nse of Bolshevism. Dzhugashvili also helped to organize robberies of government transports in Georgia, providing the Bolsheviks with badly needed funds. In 1907 he shifted his base to Baku, where the exploited workers in the oil industry provided the Bolsheviks with their most extensive support in all of the Caucasus. For the next four years he alternated between vigorous revolutionary activity and spells in prison and exile in northern Russia. He entered the national scene serving as delegate from the Caucasus to the first national conference of Bolsheviks, in Tammerfors, Finland, in December 1905 (where he first met Lenin) and to the general congresses of the Russian Social Democratic party in Stockholm (1906) and London (1907). In December 1911, Stalin was exiled to Vologda. In January 1912, Lenin and his closest followers, having decided to break with the Mensheviks in the party, met in Prague and elected a new ruling body or central committee. Although Dzhugashvili was not elected, Lenin personally co-opted him into that body and also appointed him one of the leaders for underground work in Russia. In March 1912, Dzhugashvili, having escaped from exile, arrived in St. Petersburg and helped set up Pravda, the new newspaper of the Bolsheviks, which first appeared on May 5, 1912. He attended party meetings in Cracow in late 1912 and then joined Lenin in Vienna during January and February 1913 in order to write, under the latter's supervision, an important study, Marxism and the National Problem, embodying the Bolsheviks' stand on the minority races. On March 7, 1913, after his return to St. Petersburg, he was arrested and deported to Siberia. Thus Stalin (the name by which he was to be known henceforth) had reached the inner circle of leaders of the Bolshevik wing of the party, not by virtue of intellectual brilliance or personal gifts, but because Lenin wanted an organizer and a self-reliant, fanatical man of action. He was relativel...
