He Was a Bank Robber

After joining the communist party, Stalin concluded that in order to successfully rise up, depose the capitalists, and most crucially, maintain their rule, they required a lot of money. Stalin started organizing massive defense actions for important companies and mines in and around Baku for that purpose in 1905, taking special care to protect any workers in the process.

Although successful, the communists depleted these monies more quickly than Stalin could replace them. Stalin would return to Tbilisi in 1907 with a clever plan and execute a bank robbery, providing the communists with a massive cash infusion.

Stalin would attack a strongly guarded carriage carrying enormous sums of money to the Imperial Bank in Tbilisi on June 26, 1907, using weapons and natural explosives, together with a group of communists. Stalin's group would have killed roughly 40 people, but they would all survive unhurt and make off with 241,000 rubles in cash, which the communists would use to fund the strikes and other uprisings in the following months years. Stalin and his family relocated to Baku following the robbery. As they voted to expel him from the RSDLP, the Mensheviks confronted Stalin about the heist, but he disregarded them.