Re: И друга мутра станала политик / Политика, Свят / Македония

Stalin formed further Battle Squads, with the Mensheviks doing the same.[83] Stalin's Squads disarmed local police and troops,[84] raided government arsenals,[85] and raised funds through protection rackets on large local businesses and mines.[86] They launched attacks on the government's Cossack troops and pro-Tsarist Black Hundreds,[87] co-ordinating some of their operations with the Menshevik militia.[88]

Stalin first met Vladimir Lenin (pictured) at a 1905 conference in Tampere. Lenin became "Stalin's indispensable mentor".[89]
In November 1905, the Georgian Bolsheviks elected Stalin as one of their delegates to a Bolshevik conference in Saint Petersburg.[90] On arrival, he met Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who informed him that the venue had been moved to Tampere in the Grand Duchy of Finland.[91] At the conference Stalin met Lenin for the first time.[92] Although Stalin held Lenin in deep respect, he was vocal in his disagreement with Lenin's view that the Bolsheviks should field candidates for the forthcoming election to the State Duma; Stalin saw the parliamentary process as a waste of time.[93] In April 1906, Stalin attended the RSDLP Fourth Congress in Stockholm; this was his first trip outside the Russian Empire.[94] At the conference, the RSDLP—then led by its Menshevik majority—agreed that it would not raise funds using armed robbery.[95] Lenin and Stalin disagreed with this decision,[96] and later privately discussed how they could continue the robberies for the Bolshevik cause.[97]

Stalin married Kato Svanidze in a church ceremony at Senaki in July 1906.[98] In March 1907 she bore a son, Yakov.[99] By that year—according to the historian Robert Service—Stalin had established himself as "Georgia's leading Bolshevik".[100] He attended the Fifth RSDLP Congress, held in London in May–June 1907.[101] After returning to Tiflis, Stalin organized the robbing of a large delivery of money to the Imperial Bank in June 1907. His gang ambushed the armed convoy in Yerevan Square with gunfire and home-made bombs. Around 40 people were killed, but all of his gang escaped alive.[102] After the heist, Stalin settled in Baku with his wife and son.[103] There, Mensheviks confronted Stalin about the robbery and voted to expel him from the RSDLP, but he took no notice of them.[104]

In Baku, Stalin secured Bolshevik domination of the local RSDLP branch,[105] and edited two Bolshevik newspapers, Bakinsky Proletary and Gudok ("Whistle").[106] In August 1907, he attended the Seventh Congress of the Second International—an international socialist organisation—in Stuttgart, Germany.[107] In November 1907, his wife died of typhus,[108] and he left his son with her family in Tiflis.[109] In Baku he had reassembled his gang, the Outfit,[110] which continued to attack Black Hundreds and raised finances by running protection rackets, counterfeiting currency, and carrying out robberies.[111] They also kidnapped the children of several wealthy figures to extract ransom money.[112] In early 1908, he travelled to the Swiss city of Geneva to meet with Lenin and the prominent Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, although the latter exasperated him.[113]