Joseph Stalin or Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was born
             December 21, 1879. He was born in Gori, a village in
             Transcaucasian Georgia, a province of the Russian Empire within
             the Caucasus mountains. Stalin was the only of four children to
             survive infancy. Stalin's father was named Visarion Dzhugashvili,
             who was an unsuccessful cobbler. Stalin's father drank heavily
             and sometimes beat his son. Stalin's mother, Yekaterina
             Dzhugashvili, worked as a house servant for various upper-class
             Georgian families. Joseph Stalin was sickly as a child, he was
             scarred by smallpox, and septicemia crippled his left arm.
             Nevertheless, he was in excellent shape as a teenager. Stalin was
             enrolled at a local Orthodox prochial school in Gori in 1888 at the
             age of nine. When he was 14, his father died from wounds he
             In 1894, Stalin won a free scholarship to the Orthodox
             Russian theological seminary at Tiflis to be educated for
             priesthood. In his fourth year he joined Mesame Dasi, a secret
             group supporting Georgian nationalism. In 1899 Stalin was
             expelled from the seminary, when he was about to graduate. Stalin
             first tried tutoring and then clerical work at the Tiflis Observatory,
             but abandoned the job in May of 1901 when he was about to be
             arrested. He then became a paid agitator, trying to start a revolt
             against the czar. He edited illegal pamphlets and helped distribute
             them secretly. At first he called himself Koba after a legendary
             Georgian hero. Later he changed his name to David, Soso,
             Chujikov, Nijeradaze, and finally Stalin. He was then arrested for
             the first time on April 18, 1902 and imprisoned for eighteen
             months in Bantum. Afterwards in 1903 he was exiled to Siberia
             for three years. Stalin escaped in 1904 and reappeared in Tiflis.
             Joseph Stalin and Lenin met for the first time in 1905, at a
             Bolshevik conference in Finland. Stalin, was reportedly h...