<div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>One of the 20th century's most infamous men gave himself his best-known nickname in a letter to a newspaper published for the first time on January 12, 1913.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili, an ethnic Georgian, was born to a poor shoemaker's wife in December, 1878, in the Russian Empire, and was the only child of the couple to survive past infancy.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>In 1894 his late teens, Ioseb enrolled in the Tiflis Theological Seminary on a scholarship, training to be a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church.</span></div></div><div><div id="adspot-mobile-medium"></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><strong><span>READ MORE:</span></strong><span> </span><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/world/iran-protests-hundreds-dead-in-crackdown-activists-say/3a4d312e-bb85-46d1-ba08-4115eb5dee61" rel="" target="_blank" title=""><strong><span>Hundreds dead in mass Iran protests, activists say</span></strong></a><strong><span></span></strong></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>However, he soon drifted from his studies, growing more and more interested in the then-burgeoning revolutionary feeling in the empire.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Dubbing himself Koba, the name of a bandit hero in a popular novel of the time, he dropped out of the seminary in 1899.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Working as a meteorologist before he was forced to leave, Koba went on to organise several workers' strikes and protests, dodging arrest by secret police, and living off the generosity of friends.</span></div></div><div><div class="OUTBRAIN" data-reactroot="" data-src="//www.9news.com.au/world/today-in-history-january-12-josef-stalin-gives-himself-nickname/5870e311-93e4-404b-b7c6-b774fee1872a" data-widget-id="AR_5"></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><strong><span>READ MORE:</span></strong><span> </span><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/villawood-detention-centre-death-sydney/63521b86-cd52-427c-a381-5a6f617d5980" rel="" target="_blank" title=""><strong><span>Man charged after man dies at Sydney immigration centre</span></strong></a><strong><span></span></strong></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He was elected to the local committee of the Marxist-aligned Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, eventually aligning with the Bolshevik faction led by Vladimir Lenin.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Koba was arrested and sentenced to periods of exile several times in the following years, even as he was elected to the Bolsheviks' Central Committee and became the editor of the party's daily newspaper, Pravda.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>And in 1913, Koba wrote an article for another Bolshevik newspaper, the Social Democrat, entitled "On the Road to Nationalism (A Letter From the Caucasus)".</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><strong><span>READ MORE:</span></strong><span> </span><a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/bushfires-victoria-death-longwood-fire/6d742b08-2d80-4c4c-974f-5d917941adac" rel="" target="_blank" title=""><strong><span>Body found after Longwood bushfire, blazes continue across Victoria</span></strong></a><strong><span></span></strong></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>This one he signed, for the first time, with the pseudonym that would become one of history's most recognisable: Stalin.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>Meaning "man of steel", it was under this nickname that Joseph Stalin eventually rose to dictator of the USSR, from 1924 until his death in 1953.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>His reign saw Russia advance to the ranks of the world's superpowers, enduring and beating back a Nazi onslaught in WWII.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>After the Red Army captured Berlin for the Allies, the USSR and USA settled into an uneasy stand-off that escalated into the Cold War, a race of scientific and technological development as much as ideology and warfare.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>But Stalin also presided over an immensely repressive state, with millions of deaths attributed to him through famine, execution, and deaths in prison or exile in the gulags.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>He died from a stroke in 1953, carrying an aura of such fear that it's believed his death is partially attributed to nobody wishing to disturb him where he lay for fear of incurring his wrath.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><span>An ideological villain in much of the West, his legacy remains more complex in Russia and former USSR states, where his leadership particularly during WWII remains lauded by some.</span></div></div><div class="block-content"><div class="styles__Container-sc-1ylecsg-0 goULFa"><a 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