The government contained him only once; his last exile in 1913 lasted until 1917.
After his first escape from Sibiria in 1904, Stalin returned to Georgia. There he married his first wife, Yekaterina Svanidze. She died in 1907, just after she gave birth to Stalin's first son: Yakov. Stalin later said: "This creature softened my stony heart. She is dead and with her have died my last warm feelings for all human beings." .
In December 1905 Stalin and Lenin met for the first time, at a Bolshevik conference in Finland. Stalin was highly unimpressed by Lenin at their first meeting. He expected him to be a superhuman hero, unlike the ordinary and normal-seeming man that he really was. Stalin's first political pseudonym was "Koba" (a fictitious hero in Georgian literature). Such pseudonyms were quite common among the Russian revolutionaries of that period; Lenin often published under the name "Tulin" (note that even the names "Lenin" and "Stalin" were political pseudonyms). Stalin used the name "Koba" until about 1913, when he regularly began signing articles and letters with the name "Stalin" (meaning "man of steel" or "steel one"). .
Until the last years of the czarist Russia, Stalin was more an up-and -coming follower than a leader. Unlike the intellectual party members, his contribution to the cause was practical, not theoretical. These "practical contributions" were the reason of his expelling from the Georgian Social Democratic Party in 1907; when he took part in a series of bank robberies and other crimes (supposedly in order to raise funds for the "professional" revolutionaries like himself). Shortly thereafter he migrated to Baku and founded a Bolshevist group among the Baku socialists. In January 1912, Stalin was nominated by Lenin to the Central Committee; by now Lenin was quite impressed with Stalin's writings (which he generally worked on while in exile). Stalin edited briefly the new party newspaper, Pravda (Truth) and at Lenin's erge wrote his first major work, Marxism and the Nationality Question.
