Joseph Stalin, born losif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on Dec. 18, 1878, may come off to many as the notorious leader of the communists in Russia, more popularly known as the Soviet Union. He is well-known for initiating The Great Purge in 1937, a period of heightened police terror.

But Stalin isn’t all bad. Before even becoming an influential leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he entered the seminary, but primarily due to lack of state universities under the Tsarist Government at that time and not because of any spiritual vocation. This is where he first propagated ideologies under the Marxist philosophy, where he loosely based most of his policies as the Soviet Union’s leader. Stalin was expelled from the seminary in 1899 for these actions. He worked for a decade with the political underground in the Caucasus, experiencing repeated arrests and exile to Siberia between 1902 and 1917.

In 1912, Stalin was co-opted to the Bolshevik Central Committee at the Prague Party Conference. In 1917, he became the editor of Pravda, the official Communist newspaper, while Lenin and much of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) leadership were in exile. In April 1917, Stalin was elected to the Central Committee with the third highest vote total in the party and was subsequently elected to the Politburo of the Central Committee (May 1917); he held this position for the remainder of his life.

On April 3, 1922, Stalin was made general secretary of the Central Committee of Bolsheviks, a post that he subsequently built up into the most powerful in the country. He subsequently undermined and competed against other potential leaders to head the most powerful party in Russia at that time. His rise to power was marked by the 15th Party Congress where he kicked his competitors out of the party.

Stalin took great advantage of the ban on factionalism which meant that no group could openly go against the policies of the leader of the party because that meant creation of an opposition. But Stalin didn’t achieve absolute power over his constituents until the Great Purge of 1938.