(Right to left) Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin meeting in 1919
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Stalin was exiled to Siberia under the name Koba, but soon escaped exile in 1904. That next year, he joined the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) which was led by Vladimir Lenin. By 1907, Stalin was recognized as an outstanding Bolshevik propagandist in the Caucasus, particularly on the nationalities question. Lenin sponsored Stalin in the Bolshevik-controlled RSDLP central committee at the Prague conference in 1912 where the final split between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks took place. Stalin was freed from his Siberian exile by the Russian revolution of March 1917. When he returned to Petrograd, Stalin became the editor of the party newspaper Pravda. Because of his seniority in the central committee, Stalin assumed leadership of the Bolshevik until Lenin's return to Petrograd from Switzerland in April 1917.
Although he seems to have played little role in the Bolshevik's seizure of power in October 1917, Stalin's supposed expertise on the nationalities question led to his appointment as commissar of nationalities in the new Bolshevik government. Throughout the Civil War period, the real government of Russia was the Bolshevik Politburo of five men: Lenin, Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Stalin. Stalin had the day-to-day management of the party, which gave him a considerable amount of power. In 1922, his power base was expanded when he was appointed general secretary of the central committee, whereby he obtained control of the politburo. Following Lenin's incapacitation by stroke in 1923 and his death on January 21, 1924, over time Stalin was able to parlay his base of power into control of the organs of soviet government. |