicide in 1932. Between 1905 to 1917, Stalin became more of an up-and-coming follower than a leader and supported the Bolshevik faction of the party, and in 1907 he helped organize a bank holdup in T'bilisi "to expropriate" funds. He was co-opted by Lenin the leader of the Bolsheviks' Central Committee in 1912 and the following year he briefly edited the new party newspaper, Pravda (Truth). At Lenin's request he wrote his first major work, Marxism and the Nationality Question. However, |
before this treatise appeared in 1914, Stalin was sent to Siberia. Following the Russian Revolution of February (March, New Style) 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd (now known as Saint Petersburg), where he resumed the editorship of Pravda. In 1922 Stalin became secretary general and after Lenin's death he joined in a troika with Grigory Zinovyev and Kamenev to lead the country. With these temporary allies, Stalin acted against his archrival Trotsky. Subsequently he had Trotsky and his supporters expelled from the Party and exiled. At the age of 50 in 1929, Stalin became leader of the USSR and that year, he expanded what had been a moderate collectivization program into a nationwide offensive against the peasantry. Millions were displaced, and countless millions died in the massive collectivisation. By |
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