Stalin was not his name.

Born in Georgia, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1878, Ioseb Jughashvili was the son of a failing cobbler and a housemaid.

His father Besarion was an alcoholic, and, following an attack on the town's chief of police, was sent into exile.

In 1894, 16-year-old Ioseb attained a scholarship to Russia'a primary Russian Orthodox seminary. By the end of his first year, Ioseb had decided he did not believe in God.



Despite this decision, he remained in the seminary until 1899, when he was expelled for not sitting his final exams. But Ioseb had more significant issues occupying his mind; he read Lenin's works and enrolled in a Marxist political group.

It was at the seminary that Ioseb first began to use a pseudonym, though not "Stalin." He took the name "Koba" and demanded he be referred to as such by his fellow students. Koba is the name of "rob-from-the-rich, give-to-the-poor" hero of Alexander Kazbegi's novel The Patricide.

After leaving the seminary, Koba worked in a weather office until, in 1901, he became a full-time, boot-strapping underground revolutionary.

And as a revolutionary, he fermented unrest, provoking strikes and writing articles for underground publications. In 1904 he joined Lenin's newly formed Bolshevik group.

Koba accelerated his revolutionary activities within the Bolshevik group. In order to fund the group's work, he organised robberies and extortion — even kidnapping.

Around 1911 Koba changed his nom-de-plume to "Stalin," which derives from the Russian word for "steel" and in this case implies "man of steel."