Stalin's Baku Curve: A Detonating Mixture of Crime and Revolution

The paper Stalin's Baku Curve, a Detonating Mix of Crime and Revolution presents a brief insight into the earliest periods of activities of one of the most ominous and yet still insufficiently understood political figures of the 20th century -- Joseph Stalin.;The major emphasis of the work is made on Stalin's period in Baku in 1902-1910. A rapidly growing industrial hub providing almost half of the world's crude oil, Baku was in the meantime a brewery of revolutionary ideas. Heavily imbued with crime, corruption and ethnic tensions, the whole environment provided an excellent opportunity for Stalin to undergo his "revolutionary universities" through extortion, racketeering, revolutionary propaganda and substantial incarceration period's in Baku's famous Bailov prison.;Along with this, the Baku period brought Stalin into close contact with the then Russian secret police, Okhranka, that left an indelible imprint on Stalin's character and ruling style as an irremovable leader of the Soviet empire for almost three decades.;By tracing life of young Stalin in Baku the paper tries to provide an insight into what Dmitry Volkogonov (a famous Russian historian) identified as "the subterranean worm and the silent chrysalis before it hatched a steel-winged butterfly".