tes were Koba (the name of a legendary Georgian folk hero meaning "The Indomitable) and, after 1913, Stalin ("The Man of Steel). In 1901 his first articles appeared in the clandestine periodical Brdzola (The Struggle), published in Baku. He was arrested for the first time in Batum on April 18, 1902, and exiled to Siberia in 1903, only to escape and reappear in Tiflis in 1904--a pattern that he experienced many times prior to 1917. Dzhugashvili--unlike many of his fellow conspirators, who particularly valued intellectual brilliance and mastery of the written and spoken word--began to show a special interest in practical problems and party organization. This predilection led him to join the handful of Georgian Socialists who backed Bolshevism, as Lenin's conception of a highly disciplined, centralized conspiratorial Socialist party came to be called, and he helped propagate Lenin's views in the local clandestine press. He was not yet sufficiently prominent, however, to attend the founding meeting of the Georgian Bolshevik organization in 1904 or the third national congress of the Social Democratic party in April 1905. In June 1904 he married Yekaterina Svanidze, a simple, devout peasant girl who was devoted to him. The marriage, evidently a happy one, was typical of the more conventional unions that Georgian radicals, unlike their Russian counterparts, usually contracted. His wife died on April 10, 1907, leaving a son, Yakov (Jacob). Thus by 1905, Dzhugashvili led the life of a typical fledgling provincial revolutionary, hardly the heroic role ascribed to him later in the official Soviet histories. The Russian revolution of 1905 speeded his rise to local prominence and marked his entrance into the fringes of the national movement. In 1905 he served as party organizer in Tiflis and as coeditor of the Tiflis-based Caucasian Workers' Newssheet. For the first time his articles were readily identifiable by their exegetical style and rabid defe...
