Word: djugashvili
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...Volga region named Scriabin, related to the composer. Young Vyacheslav Mikhailovich ingratiated himself with the Bolsheviks by persuading a wealthy young bourgeois friend to finance a clandestine newspaper called Pravda. To this, and the fact that one of the first editors of Pravda was a young Georgian bandit named Djugashvili, alias Koba, alias Stalin, he owed his future. His own underground alias was derived from molot, meaning hammer. But though he was as methodical and repetitive as a foundry trip hammer, the stuff of his soul was not steel, but the durable latex of a heavy-handed rubber stamp...
Georgia is a proud and fiery republic on the Black Sea, abutting on Armenia and Turkey, where Asia and Europe meet. A mountain-girt southland, incorporated in the Soviet Union in 1921, and still resentful of it, Georgia gave Communism two of its mightiest sons: Joseph Djugashvili...
Molotov's classmates, a wealthy liberal, put up 100,000 rubles to found a revolutionary journal to be called Pravda (Truth). Molotov was appointed secretary; his editor was a mustachioed Georgian, eleven years his senior, named Joseph Djugashvili (alias Stalin). The two pledged "eternal alliance," and Stalin took room and board with Vyacheslav's widowed aunt...
...expelled from the seminary for reading radical literature. He had joined a clandestine Socialist organization. He got a job at Tiflis Geophysical Observatory and the group began holding secret meetings in his room. Police raided the room; young Djugashvili went underground, taking his first revolutionary nickname: Koba (meaning Indomitable). He became a strike agitator among Tiflis railroad men, but was soon run down by Czarist police, jailed and deported to Siberia. In absentia, he was elected a member of the executive of the All-Caucasian Federation of Social Democratic groups...
Disappointing Eagle. But his pamphlets had caught the eye of Lenin. That year young Djugashvili met the famous Lenin at a party conference in Finland. At that point (as today), Lenin was a certified god in the world Pantheon of social progress, but hard-boiled Djugashvili was not impressed: "I had hoped to see the mountain eagle of our party," he wrote. "How great was my disappointment to see a most ordinary looking man, below average height, in no way distinguishable from ordinary mortals...