the experience of the civil war, especially the civil war in Ukraine, shaped the views of Stalin himself. On the eve of the Russian Revolution, Stalin was in his late thirties, with little to show for his life. He had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry,” as a recent biographer has written.40 Born in Georgia, educated in a seminary, his reputation in the underground rested on his talent for robbing banks. He had been in and out of prison several times. At the time of the February revolution in 1917, he was in exile in a village north of the Arctic Circle.
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