About the book: 2021 / The book is dedicated to the least studied, but surrounded by many rumors and speculations, period in the biography of I.V. Stalin and represents a combination of research text and documentary collection. The published set of documents fairly fully reflects the corpus of sources on the pre-revolutionary biography of Stalin, and materials both from the main archives and from old, hard-to-access and forgotten publications are brought together. Based on this documentary array, the author describes the transformation of the young Tiflis social democrat Koba into a prominent Bolshevik on an all-Russian scale, Stalin. The book raises questions about the realities of the functioning of the revolutionary underground, ideological differences, the Bolsheviks' use of the labor movement and revolutionary violence. What was the underground work that Stalin was engaged in, and with what experience did he approach 1917?