ABSTRACT
Soso Jughashvili was deeply involved in the Caucasian revolution, and 1905 was a formative experience that shaped the further evolution of the man who became Stalin. The experience of the first Russian Revolution was particularly brutal in the South Caucasus, and nowhere more socially traumatic than in Georgia. Social Democrats, who as Marxists, traditionally condemned the tactic of individual terrorism, joined the anarchists, populists, and Georgian Socialist Federalists, who advocated the use of bombs and targeted killing. Workers in Batumi carried out several terrorist acts in 1904-05, including the assassination of Prince Levan Gurieli, the head of the police in the Batumi region. The "majority", increasingly referred to as the Bolsheviks, had enjoyed dominance in most of the Caucasian committees, as well as the Caucasian Union Committee (CUC), for most of the time since the divisive Second Party Congress of 1903. With both Tiflis and Batumi siding with the Mensheviks, the CUC was left with little worker support.
