Joseph Stalin during the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and the Polish–Soviet War

Stalin was born on December 18, 1878 Gori, Georgia to a family of limited financial means.[1] He was the fourth child born to the family of Ekaterina Gheladze and Vissarion Djugashvili; the prior three children of the couple had died at an early age.[2] Stalin later became politically active and, during the Russian Revolution of 1905, organized and armed Bolshevik militias across Georgia, running protection rackets and waging guerrilla warfare. After meeting Lenin at a Bolshevik conference in 1906 and marrying Ekaterina Svanidze, with whom he had a son Yakov, Stalin temporarily resigned from the party over its ban on bank robberies. Embarking on an effort to organize Muslim Azeri and Persian partisans in the Caucasus, Stalin conducted a range of criminal activities until arrest and exile in 1908. He fulfilled these activities through his formation of the Outfit, a criminal gang that were involved with armed robberies, racketeering, assassinations, arms procurement and child couriering.[3]

Between 1908 and 1917, Stalin was arrested seven times and escaped five times, enjoying less than two years of liberty in the nine-year period.[4]

On 7 November (O.S. 26 October) 1917, Lenin officially proclaimed the existence of the new Bolshevik government,[14] which became known as "Sovnarkom".[15] Stalin was not yet well known to the Russian public, but was included on a list of new People's Commissars—effectively government ministers—under the name of "J. V. Djugashvili-Stalin".[14] Stalin moved into the Smolny Institute, where Sovnarkom was then based.[16] It was probably Lenin who had proposed Stalin for the position of People's Commissar of Nationalities, and while Stalin had initially turned down the post, he ultimately relented.[17] He and Yakov Sverdlov were also tasked with ensuring that Petrograd was defended from Kerensky's Cossack forces which had rallied in the Pulkovo Heights.[16]

During the first few months of the new government, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky formed what the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore described as an "inseparable troika".[16] Lenin recognised both Stalin and Trotsky as "men of action" who stood out in this regard from many of the other senior Bolsheviks.[16] On 29 November, the Bolshevik Central Committee established a four-man Chetverka to lead the country; it consisted of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov.[18]

On 7 December, Lenin's government formed the Cheka, a political police force.[19] On 27 October, they banned opposition press.[18] Stalin supported the use of terror from the beginning;[19] in response to a message from Estonian Bolsheviks suggesting how they could deal with opponents, he stated that "the idea of a concentration camp is excellent".[19]

Upon seizing Petrograd, the Bolsheviks formed the new revolutionary authority, the Council of People's Commissars. Stalin was appointed People's Commissar for Nationalities' Affairs; his job was to establish an institution to win over non-Russian citizens of the former Russian Empire. He was relieved of his post as editor of Pravda so that he could devote himself fully to his new role.[20]

In March 1918, the Menshevik leader Julius Martov published an article exposing Bolshevik crimes committed before the revolution. Martov wrote that Stalin had organized bank robberies and had been expelled from his own party for doing so (the latter part is untrue). Stalin sued Martov for libel and won.

After seizing Petrograd, civil war broke out in Russia, pitting Lenin's Red Army against the White Army, a loose alliance of anti-Bolshevik forces. Lenin formed an eight-member Politburo which included Stalin and Trotsky. During this time, only Stalin and Trotsky were allowed to see Lenin without an appointment.

In May 1918, Lenin dispatched Stalin to the city of Tsaritsyn (later known as Stalingrad, now Volgograd). Situated on the Lower Volga, it was a key supply route to the oil and grain of the North Caucasus. There was a critical shortage of food in Russia, and Stalin was assigned to procure any he could find according to Prodrazvyorstka policy. The city was also in danger of falling to the White Army. He opposed the “military specialists”— former Tsarist professional military officers— and formed the "Tsaritsyn group," a loose group of like-minded Bolshevik military leaders and party members personally loyal to Stalin. In doing so, he first met and befriended Kliment Voroshilov and Semyon Budyonny, both of whom would become two of Stalin's key supporters in the military. Through his new allies, he imposed his influence on the military; in July Lenin granted his request for official control over military operations in the region to fight the Battle for Tsaritsyn.[20]

Stalin challenged many of the decisions of Trotsky, who at this time was Chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic and thus his military superior. He ordered the killings of many former Tsarist officers in the Red Army; Trotsky, in agreement with the Central Committee, had hired them for their expertise, but Stalin distrusted them, seizing documents which showed many were agents for the White Army.[21] This created friction between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin even wrote to Lenin asking that Trotsky be relieved of his post.[20]

Stalin ordered the executions of any suspected counter-revolutionaries.[22] In the countryside, he burned villages to intimidate the peasantry into submission and discourage bandit raids on food shipments.[20]

In May 1919, Stalin was dispatched to the Western Front, near Petrograd. To stem mass desertions and defections of Red Army soldiers, Stalin had deserters and renegades rounded up and publicly executed as traitors.[20]

After the Bolsheviks turned the tide and were winning the civil war in late 1919, Lenin and many others wanted to expand the revolution westwards into Europe, starting with Poland, which was fighting the Red Army in Byelorussia and Ukraine. Stalin, in Ukraine at the time, argued these ambitions were unrealistic but lost. He was briefly transferred to the Caucasus in February 1920, but managed to get transferred back to Ukraine in May where he accepted the position of the Comissar of the South-West Front (commander Alexander Yegorov).[20][23]

In late July 1920, Yegorov moved against the then-Polish city of Lwów, which conflicted with the general strategy set by Lenin and Trotsky by drawing his troops further away from the forces advancing on Warsaw. In mid-August, the Commander-in-Chief Sergei Kamenev ordered the transfer of troops (1st Cavalry Army, commanded by Semyon Budyonny and Kliment Voroshilov) from Yegorov's forces to reinforce the attack on Warsaw led by Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Stalin refused to counter-sign the order because it did not have the requisite two signatures on it, a reasonable response.[20] In the end, the battles for both Lwów and Warsaw were lost, and Stalin's actions were held partly to blame.

Richard Pipes suggested Lenin was more to blame, for ordering Soviet troops south to spread the revolution to Romania, and north to secure the Polish corridor for Germany (this would win over German nationalists). Both these diversions weakened the Soviet assault. Much blame must be laid on the overall commander, Sergei Kamenev, for permitting insubordination from both front commanders and conflicting and ever-changing strategic orders during the critical phase in the attack on Warsaw.

Stalin returned to Moscow in August 1920, where he defended himself before the Politburo by attacking the whole campaign strategy. Although this tactic worked, he nonetheless resigned his military commission, something he had repeatedly threatened to do when he didn't get his way.[20] At the Ninth Party Conference on September 22, Trotsky openly criticized Stalin's war record. Stalin was accused of insubordination, personal ambition, military incompetence and seeking to build his own reputation by victories on his own front at the expense of operations elsewhere. Neither he nor anybody else challenged these attacks; he only briefly reaffirmed his position that the war itself was a mistake, something which everybody agreed on by this point.[20]