Word: koba
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...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...
Siberia was the university of the revolution. Here Koba followed the sharp controversies between the right (Menshevik) and left (Bolshevik) wings of the Social Democrats, without committing himself on either side. He also had time to observe his fellow exiles and to study their weaknesses. That maneuvering, waiting, ruthless mind of his was already shaping. Russia's defeat by Japan in 1904-05 brought on the October 1905 Revolution. Koba escaped from Siberia, traveled hundreds of miles by peasant cart, suffered frostbite, and arrived back in Tiflis. Here he married Katerina Svanidze, an illiterate Georgian girl, who bore...
...revealed his bent: control through committees. But what committees! "Our committees ought at once to set out to arm the people . . . to set up regional centers for the collection of arms, to organize workshops for the preparation of ... explosives." The revolution failed, Trotsky was sent to Siberia, and Koba's young wife died of tuberculosis. These were hard days for Koba, the Indomitable...
...listening to Lenin's cold, hard logic, Stalin became a devoted disciple. A cold and careful mind responded to a cold and brilliant mind. The party was flat broke and Koba became the appropriations member of the Caucasian Bolshevik Bureau, i.e., he directed "fighting squads" which robbed banks, public treasuries, steamships. His biggest haul: a quarter of a million rubles in a stickup in the main square of Tiflis. Among those arrested as a result of this raid was Litvinov, future Commissar for Foreign Affairs, who was trying to dispose of the loot in Paris. Koba, although...
Mass Leader. Czarist rule toughened. Koba spent a total of seven of the next ten years in prison. During periods of freedom he organized the oil workers in Baku which, he afterwards said, "hardened me as a practical fighter ... I first learned what it means to lead masses of workers." He began using the name Stalin (Man of Steel...