Then, little Josef got to witness some atrocities*, and decided that the Church wasn’t the solution. He read the wrong books and as a rebellious teen tend to do, he got bored and he acted up. He met other rebellious teens and they did something stupid. They started a communist club in Tiflis. He was arrested for weird charges (one of his friends hadn’t paid his taxes and Stalin was his endorser) he was sent to a fortress to do hard labor for a couple weeks until the taxes were paid or whatever.
Maybe it really was taxes, maybe it was some local bureaucrat fishing for a bribe, maybe it was his acting up, but these weeks changed Stalin. Before, he was a red-ish nerd loving philosophy, literature and… Meteorology (I don’t blame him for being a marxist in the 1900s, I mean, teens back then were either anarchists, marxists or fascists, everyone got their favored extremist flavor back then) . He came out of prison as a dedicated, radicalized communist agent.
He organized marches, riots where he fought against cossacks, he organized strikes, labor unions, sabotage, distribution of pamphlets and what not. He unmasked secret police infiltrators and they were executed. It wasn’t his call, but it left a mark.
He was then arrested for organizing demonstrations and deported to Siberia into a camp where he was thrown into solitary for weeks because he demonstrated against the visit of an important Orthodox dude. He suffered from frostbites and what not. He managed to escape and crawled back to Tiflis. He wasn’t in a good way when he came back. He wasn’t before, but it really was worse now.
Now he was a full blown violent thug who organized a terrorist network. He was 26 years old. His education was finished. He was ready to make his career and he did.
*Stalin may or may not have been witness to an act of random lynching commited by Tsarists cossacks against Georgians. The lynching really happened, and little Josef was in the vicinity, but was he a factual witness is a matter of debate. However, one doesn’t need to see members of his people get killed by government agents to begin to hate said government. Just hearing about it was sufficient.
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Context: this is Stalin’s mom (he was Georgian, his original surname was Dzhugashvili)
[“Mama, do you remember our tsar? Well, I’m something like the tsar,” to which Geladze replied “You’d have done better to become a priest.” ](https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/189ot4m/keke_geladze_was_the_mother_of_joseph_stalin/)
Then, little Josef got to witness some atrocities*, and decided that the Church wasn’t the solution. He read the wrong books and as a rebellious teen tend to do, he got bored and he acted up. He met other rebellious teens and they did something stupid. They started a communist club in Tiflis. He was arrested for weird charges (one of his friends hadn’t paid his taxes and Stalin was his endorser) he was sent to a fortress to do hard labor for a couple weeks until the taxes were paid or whatever.
Maybe it really was taxes, maybe it was some local bureaucrat fishing for a bribe, maybe it was his acting up, but these weeks changed Stalin. Before, he was a red-ish nerd loving philosophy, literature and… Meteorology (I don’t blame him for being a marxist in the 1900s, I mean, teens back then were either anarchists, marxists or fascists, everyone got their favored extremist flavor back then) . He came out of prison as a dedicated, radicalized communist agent.
He organized marches, riots where he fought against cossacks, he organized strikes, labor unions, sabotage, distribution of pamphlets and what not. He unmasked secret police infiltrators and they were executed. It wasn’t his call, but it left a mark.
He was then arrested for organizing demonstrations and deported to Siberia into a camp where he was thrown into solitary for weeks because he demonstrated against the visit of an important Orthodox dude. He suffered from frostbites and what not. He managed to escape and crawled back to Tiflis. He wasn’t in a good way when he came back. He wasn’t before, but it really was worse now.
Now he was a full blown violent thug who organized a terrorist network. He was 26 years old. His education was finished. He was ready to make his career and he did.
*Stalin may or may not have been witness to an act of random lynching commited by Tsarists cossacks against Georgians. The lynching really happened, and little Josef was in the vicinity, but was he a factual witness is a matter of debate. However, one doesn’t need to see members of his people get killed by government agents to begin to hate said government. Just hearing about it was sufficient.